What do you think?
Rate this book
Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America
People of good will on both the left and the right are secretly asking themselves the same question: how has the conversation on race gone so crazy?
Bestselling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting black communities and weakening the social fabric.
We're told to read books and listen to music by people of colour but that wearing certain clothes is 'appropriation.' We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we'll be seen as unwoke, or worse, labelled a racist. According to John McWhorter, the problem is that a well-meaning but pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion - and one that's illogical, unreachable, and unintentionally neoracist.
In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of 'white privilege' and the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervour of the 'woke mob.' He shows how this religion that claims to 'dismantle racist structures' is actually harming his fellow black Americans by infantilizing black people, setting black students up for failure, and passing policies that disproportionately damage black communities. The new religion might be called 'antiracism, ' but it features a racial essentialism that's barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past.
Fortunately, for all of us, it's not too late to push back against woke racism. McWhorter shares scripts and encouragement with those trying to deprogramme friends and family. And most importantly, he offers a roadmap to justice that actually will help, not hurt, black people.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Bestselling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting black communities and weakening the social fabric.
We're told to read books and listen to music by people of colour but that wearing certain clothes is 'appropriation.' We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we'll be seen as unwoke, or worse, labelled a racist. According to John McWhorter, the problem is that a well-meaning but pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion - and one that's illogical, unreachable, and unintentionally neoracist.
In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of 'white privilege' and the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervour of the 'woke mob.' He shows how this religion that claims to 'dismantle racist structures' is actually harming his fellow black Americans by infantilizing black people, setting black students up for failure, and passing policies that disproportionately damage black communities. The new religion might be called 'antiracism, ' but it features a racial essentialism that's barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past.
Fortunately, for all of us, it's not too late to push back against woke racism. McWhorter shares scripts and encouragement with those trying to deprogramme friends and family. And most importantly, he offers a roadmap to justice that actually will help, not hurt, black people.
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
224 pages, Hardcover
First published October 26, 2021
About the author
John McWhorter
47 books1,564 followersJohn Hamilton McWhorter (Professor McWhorter uses neither his title nor his middle initial as an author) is an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specializes on how creole languages form, and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.
A popular writer, McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New Yorker, among others; he is also contributing editor at The Atlantic and hosts Slate's Lexicon Valley podcas
A popular writer, McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New Yorker, among others; he is also contributing editor at The Atlantic and hosts Slate's Lexicon Valley podcas
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,005 reviews
October 30, 2021
Meh, there's not really much here.
Its mostly an angry rant at so-called 'woke' Black folks though he writes this book to 'save' white people and because he's aware that racist white folks will wield this as a weapon. He states its his 'duty' to be used as a weapon by white supremacists🤣😭
This man is a whole ass-clown.
The author is deeply antiblack which is sad for him and his kids.
I guess.
I mean I don't really care.
Black folks aren't a monolith and so self-hating Black folks exist.
They always have.
This author is one of those folks and fully aware of it.
In the beginning, he says this book is for 2 groups of people: people who listen to NPR & read the NY Times; he referred to this group as white but not exclusively white and placed himself in this group.
He then addresses Black folks in a separate group and relates to Black 'victim mentality' behaviors.
Clearly for this author Black folks are largely a monolith & less than, as a group, the white people whom he thinks, apparently, all listen to NPR & read the NY Times.😬
Fucking yikes dude.
This man is ivy league educated but that does not come across this silly rant mostly in support of white supremacy🤷🏾♀️
He tries to give credence to his made up arguments by giving them weird titles like, 'Third Wave Antiracist', 'The Elect' etc.
Mostly he doesn't like white people being publicly called out on social media and shamed for saying biased and oppressive things.
He also has negative critiques of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter largely around building 'victim mentality' and being undignified.
It's a revamp of respectability politics circa Booker T. Washington, complete with the 'I love my people, this to help them' rhetoric,
dated and of no help to anyone other than white supremacists.
The author is an atheist and one of those arrogant ones who can't just chose to believe as he chooses but feels the need to belittle others beliefs to boot.
Everything he doesn't like he sees as religion-like.🙄
It's boring and tired and an EPIC reach. Unfortunately for the author he's unable to make the reach work.
I think the real issue is the author doesn't understand the modern antiracist movement and is embarrassed by Black folks protesting.
Many Black folks feel embarrassed by other Black folks as this monolith mentality is heavily pushed by white supremacist rhetoric.
I think the author has a white or NBPOC spouse and light skin children. He speaks about protecting them as well.
Again this mentality is common amongst men who invest in white supremacy, even unconsciously.
The author engages lightly with the modern civil rights movement using the conservative 'woke' rhetoric.
He thinks holding white people accountable for their actions and educating them is somehow hateful.
Actually when you take the time and make the effort to correct folks when they are wrong, this is an act of love not hate.
Anyone who parents will tell you its much easier to ignore wrong behavior than it is to take the time and effort to correct said bad behaviors.
This is nonsense written by the authors own admission for white supremacists to wield as a weapon against Black & other POC fighting racism.
Not a worthy read at all. Mostly whining, name calling and ass kissing white supremacy🤣
The audiobook I listened to was read by the author who has a very nice voice and does good job narrating this.
Its mostly an angry rant at so-called 'woke' Black folks though he writes this book to 'save' white people and because he's aware that racist white folks will wield this as a weapon. He states its his 'duty' to be used as a weapon by white supremacists🤣😭
This man is a whole ass-clown.
The author is deeply antiblack which is sad for him and his kids.
I guess.
I mean I don't really care.
Black folks aren't a monolith and so self-hating Black folks exist.
They always have.
This author is one of those folks and fully aware of it.
In the beginning, he says this book is for 2 groups of people: people who listen to NPR & read the NY Times; he referred to this group as white but not exclusively white and placed himself in this group.
He then addresses Black folks in a separate group and relates to Black 'victim mentality' behaviors.
Clearly for this author Black folks are largely a monolith & less than, as a group, the white people whom he thinks, apparently, all listen to NPR & read the NY Times.😬
Fucking yikes dude.
This man is ivy league educated but that does not come across this silly rant mostly in support of white supremacy🤷🏾♀️
He tries to give credence to his made up arguments by giving them weird titles like, 'Third Wave Antiracist', 'The Elect' etc.
Mostly he doesn't like white people being publicly called out on social media and shamed for saying biased and oppressive things.
He also has negative critiques of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matter largely around building 'victim mentality' and being undignified.
It's a revamp of respectability politics circa Booker T. Washington, complete with the 'I love my people, this to help them' rhetoric,
dated and of no help to anyone other than white supremacists.
The author is an atheist and one of those arrogant ones who can't just chose to believe as he chooses but feels the need to belittle others beliefs to boot.
Everything he doesn't like he sees as religion-like.🙄
It's boring and tired and an EPIC reach. Unfortunately for the author he's unable to make the reach work.
I think the real issue is the author doesn't understand the modern antiracist movement and is embarrassed by Black folks protesting.
Many Black folks feel embarrassed by other Black folks as this monolith mentality is heavily pushed by white supremacist rhetoric.
I think the author has a white or NBPOC spouse and light skin children. He speaks about protecting them as well.
Again this mentality is common amongst men who invest in white supremacy, even unconsciously.
The author engages lightly with the modern civil rights movement using the conservative 'woke' rhetoric.
He thinks holding white people accountable for their actions and educating them is somehow hateful.
Actually when you take the time and make the effort to correct folks when they are wrong, this is an act of love not hate.
Anyone who parents will tell you its much easier to ignore wrong behavior than it is to take the time and effort to correct said bad behaviors.
This is nonsense written by the authors own admission for white supremacists to wield as a weapon against Black & other POC fighting racism.
Not a worthy read at all. Mostly whining, name calling and ass kissing white supremacy🤣
The audiobook I listened to was read by the author who has a very nice voice and does good job narrating this.
Read
October 28, 2021"This book is dedicated to each who find it within themselves to take a stand against this detour in humanity's intellectual, cultural and moral development." That dedication alone would have sold me on this book even if it hadn't been written by one of my favourite authors, a professor of linguistics.
