OpinionPamela Paul

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By Pamela Paul

Opinion Columnist

Glenn Loury thought maybe the world — maybe he — had been wrong about Derek Chauvin, the police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in 2020. Loury had watched a documentary, “The Fall of Minneapolis,” that had circulated largely on right-wing social media, arguing that Chauvin had been wrongly convicted, and found himself persuaded. Was it possible, he wondered, that Floyd had actually died of a drug overdose?

Floyd’s death had ignited protests nationwide and spurred a passionate national debate about racism that often left Loury, a prominent Black conservative, at odds with many other Black intellectuals and with much of the American left.

He welcomed the film’s creators, Liz Collin and JC Chaix, as guests on his podcast, “The Glenn Show,” which has over 100,000 subscribers on YouTube.

The blowback was swift and harsh.

“Really, you’re going to take Chauvin’s side?” friends emailed Loury. Commenters on his newsletter and social media also took issue. Then Radley Balko, an independent journalist, published a lengthy and meticulous critique of the film, calling it “all nonsense.”

“Frankly, I felt exposed,” Loury told me. We were sitting by the fireplace of his living room on a chilly April afternoon in Providence, R.I., where he is a professor at Brown University. “I felt that my integrity could potentially be called into question.” He needed to “come clean.”

“I pride myself on remaining open to evidence and reason, even if they disconfirm something I had formerly thought to be true,” Loury wrote in a mea culpa for his Substack, calling his error egregious. That weekend, he had Minnesota’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, who oversaw the prosecution of Chauvin in the Floyd case, on his podcast, to hear the other side of the story.

How had he made such a mistake?

“The real story is I hated what happened in the summer of 2020,” he told me. “I think these moral panics we have around these police killings are over the top and it’s bad for the country.” He had supported the filmmakers, he confessed, because they were attacking people he opposed. “I let that cloud my judgment.”

This is far from the first reversal, political or personal, for Loury, 75, one of the most celebrated and reviled Black intellectuals of the past half-century. While public debate has too often devolved into lobbing grenades from entrenched positions, Loury’s tumultuous life, his swings from the right to the left and back again, his remarkable, barrier-busting successes and his considerable frailties and failures, have taught him to always recognize that he could be wrong and to keep an open mind, no matter how vehement his opinions. He outlines this ragged road to wisdom in his remarkably candid memoir, “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.”

The name Glenn Loury often appears on lists of prominent conservative Black figures like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas and Shelby Steele. He was a star Ph.D graduate in economics from M.I.T. and the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard. He was a darling of the neoconservative movement and was tapped to be deputy secretary of education during the Reagan administration.

But that was before he was charged with assaulting his ex-mistress. Before he was arrested for drug possession. Before he was exposed as both a serial philanderer and a crack addict. He’d left two daughters from his first marriage back in Chicago; he barely acknowledged a son born to a former girlfriend, until the son was fully grown.

A 1995 New Yorker profile described Loury’s first public downfall thus: “Loury was emerging as exactly the kind of person he had warned Black America to avoid: a violent, irresponsible, drug-using womanizer who put his own pleasure above the demands of his career and the needs of his family.”

In recounting all that’s happened since, “Late Admissions” does something that is rare in fiction but almost unheard-of in memoir: It presents both an unlikable and an unreliable........

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