Editor’s note: Glenn Loury made his debut as an exclusive UnHerd columnist with an essay on how the anti-woke backlash risks traducing the African-American experience. The article generated a robust debate in our comments section. Here, Professor Loury replies to the main lines of argument from his critics.

In response to my recent essay on the legacy of George Floyd and its aftermath, many readers wrote to express not only disagreement with my conclusions but something deeper: exhaustion. Some said they were tired of hearing about race. A few asked, bluntly: why are we still talking about this?

I want to take these criticisms seriously. They reflect a real mood in the US and in many Western countries — a mood born of frustration with an overbearing racial discourse that too often demands confession rather than understanding.

For years now, many Americans have been told that they are complicit in a system of hidden sin from which no amount of personal goodwill can absolve them. They have been invited to workshops, subjected to mandatory training, and encouraged to recite slogans whose meanings they do not believe. It is no surprise that many now recoil at the very mention of race. Fatigue of this sort is understandable. But it is not an argument.

Some readers took my essay as another invocation of racial grievance. Others read it as a covert defence of the excesses of 2020. Still others assumed I was asking white Americans to indulge the very narratives — of collective guilt and inherited sin — that I have spent much of my career criticising.

If that is what you heard, then I failed to communicate clearly enough. So let me state it plainly: I was calling out two distortions, not one. One distortion came from the Left’s insistence, in 2020, that blackness could be reduced to injury, that “systemic racism” explains everything, and that the moral status of whites could be inferred from the colour of their skin. The other distortion — now growing on the Right — is the reflexive impatience that treats blackness as pathology, race as an annoyance, and racial disparities as evidence that the subject should be closed.

Both distortions flatten the complexity of black American life. Both substitute caricature for understanding. Both erase the depth of a cultural inheritance too important to be left to activists or algorithmic provocateurs.

Several critics also argued that the problems facing black America today are overwhelmingly self-inflicted: crime, family breakdown, poor educational outcomes. “Why won’t you say the obvious?” they ask. But I have said the obvious — for decades. I have written bluntly about violence in black communities, about the disintegration of the family, about the failures of our institutions and the failures within our communities. I have argued, often to the dismay of progressives, that agency matters, that culture matters, that behaviour matters.

Yet acknowledging responsibility does not absolve a society of the need to understand the forces which shape behaviour. A moral community can walk and chew gum: we can hold people accountable while also recognising historical context, structural constraints, and the social ecologies that influence human choice. To acknowledge history is not to deny agency. Reducing the discussion to “black people did this to themselves” is as shallow, and as false, as claiming that racism alone explains every disparity.

I am not, as another critique claimed, clinging to the corpse of the Civil Rights Movement. The programmatic Civil Rights Movement — affirmative action, guilt politics, elite patronage — is indeed exhausted. Its remedies have reached their limits. But the moral ambition of that movement remains relevant: the ambition that opportunity be real, not rhetorical; that citizenship be meaningful, not symbolic; that America live up to its own ideals. If your fatigue leads you to declare that those ambitions no longer matter, then your quarrel is not with me but with the Constitution itself.

Some also said we should just move on, that race has simply lost its salience. America has become a multiethnic mosaic in which the old black-white binary is obsolete. There is truth in this. Immigration has remade the country, and the categories of the 20th century no longer map cleanly onto the politics of the 21st. But it does not follow that the history of black America has become irrelevant.

The black experience has been, and remains, one of the central moral narratives of the American story. It shaped our culture, our politics, our legal system, our literature, our music, and our national identity. Pretending otherwise for the sake of convenience is not “moving on”: it is amnesia.

In sum, I was warning against the erasure of complexity. The Left erased black complexity in 2020 by reducing blackness to suffering. The Right now risks erasing black complexity by reducing blackness to nuisance. Both of these evacuate blackness of its cultural, spiritual, and moral content — its music, its improvisation, its humour, its ironies, its stories of migration and striving and reinvention. That, not the politics of 1965, is what I am trying to defend.

The real question before us is not whether America should feel guilty, nor is it whether the Civil Rights Movement is over. The real question is: how should a mature society remember a complex past while building a more just future? If we retreat into slogans — “racism explains everything”, “blacks are to blame for everything”, “I’m tired of hearing about this” — we forfeit the possibility of answering that question honestly.

To those who say they have heard enough about race: I hear you. But a society does not get to choose its responsibilities based on its mood. Fatigue is not a philosophy. Boredom is not a moral framework. You do not have to genuflect before fashionable rhetoric or submit to pseudo-religious talk of privilege or sin. But neither should you allow exasperation to become indifference.

A just society requires more of us than that. The goal is not to be ruled by race. It is to see clearly — and act justly — in light of its complicated legacy. That work remains unfinished. And I, for one, do not intend to abandon it because the national mood has shifted.

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Glenn Loury, an UnHerd columnist, is an economist, academic and author.

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