DE Asst. Features Editor

Individuals need to stop addressing issues in racial terms and view them as a human problems, a lecturer said to a crowd of 100 people Thursday night, kicking off SIUC’s Black History Month.

Glenn Loury, a Boston University professor in economics, gave the month’s keynote address titled Individualism before Multiculturalism Thursday night in the Student Center Auditorium.

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Loury recently published, One By One From the Inside Out, a collection of essays about race responsibility.

Loury’s hour-long speech addressed working toward a goal of a color-blind society where problems would be viewed as human dilemmas and not specific ethnic issues.

It’s powerful and compelling to learn about a mother living in the projects struggling on her own and has zero successes, he said. The problem can be viewed as a minority problem, but all humans can identify with those who suffer.

Loury said people who place racial identities above all other personal characteristics are called racial essentialists. He said because essentialists point to ethnic identities, they view problems as race- related instead of society-connected.

If we are reduced to bantering and badgering, we do not see the failure of our civilization, he said. We see it as a manifestation of their disability.

Loury said a novel, The Bell Curve, is an example of a racialist perspective. He said the authors statistics were racially categorized and ignored other factors such as income, pushing back the ideal of the human condition.

Our society is a bell curve, he said. But our position on the bell curve does not explain our position in life.

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Loury said the human condition is not linking problems and deficiencies such as education and poverty to races but to problems of humanity.

He said persuasion is an idealistic route where the human condition is in conjunction with race, and brokerage is a route in which people make demands because they feel they deserve compensation for some type of racial suffering.

If we travel these routes, we will have one society (the idealistic route) where we are one people brothers all created in the spirit of good, Loury said. Or we are collective minorities (in the brokerage route) where some will reap benefits, and some will have to be dealt with.

Loury answered some heated questions from the crowd regarding the idea of dropping racial identities to achieve a total human identity.

Black people have the richest culture in my opinion, he said. But we are sucking our ethnic thumbs and should be smacked in the face. We have no one but ourselves to blame.

Frederick Williams, director of the University Honors Program, said Loury was asked to speak because he is a reputable speaker about race relations.

Many people consider him to be a voice of reason in an atmosphere that is not always considered reasonable.

After listening to Loury’s speech, Danielle Shaw, a junior in speech communications from Chicago, said she agreed with Loury’s idea about looking past racial identities, but she said she thinks all races need to be treated equally to see problems on the same level.

In a time when I need a law like Affirmative Action to ensure that I have a fair shot at a job, she said, I can’t see humanness rising above the issue of color for awhile.