Glenn C. Loury

“[Speaking with John McWhorter]
I take umbrage at the lionisation of lightweight, empty-suited, empty-headed motherfuckers like Ibram X. Kendi. Who couldn't carry my book bag. He hasn't read a fucking thing. If you ask him what Nietzsche said, he would have no idea. He's an unserious, superficial, empty-suited, lightweight - he's not our equal, not even close.”
― Glenn C. Loury

“The election of a black president was an achievement, but it belonged to the American populace, not to Obama himself. That we could progress from a nation that harbored a virtual apartheid regime within its borders to one with a black president within my lifetime was remarkable. But the figurehead chosen to carry the torch of racial progress to the pinnacle of the American political system was, in my mind, little more than a political operator, albeit a gifted one. I did not doubt that Barack Obama was intelligent, but his self-presentation as an icon of American blackness struck me as absurd. He had no real ties to the history of black people in this country. If you took his Kenyan father (who he never really knew) out of the equation, I could see nothing of the African American experience in his life. I couldn’t accept the idea that he represented, in his very being, the ascension of black Americans from slavery to full citizenship to prosperity. His endless touting of his ties to Chicago, with the implication that he was a product of the very same South Side that made me, only drove home that, while he understood how to convey “authenticity” to the American public at large, there was almost nothing real about the persona that he presented for the TV cameras. My uncle Moonie, I was quite sure, would have been singularly unmoved by Barack Hussein Obama’s act.”
― Glenn C. Loury, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative