In 2018, Glenn Loury described what he called the bias narrative and the development narrative.

The bias narrative calls attention to racial discrimination and exclusionary practices of American institutions—black Americans not being treated fairly. So, if the gap is in incarceration, the bias narrative calls attention to the behavior of police and the discriminatory ways in which laws are enforced and attributes the over-representation of blacks in the prisons to the unfair practices of the police and the way in which laws are formulated and enforced.

The development narrative, on the other hand, calls attention to the patterns of behavior and the acquisition of skills and discipline that are characteristic of the African American population. So, in the case of incarceration, the development narrative asks about the behavior of people who find themselves in trouble with the law and calls attention to the background conditions that either do or do not foster restraint on those lawbreaking behaviors. Now, the position that I take is that whereas at the middle of the twentieth century, 50 to 75 years ago, there could be no doubt that the main culprit in accounting for the disadvantage of African Americans was bias of many different kinds (bias in the economy, social relations, and in the political sphere), that is a less credible general account of African American disadvantage in the year 2018. And the development narrative—the one that puts some responsibility on we African Americans ourselves, and the one that wants to look to the processes that people undergo as they mature and become adults and ask whether or not those processes foster people achieving their full potential—that, I think, is a much more significant dimension of the problem today relative to bias than was the case 50 years ago.

But as far as I can tell, Critical Race Theory sees the development narrative as racist.

For more Glenn Loury, along with John McWhorter, Shelby Steele, and Eli Steele, I strongly recommend this video.

In this half-hour lecture, Glenn Loury as an aside makes the point that the existence of a race depends on cultural behavior. After all, if people did not perceive racial differences, over time inter-marriage would eliminate any such differences.

If you think about it, endogamy is a necessary condition for any persistent cultural distinctiveness. If Japanese and non-Japanese were prone to marry one another, that would eventually mean the end of distinctive Japanese culture.

This in turn leads me to think about our contemporary society, in which the Highly-Educated Elites (HEEs) are endogamous. That leads to a distinctive culture, with values, tastes and linguistic patterns that differentiate them from everyone else. If this keeps up, in a few generations HEEs will seem like a different race altogether.

A few hundred years ago, aristocrats seemed like a race apart from ordinary Englishmen. They were taller. They spoke with a different accent. Endogamy was strong among the aristocratic class.

The term “race” is so loaded that people will object to anyone calling the HEEs a race. You may want to reserve the term race for differences that are visible in physiognomy. You may prefer the more typical expression “culture war.”

The advantage to calling the conflict involving HEEs a race war is that it would allow us to see the danger in where the endogamous HEEs are heading.

Psychologist Andrew Hartz writes,

Splitting is a defense mechanism by which people unconsciously frame ideas, individuals or groups of people in all-or-nothing terms—for example, all good or all bad. The term was popularized in its current usage by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein in the 1930s and ’40s. Its name describes how intolerable thoughts and feelings are split off from the subject’s awareness, leading to a partial view of the world. To see our opponents as pure evil, we have to split off the parts of them that are admirable. To see ourselves as purely righteous, we have to split off our shortcomings.

Hartz argues that this explains polarization. We learn to tune out any sort of positive perceptions of people whose political views differ from ours.

I think of splitting as another term for, or at least related to, cognitive dissonance. Believing something good about someone who disagrees with you creates cognitive dissonance. The easiest way to resolve that is to avoid believing something good about someone who disagrees. In The Three Languages of Politics, I call this the need for closure.