Debate: Why Does Racial Inequality Persist?

Glenn Loury and Adaner Usmani debate and discuss the presence and roots of racial inequality in the United States of America. Glenn Loury is Professor of Economics and Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is a contributing editor at The Boston Review, and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He has given the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford, the James A. Moffett ’29 Lectures in Ethics at Princeton, and the DuBois Lectures in African American Studies at Harvard. Adaner Usmani is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Studies at Harvard University. He earned his BA in social studies from Harvard University before earning his PhD in sociology from New York University. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University. He has written about collective action, democracy and the origins and consequences of American mass incarceration. His scholarly work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces and Socius, and he has also written for Jacobin and sits on the editorial board of Catalyst. For more information and lectures, visit the George Washington Forum website http://www.gwfohio.org