A Black conservative reflects on his past, shocking behavior and all

“I am going to tell you things about myself that no one would want anybody to think was true of them,” Loury warns early in the book. Fans of “The Glenn Show” admire Loury’s probing intelligence and forceful charisma. But he has many detractors, too. He was arrested twice in 1987, first for assaulting his girlfriend, then for drugs. Though the assault charge was dropped, it was a terrible look for someone who was up for a job in the Reagan administration at the time. More recently, Loury has drawn criticism for inveighing strongly, and occasionally profanely, against America’s post-George Floyd “racial reckoning.”

In “Late Admissions,” he intertwines his intellectual journey with unexpectedly juicy personal disclosures. By confessing to some reprehensible behavior, Loury says, he hopes to earn his readers’ trust and, paradoxically, their respect and admiration. If this seems like a risky gambit for such a polarizing thinker, you are onto something.

Loury was born and raised in Park Manor, a Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. Socioeconomically, most of its law-abiding residents cruised at medium altitude, but some descended into the underground economy. Loury warmly portrays his vexing and often amusing extended family. His Aunt Eloise became his primary caregiver. Generous, decorous and churchgoing, Eloise enjoyed standing in her community. She had two beguiling brothers, however. Loury’s Uncle Adlert was brilliant but erratic; he became a successful lawyer back when that was uncommon among Black men, only to be disbarred over some unspecified “shady family business.” Meanwhile, Uncle Alfred fathered an astonishing 22 children by four women. “Alfred’s appetites may have outstripped the confines of respectability,” Loury acknowledges. “But he was quite the patriarch. His sense of duty as a father, stretched thin though it may have been, gave his life meaning.”

Loury finished high school “both a valedictorian and a virgin,” though he had two kids by the time he was 19. It was the beginning of a lifetime of assiduously wooing women. While attending junior college, Loury worked as a clerk in a printing plant. It was a solid entry-level job for a young man, and he seemed destined to work a 9 to 5, until an instructor recognized his potential.

Loury transferred on a scholarship to Northwestern University, where he was swiftly discovered to be a math prodigy. In 1972, at 23, he started working on his PhD in economics at MIT. “I am coming in hot,” Loury reminiscences about his arrival on campus. “I’m about to begin a steep professional and intellectual ascent. I know this, and I’m excited by the thought.” As a young man, he published blockbuster works in technical economic theory, and in 1982 he became the first Black economist to earn tenure at Harvard. That is where his path to academic stardom stalled.

Loury faced a conundrum. Was he building a career as an economist, or as a Black economist? It did not help that liberal intellectuals tended not to appreciate his social critiques. Loury surmised that, given American history, it was probably unwise for disadvantaged African Americans to rely upon Whites to help them. Instead, he thought that Black people should follow his Uncle Moonie’s common-sense formula for poverty relief: “Get up and get busy.” Loury recalls a senior colleague warning him to be “very, very careful” about saying this publicly, for fear he could be labeled “conservative” and therefore on the “wrong side” of the early-1980s inequality debate.

Meanwhile, Loury’s ideas in his primary field started drying up. “I began to doubt I had what it takes to be a Player in the big league economics game,” he writes. Many academics suffer from “impostor syndrome,” but Loury actually became one: In the evenings, he would drive his late-model Saab into Boston’s Black neighborhoods, turn his baseball cap sideways (it was the ’80s, remember) and engage in tawdry high jinks. When he trawled nightclubs, hired prostitutes and smoked crack — to which he became powerfully addicted — nobody in those circles knew that he was an Ivy League professor by day. Likewise, his Harvard colleagues had no idea that Loury was paying the rent on a “love nest” for his barely-out-of-college mistress, after having been delinquent on payments for student loans and child support.

Even after his double life was discovered and made national news, Loury could not stop smoking crack. Several of his book’s passages recounting his self-sabotaging escapades induced queasiness in this reader.

Loury’s addiction eventually landed him at the Appleton clinic, an inpatient program at the storied McLean Psychiatric Hospital. After spending several weeks there, he moved into a halfway house and attended daily AA meetings, which may be where he grew comfortable sharing the types of unflattering self-disclosures that appear throughout his memoir. In 1989, Loury and his wife became born-again Christians and found solace and community in a Black church, though only temporarily. Regarding the divinity of Christ, Loury says, “I now have my doubts.”

Upon resuming his career in the early 1990s, Loury continued to surprise, criticizing some erstwhile intellectual allies: He mocked Charles Murray, co-author of “The Bell Curve,” for dodging his critics and for his perceived lack of technical facility. He found Dinesh D’Souza’s “The End of Racism” pathetic, dishonest and contemptuous of Black people. Loury had been friends with Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, vocal opponents of affirmative action, but in 1996, at a backyard barbecue, an argument he had with the couple about the urban crisis grew very heated. The following year, Loury eviscerated their tremendously hyped co-written opus, “America in Black and White,” at length in the Atlantic.

Some were correct to wonder: Was Loury becoming progressive? His next research topic was mass incarceration, and back then “there was no blacker project than criticizing America’s prisons,” Loury writes. He found a role that suited his talents, delivering fiery sermons on the United States’ “moral decrepitude.” Though he enjoyed the rush that came from speaking before validating crowds, he eventually concluded that the New Jim Crow narrative — the idea that prisons could be likened to a racial caste system — was “wildly overstated.” He likewise could not get behind the Black Lives Matter movement, which started garnering headlines in 2014. “I had to acknowledge that my social critique and my disposition were better suited to the right,” he writes. “I was a conservative, and in truth I suspected that’s what I always had been.”

A poignant moment arrives toward the end of “Late Admissions.” Glenn’s second wife, Linda, had just died from cancer, at 59. Going through her possessions, he found a self-help book. “It was about learning how to forgive those who have wronged you,” he writes. Many of its passages were underlined, and Loury did not have to wonder why.

So, does Loury’s delicate gambit — his attempt to garner sympathy while revealing some of his worst behavior — work? For this reader, the answer is unequivocally yes. “Late Admissions” is a zestfully written book, packed with humor, pathos and hard-earned wisdom. Even its distasteful revelations are, for the most part, in keeping with Loury’s rigorous ethic of self-scrutiny. He has long insisted that when social science professors play to the crowds or are too timid to speak the truth as they see it, they dishonor their vocation. Now he’s applied that spirt to his autobiography. Loury’s body may be showing the signs of age, but his famously independent thinking is as strong as ever.

John McMillian is an associate professor of history at Georgia State University, in Atlanta. He is writing a book about crime and policing in New York City since the 1960s.

Late Admissions

Confessions of a Black Conservative

By Glenn C. Loury

W.W. Norton. 428 pp. $32.50