'Can We Talk Honestly About Race?: What Are the Causes of Racial Disparities in Contemporary America?' with Glenn Loury and Khalil Gibran Muhammad

In this lecture Dr. Glenn Loury will introduce a theory of persistent social and economic disparities between racial groups meant to apply to the historical circumstances of the United States. The central argument rests on a distinction between racial bias in the treatment of persons in their individual economic transactions, and racial bias in the social relations among persons in their everyday lives. This perspective points toward a radically different program of policy interventions needed to reduce racial disparities — shifting the focus from one of fighting against discrimination to one of promoting the human development of the disadvantaged. Dr. Khalil Gibran Mohammad responds.

The Civic Discourse Project is co-sponsored by the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. Light refreshments will be served.

About the speakers:

Professor Glenn C. Loury holds a BA in Mathematics (Northwestern) and a PhD in Economics (MIT). As an economic theorist, he has published widely and lectured throughout the world on his research. He is also among America’s leading critics writing on racial inequality. He has been elected as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economics Association, as a Member of the American Philosophical Society and of the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations and as a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is the Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Khalil’s scholarship examines the broad intersections of race, democracy, inequality and criminal justice in modern U.S. history. He is co-editor of “Constructing the Carceral State,” a special issue of the "Journal of American History" (June 2015), and a contributor to a 2014 National Research Council study, "The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences", as well as the author of "The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America" (Harvard), which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book award in American Studies.