Black scholar renounces conservative 'crown'

It would be a leap for any intellectual. But because of Loury's race, and the hostility his conservatism engendered among many African-Americans, his about-face was more vulnerable to criticism. Unpleasant questions of motive, and issues of loyalty and betrayal, cloud and aggravate an already-charged situation.

"It was being willing to be seen to be on the side of Ronald Reagan and those people that was thought to be un-black," explains Kwame Anthony Appiah, a former Harvard philosophy professor who has just moved to Princeton University. "And I think that's unfair."

Loury would agree with that assessment, but he does not believe it gives him an excuse to avoid facing his past. Today, he is his own worst critic. He says he was seduced by the glamour and power bestowed on him in those heady Republican years in the 1980s. Dining with President Reagan, sought out by the media, chauffeured in limousines, Loury says he was intoxicated by his new world.

"I know what my motives were," Loury says in retrospect. "Currying favor, ambition, the sense of exhilaration and excitement about what I'm doing now, who I'm talking to, where I'm invited, how important I seem to be, not wanting to get the disapproval of people, and therefore maybe tempering doubt or critical thoughts that come up in my own mind," Loury recalls. "So I know that I was censoring myself to a certain degree."

As a young black intellectual with impeccable credentials who dared to speak critically of his own race, Loury says he gave many conservatives what they wanted. In turn, Loury got noticed.

"There's a tendency for public intellectuals to take extreme positions in an effort to differentiate themselves from the group to which they belong, and which they might otherwise be submerged by," says Richard Posner, the author of "Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline." "If [Loury] hadn't taken an independent position, he might have gotten no attention at all. He'd just be running with the pack."

This path to success had its price, however. The more he attacked liberal dogma, the more ostracized from the African-American community he became. Seen by them as a sellout, Loury became the poster boy for appeasement, reviled by the majority of blacks who would, when he spoke in public, seethe in anger.

"I'd sort of wear it as a badge of pride," Loury says. "But down underneath, it was really taking its toll, sure." During this time, Loury developed a cocaine addiction. "I was troubled by these feelings of, well, deep down I'm a hypocrite, right?"

Loury now says he is more or less politically rehabilitated – a "recovering reactionary." Yet he remains an outsider. "There are people who are just never going to forgive the unforgivable," he says. "[To them], Ronald Reagan was evil incarnate."

Randall Kennedy, a leading black professor at Harvard Law School and author of the controversial book "Nigger," agrees. "There are some people who, I guess, take the position, well, you know, if you switch so dramatically, maybe you'll switch again," Professor Kennedy says.

Having been roundly criticized for the provocative title of his book, Kennedy knows what it's like to stand apart from the liberal ranks of black academics.

"Any community is going to have some notion of loyalty," he says. "Intellectuals should not allow themselves to be too bound to ethnocentric loyalties of that sort, because that impedes the freedom that intellectuals need to do their best work."

If Kennedy is correct, perhaps Loury's best work is before him. He plans to write another book, tentatively titled "Changing My Mind." "It needs to be partly the telling of my story, but also a reflection on being a public intellectual," Loury explains.

Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science at Boston College and the author of "Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice," knows Loury well.

"Glenn is heading somewhere," he says. "At the appropriate point, I'm sure he'll know where he's at, and we'll have a major statement."

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