November 28, 2021
McWhorter is that guy who goes on & on about something that is of interest to you but maybe not to the same very heated, over the top degree. He's an excitable fellow and while I love that about him, it's also at the heart of my big challenge with this book. Namely, he's guilty of engaging in the same thing that those infernal Woke do: binary thinking! These True Believers are often obnoxious and many of their ideas are deeply offensive, but there are a lot of good points in there too (says the old progressive, generously). McWhorter is basically saying that woke viewpoints denote Lost, Sick Person. There is apparently nothing positive whatsoever about woke ideology to him and that's just too black & white for me. This is often a polemic, which is fun, but I wanted more fairness e.g. the BLM protests definitely spawned condemnable destruction, but that doesn't invalidate the actual peaceful protests that occurred. Don't throw that woke baby out with the bathwater, buddy. It's still a little human being, it just needs to grow.
Okay all that said, this is still very enjoyable, super readable, and it makes a host of valid points. I won't go on & on about it because my progress notes already go on & on. The best section is Chapter 4, which is incisive, insightful, complex. A lot of that is due to how he dampens his own emotionalism - something he often rightfully accuses the woke of indulging in - and that makes this section all the more impactful. It made points that I strongly agreed with, points that troubled me, and it systematically takes down key parts of the woke platform. I go over that section in msg 30 below.
Despite his attempt to sideline the usual critique of He's So Bougie, that highly intelligent yet vaguely entitled middle-class perspective does inform the entire book. But to me, that's fine. I'm not against that perspective, it's a valid, real one. I can say the same about certain woke perspectives too. LOL look at me, what a fucking centrist.
♜♞♝♚♛♝♞♜
RAMBLING READING RATIONALE
♟♟♟♟♟♟♟♟
PROGRESS NOTES
♙♙♙♙♙♙♙♙
TRIFE
♖♘♗♔♕♗♘♖
IDENTITY POLITICS RANKING, SO FAR
1. Political Tribes by Amy Chua - 5 stars. Precisely written with a powerfully resonant message
2. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson - 4 stars. Beautiful prose, some amazing stories of courage and of horror brought to light, and relatably petty at times
3. How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi - 4 stars. Fascinating personal journey, written before Kendi became an embarrassing parody of himself
4. Woke Racism by John McWhorter - 3 stars. Many excellent points and also many cringe moments due to overexcited, broad-stroke shoutiness
5. Taboo by Wilfred Reilly - 3 stars. Quite cheeky, impressive data, frustratingly tunnel-visioned
6. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo - 1 star. White sludge
Okay all that said, this is still very enjoyable, super readable, and it makes a host of valid points. I won't go on & on about it because my progress notes already go on & on. The best section is Chapter 4, which is incisive, insightful, complex. A lot of that is due to how he dampens his own emotionalism - something he often rightfully accuses the woke of indulging in - and that makes this section all the more impactful. It made points that I strongly agreed with, points that troubled me, and it systematically takes down key parts of the woke platform. I go over that section in msg 30 below.
Despite his attempt to sideline the usual critique of He's So Bougie, that highly intelligent yet vaguely entitled middle-class perspective does inform the entire book. But to me, that's fine. I'm not against that perspective, it's a valid, real one. I can say the same about certain woke perspectives too. LOL look at me, what a fucking centrist.
♜♞♝♚♛♝♞♜
RAMBLING READING RATIONALE
♟♟♟♟♟♟♟♟
PROGRESS NOTES
♙♙♙♙♙♙♙♙
TRIFE
♖♘♗♔♕♗♘♖
IDENTITY POLITICS RANKING, SO FAR
1. Political Tribes by Amy Chua - 5 stars. Precisely written with a powerfully resonant message
2. Caste by Isabel Wilkerson - 4 stars. Beautiful prose, some amazing stories of courage and of horror brought to light, and relatably petty at times
3. How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi - 4 stars. Fascinating personal journey, written before Kendi became an embarrassing parody of himself
4. Woke Racism by John McWhorter - 3 stars. Many excellent points and also many cringe moments due to overexcited, broad-stroke shoutiness
5. Taboo by Wilfred Reilly - 3 stars. Quite cheeky, impressive data, frustratingly tunnel-visioned
6. White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo - 1 star. White sludge
November 1, 2021
I could honestly write an entire blog post about this book (and maybe I will), but this book completely changed my opinion of John McWhorter. I got into John’s books on linguistics, and then I found out he’s a very vocal person when it comes to issues with wokeness. I’ve listened to many of his podcasts and conversations with people, and while he has no problem admitting racism exists, it was hard to get a read on him. I couldn’t quite tell if he was just against the woke stuff as a way to pander as some people do, or what his nuanced opinions were on this topic. Once I read this book, I had a far better understanding of what John believes, and I’m glad to say he proved my skepticism wrong.
