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The author of many scholarly articles, Glenn Loury first made his mark as an economic theorist. A consultant to state and federal government agencies and private business organizations, he has taught at Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of Michigan before coming to Boston University, where he is university professor and professor of economics.

General readers, however, know Loury best as an analyst of public policy, particularly regarding racial inequality. His essays and commentaries appear regularly in leading national publications. Although he is identified as a conservative, Loury's views defy easy categorization. While arguing that black Americans must place an emphasis on "self-help"--a position that has earned for him the enmity of the civil-rights establishment--he warns that this call for self-reliance is in danger of being hijacked by "those who are looking for an excuse to abandon the black poor."

Loury's writings on politics and culture have been collected in "One by One from the Inside Out: Essays on Race and Responsibility in America" (Free Press, 332 pp.; $25, hardcover), the epilogue to which is a powerful Christian testimony. In a conversation in Washington, D.C., last fall with CT advisory editor Michael Cromartie and former CT assistant editor Edward Gilbreath (now with "New Man" magazine), Loury talked about the evolution of his outlook on race relations and his personal faith journey.

WHAT ARE SOME OF THE EXPERIENCES THAT HAVE SHAPED YOUR THINKING ABOUT RACE AND RESPONSIBILITY IN AMERICA?

One thing I think of is the years I spent at the University of Michigan, from 1978 to 1982, and watching the city of Detroit go through some very serious changes. Toward the end of that time, just before I moved to Harvard, I was asked to give a talk at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington. It was Black History Month and I wanted to be responsive to the charge, so I chose to take up the issue of what was happening in the cities, to talk about Detroit in particular. I ended up writing an essay that had a lot to do with issues of character, responsibility, and values. I tried to direct attention away from structural problems and onto questions of what individuals were doing, how they behaved, and so forth. That was a very formative experience, both thinking through that presentation and dealing with the reaction to it, which was quite sharp and negative. It was seen as "politically unhelpful."

I think also some of my personal experiences that I talk about in "One by One" have played a role. I remember reading a book by John Edgar Wideman called "Brothers and Keepers," which was published in 1985. It stunned me. Wideman is a gifted writer. That book is about a pair of brothers who grow up in Pittsburgh. One of them is the writer, who goes away to the university, becomes a Rhodes Scholar, and ultimately a critically acclaimed novelist. The other one is incarcerated for life for being a part of a robbery in which someone gets killed. He's charged with murder, he gets convicted, and he goes to jail. So Wideman is writing about this relationship with his brother, and how his brother is in jail and how he came to be there.

As I say, the prose is brilliant, but underneath, I found that the vision was bankrupt. It was corrupt, because the vision was about how society was arrayed against his brother, how his brother never had a chance. And here, right in the same family, subject to exactly the same environmental influences, there had been these two disparate paths. I was struck by how the author was denying the evidence implicit in his own story. How reluctant he was to affirm that he had lived his life in a certain way, with certain consequences, in contrast to the choices made by his brother, and the much different consequences that followed those choices.

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January 8 1996, Vol. 40, No. 1