John McWhorter on Woke Racism

I’ve been a student of John McWhorter for more than two decades. Long before he became known as an academic critic of Progressive race policy, McWhorter was already a leading professor of linguistics at Columbia University when he recorded his lectures on language with the Teaching Company (later rebranded as The Great Courses).

I recently finished reading his book Woke Racism, where McWhorter shows parallels between diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology (DEI) and religious behavior. In doing so, he notes how this Progressive ideology is mostly a phenomenon of white people looking down on black people. In the name of anti-racism, Progressives are overtly racist:

I write this viscerally driven by the fact that the ideology in question is one under which white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special. I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination infecting my daughters’ sense of self. I can’t always be with them, and this anti-humanist ideology may seep into their school curriculum. I shudder at the thought: teachers with eyes shining at the prospect of showing their antiracism by filling my daughters’ heads with performance art instructing them that they are poster children rather than individuals. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Between the World and Me, wanted to teach his son that America is set against him; I want to teach my kids the reality of their lives in the twenty-first, rather than the early to mid-twentieth, century. Lord forbid my daughters internalize a pathetic—yes, absolutely pathetic in all of the resonances of that word—sense that what makes them interesting is what other people think of them, or don’t.

While McWhorter has a unique perspective as a black man to object to left-wing racism, it’s really his training as a linguist that sets him apart. He has a way with words in describing a worldview that strives to social engineer the approved ways to talk about race in polite society. He politely objects, like the earnest academic he is.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.