I was fortunate enough to get a review copy of this book from his publisher, and I binged the book within about a day. John brings up great arguments about woke ideology and how it’s basically a religion. I’ve heard him make this analogy before, but it makes much more sense once I read the book. While I may not agree with all of John’s opinions, I agreed with most of them. I think the biggest misconception I had, and one that many others have, is that he doesn’t think racism is a problem. Once you get towards the last third of the book, McWhorter dives into a ton of solutions while recognizing some of the issues we face. His arguments are sound, and basically, he just doesn’t think that some of the anti-racist ideology that’s spreading will help solve these issues.
Check out my interview with John McWhorter about the book here
I’m sure this book will get a ton of sales, but I hope it reaches more people like me who were skeptical of John. It bums me out that a lot of people will probably not even read this book and be outraged about it. So, if you’re reading this review and aren’t a fan of John, give the book a chance. It might surprise you.
I was fortunate enough to get a review copy of this book from his publisher, and I binged the book within about a day. John brings up great arguments about woke ideology and how it’s basically a religion. I’ve heard him make this analogy before, but it makes much more sense once I read the book. While I may not agree with all of John’s opinions, I agreed with most of them. I think the biggest misconception I had, and one that many others have, is that he doesn’t think racism is a problem. Once you get towards the last third of the book, McWhorter dives into a ton of solutions while recognizing some of the issues we face. His arguments are sound, and basically, he just doesn’t think that some of the anti-racist ideology that’s spreading will help solve these issues.
Check out my interview with John McWhorter about the book here
I’m sure this book will get a ton of sales, but I hope it reaches more people like me who were skeptical of John. It bums me out that a lot of people will probably not even read this book and be outraged about it. So, if you’re reading this review and aren’t a fan of John, give the book a chance. It might surprise you.
October 27, 2021
I've read a decent number of books on the debates about critical race theory, race in the modern US, etc, and this is one of the stronger offerings. I was familiar with a lot of McWhorter's thinking from watching Bill Maher and reading the NYT, but he presents a strong case against what he calls "woke racism," exemplified in the work of Kendi, DiAngelo, and Coates. This is a good argument although not a perfect one.
JM's most interesting argument is that the modern racial ideology of the Left (or the "hard Left" given that McWhorter seems to identify as left of center, as do I) has become a form of religion in that it is unquestionable, emotionally loaded, intolerant of criticism, and has its own creation myth and other forms of religion. This may be kind of hard on religion, as I've found dozens of very devout people far more willing to reason and genuinely debate with me on sticky issues like race than in the "woke mob," or whatever. While McWhorter's tarring of WR as a religion might unnecessarily alienate potential allies of faith, he has a point. This material is rarely taught with openness and critical thinking and is more often issued from on high as dogma, and the cudgel of accusations of racism is then used to silence or destroy heretics. It has its martyrs, ceremonies (like white people ceremoniously confessing their privilege or begging forgiveness from minority groups), holy texts (Btw the World and Me, How to Be Antiracist, White Fragility), original sin concept (whiteness) and creation myths (the 1619 project). JM insightfully notes that the deep commitment of many people, especially white people, to this ideology is not about money or even power but meaning; as with other religions and even secular ideologies, it is about taking part in the good side of an epic, Manichean battle with evil, which obviously grants purpose to one's life.
JM argues that this ideology hurts black people in several ways, and I think this is the territory where he is most persuasive. First, he says that this is a largely performative ideology that is mainly about white people seeking relief and absolution from guilt and to avoid being accused of racism, which is rightfully one of the worst things a person can be accused of today and an accusation that SJWs or whatever you want to call them throw around with abandon (I've been called one for such mild arguments as saying most statues of the founding fathers should remain up even as we take down Confederate ones, which I strongly support). If you read DiAngelo or Kendi, there's very little in there about how to actually help the poor and marginalized; the focus is on ritualistic and ongoing (really, never-ending) cleansing of racist thoughts. JM notes that this is popular because it is easy; it doesn't require critical thinking, it gives one cover from accusations while also giving one meaning, and it doesn't require that you do much of anything besides agree with everything that DiAngelo, Kendi, and other priests of this faith demand. White people interrogating their own biases and privilege is a generally good thing, as JM would admit, but it's a long path from that to closing the wealth, education, and opportunity gaps that remain between whites and African-Americans.
