It was a hot summer day, I remember that, and I was probably sweating a little bit more than the heat required, because I was afraid of how people were gonna take what I knew I had to say.

It was a meeting of civil rights leaders in Washington DC in 1984 — The Civil Rights Coalition Leadership Council I think that’s what they might have called themselves, Leadership Council in Civil Rights. And looking out the faces of these, you know, you see them on the television, they’re on the news, they are quote “our leaders” closed quote. They wanted to hear from me so I felt a certain pride.

I did feel a little trepidation that people were going to be mad at me but at the same time I was a little bit excited at that prospect because I’m the town crier, I’m the fellow who’s saying the emperor has no clothes. I felt empowered by this idea that I’d seen something that was important, that other people weren’t seeing and I was there to announce it to the world.

And… I showed up and I gave my spiel.

[FROM ESSAY: The moral victory of the civil rights movement is virtually complete, and yet racial divisions remain. Since the 1980s we’ve been faced with a new American dilemma, one that is especially difficult for black leaders and members of the black middle class.]

And I draw a contrast between “the enemy without” and “the enemy within.”

“The enemy without,” which is white racism — sure, it continues to exist, but much constrained by the legislation of civil rights and voting rights and so forth — and “the enemy within” being problems in African-American society that ended up limiting our ability to take advantage of the opportunities that had been opened up with the successes of the civil rights movement.

[FROM ESSAY: The bottom stratum of the black community has compelling problems that can no longer be blamed solely on white racism, and that forces to confront fundamental failures in black society.]

And then I’d have a long discussion of the character of this enemy within. Families with fatherlessness and early unwed pregnancy and so on. Criminal behavior that made it hard to do business in certain neighborhoods and limited the life chances of the people who had to live there. Poor school performance, low attachment to the labor force. I would go down a litany of statistics about the so-called pathology of African-American social life, especially in the lower classes, and conclude that these are matters that needed to be addressed directly, and that the instrumentalities of civil rights protest were not effective.

[FROM ESSAY: To admit these failures is likely to be personally costly for black leaders, and it may also play into the hands of lingering racist sentiment. Not to admit them however is to forestall their resolution and to allow the racial polarization of the country to worsen. If the new American dilemma is not dealt with soon, we may face the possibility of a permanent split in our political system along racial lines…]

We were standing in the early 1980s. Ronald Reagan had been elected president; we were within two decades of the end of the civil rights big achievements of the 1960s, and so there was a kind of taking stock idea. I was trying to say: Where are we? Where have we gotten ourselves to? The civil rights movement is over.

Looking around the room, who did you see?

Well I’m standing here in my seat, you know, at a table with ten people around it, and sitting on my left as it happens is Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s widow, and I’m winding up my argument to the effect that the civil rights movement is off the track… So I look down and I see that this woman, this iconic figure, the symbol of civil rights martyrdom, is weeping. There are tears coming down her cheeks; I’m alarmed, of course, but I’m also startled. Weeping about what? I mean, what did I say that would bring you to tears? This woman is a trip. I mean, is she off her meds? I really thought, “Come on… You’re weeping? You’re weeping at someone making a set of critical observations about the character of contemporary politics? I mean, who could take such a person seriously?” I thought.

I’m 33, 34 years old, I’ve just been made a professor at Harvard University, I am this bright, young kid, I’m the future, you know, I’m the first black to have tenure in economics at Harvard, people see this as an achievement, people are proud of me, I’m the fruit of the civil rights movement, so there’s a sense of despair in people that a guy like me, a product of their efforts would have gone off the rails.

***

I think I was reluctant to embrace the idea of myself as a conservative, rather that I was simply a contrarian. I began having concerns about affirmative action for example very early on the in the arc of my move to the right. Maybe even a neoconservative in the sense of liberal who’s been mugged by reality.

There undoubtedly is a personality dimension of me which likes being in your face and iconoclastic, but there’s also a lot of stupidity and confusion in the world. There’s a lot of error. And there’s a lot of circling the wagons around error.

So as the jails filled up as the school failure totals came in, as the 15-year-old mothers proliferated, my feeling was, you know, we’re sailing over a cliff and somebody had better call attention to that. Now that’s not my characterological flaw of somebody who loves to be at the center of controversy. That’s me being right and them being wrong about something that’s vitally important for the welfare of my people.

I mean, the way I felt about it was many of these predictably liberal African American intellectuals didn’t know diddly about the underclass. They didn’t know anything about the ghetto. They wouldn’t know what to do if they were actually confronted with real hardcore tough minded, tough living black people. They lived in a bubble. Their audience was liberal whites. They were performing an act. I actually had to go home to those neighborhoods. I had to go home to my family which was diverse in its socioeconomic and cultural makeup. And I felt like “You’re gonna tell me that I don’t care about our people? You’re gonna tell me that I’m not black?”

***

I grew up in Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s. I was born in 1948. I lived on the South side of the city. I lived with my mother who was divorced and my sister in a small apartment upstairs and in the back of a grand house that my aunt — my mother’s sister — and her husband owned.

My mother, who was a wonderful, loving woman, but not the most responsible and effective parent, was staggering through her own life, you know, one husband to another and moving around a lot. I was in five different schools before finishing the fifth grade. My aunt, my mother’s sister said “This can’t go on, we need some stability in your life. I want you to come over here and live here. You’ll pay rent but it would be a discount,” and I don’t think my mom really had much other alternative than to move in with her sister.

This was a beautiful house, in a nice neighborhood. It had been a white neighborhood when my aunt and uncle first moved into it, but it flipped over within three or four years to being all black.

Yes, so I was 16 years old when I graduated from high school in 1965. I had been always a really good student in school. I got a scholarship to study at the Illinois Institute of Technology. However, I was graduating high school at 16, just turned 17 as I was starting my college, and I had always been younger, sometimes two years younger than the other kids, and I was kind of a nerd, kind of a social misfit. And when I came out of high school and started college, I also started coming into my own in terms of being able to successfully court people of the opposite sex, and have sex with them. I mean, that’s kind of what it comes down to at the end of the day okay? And I was really a lot more interested in doing that than I was in going to classes at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

So two things happened. I flunked out. I mean literally, I got bad grades and they ultimately asked me to leave. And the other was that Charlene, my girlfriend, became pregnant. Charlene was 16 and I was 18. That was in March 1967.

I merely wanted to not have my father look at me with contempt. My father, who worked very hard for everything that he ever had, who got himself certified as a public accountant and became a auditor for the Internal Revenue Service and worked his way up till finally toward the end of his career he was a high-level manager. My father knew that I was smarter than him, he told me that every time I saw him. He was deeply concerned that I was squandering my gifts, appalled at the idea that I would marry Charlene. He said “Take care of your children, but don’t marry that girl, that’s a mistake.”

Why?

He thought that her class background within the African American community of being from parents from the South who were relatively unsophisticated — her mother worked as a laborer, and her father was a janitor — they weren’t particularly well-educated people. He didn’t think we were going to prove to be compatible over the long run.

We ultimately did marry, and I think he rather imagined that I was repeating his mistake. He knew that — as his own example showed — a man could be a father to his children without having to be a husband to their mother.

My girlfriend gets pregnant, she gets pregnant again, I go to work full-time, we marry. But while this is happening, I’m saying, you know, I really need a college degree. So I begin to take a couple of courses at a community college.  Somewhere along in my second semester, one of the inspired teachers, Mr. Andres, said to me, “You know, I think that you could do well at a real university, and I want to recommend you for a scholarship at Northwestern, which is my alma mater.” And I said “Sure” without having any idea what I was getting myself into.

They looked at my portfolio. My test score