and finally, the embattled Glenn C. Loury:

This brings me to the topic of racial stigma—the central innovative concept in my book. Garcia charges that I am unclear about my meaning here, and John McWhorter sees me as reiterating, in a slightly modified form, the tired liberal charge that blacks do not succeed because whites are guilty of moral malfeasance. Both charges are groundless. To reiterate, my basic approach to the problem of racial inequality is cognitive, not normative. I eschew use of the word “racism” not to avoid sounding like an outdated civil rights leader, but because the word is imprecise. More useful, I think, is my core concept—“biased social cognition.” McWhorter certainly, and Garcia to a lesser extent, misunderstand my intent here. Racial stigma is not a bludgeon with which I hope to beat “whitey” into political submission. It does not refer to “sinister” thoughts in the heads of white people. Nor is it an invitation to passivity for blacks. Rather, what I am doing with this concept is trying to move from the fact that people take note of racial classification in the course of their interactions with one another to some understanding of how this affects their perceptions of the phenomena they observe in the social world around them, and how it shapes their explanations of those phenomena.

posted by neel master at 3:43 PM