Second, JM argues that the simplistic doctrines of WR condescend to African Americans and hurt them in concrete ways. I think he's on to something here. DiAngelo, Kendi, Oluo, and others seem to present AA's as an extremely sensitive group prone to anger and trauma at the slightest microaggression or pushback. Remember that DiAngelo makes any retort against an accusation of racism into evidence of racism; this means that white people basically have to accept any claim an AA person makes about race/racism. JM rightfully notes that this is condescending; it treats black people as intellectual and emotional children who cannot handle being challenged, however respectfully. Of course, there's a difference between challenging someone's diagnosis of history or racism in the present or how to address it and challenging their personal experiences of racism; the latter is far more damaging and should be avoided. But JM believes that black people are stronger and smarter than this and cannot stand the ritualistic coddling these thinkers want for them. Just consider how little pushback Coates got for claiming he felt nothing for the cops and firefighters rushing into the WTC to save innocent people (regardless of color). This was a monstrous statement in an otherwise overrated book, and he was barely taken to task for it. That is condescending and coddling. Other critical race theorists say that black people should be exempt from civility, objectivity, individual responsibility, and other norms. That is condescending and coddling, almost a form of racism in itself. You could say the same thing of the shoddy ideas in Kendi, DiAngelo, and elsewhere.
Last positive note: JM has a brilliant argument against Kendi's simplistic formula for racial justice. Kendi argues that the only non-racist explanation for any gap btw white and black people has to be systemic racist oppression and the denial of opportunity. To say that black people at all contribute to any sliver of this gap is to say there is something wrong with them and is therefore to participate in racism in either a cultural or biological form. This simplistic formula wouldn't earn a B- grade in an undergraduate social science course, and JM shows how absurd it is. He argues that a racist history can create cultural forms and adaptations that endure past the existence of blatantly racist systems and ideologies and come to harm a group, such as the idea that school is a "white thing" or a confrontational attitude toward authority. JM presents reams of data showing that, in fact, AA students do get into fights more across the board, which suggests that the punishment gap btw white, black, and other groups of students may not be a product of racism (the only possible solution in a Kendi-an framework) and rather something stemming from those students themselves (stress from difficult home situations, single-parent situations, or poverty that black kids are more likely to live in, certain conceptions of masculinity). The Kendi-an way of thinking leads to an absurd lowering of standards and of the general safety of schools, which usually leads to the harming of (you guessed it) other black kids, either through violence or the disruption of their classes. JM is basically calling on us to see the complex ways that culture, racism (both past and present), policy, and other forces work together and to get other the simple ideological formulas that offer one explanation for all social phenomena related to race.
Ok, now some flaws. McWhorter is kind of out for rhetorical blood in this book, and I think that unfortunately his style, while often cutting and funny, is too informed by Twitter takedowns and his own anger at his intellectual opponents. He uses biological metaphors that over-dramatize the WR ideology as a kind of virus or infection; arguing this way is never a good idea because it is dehumanizing and it mirrors the nastiness of one's opponents. At times he is too sarcastic and dismissive; I would have preferred the more detached tone of Jonathan Rauch's work in Kindly Inquisitors. At times, this language gives the book more a polemical feel, which is not a great thing, even though the genre is kind of polemical anyway.
A larger problem: at times, McWhorter exaggerates the power and menace of WR ideology. Toward the end he claims that WR folks are more dangerous than the people who stormed the Capitol on 1/6 because they are slowly taking over institutions like education, media, etc. This is an untenable claim. Kendi, Diangelo, and their ilk are still quite far from real political power: vague versions of their ideas might seep into the fringes of the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party remains a broad and fairly moderate tent. The majority of African-Americans and other minorities, as shown by polls and simple voting behavior (like black enthusiasm for the supposedly racist Joe Biden), reject most WR ideas, or just don't know about them. The 1/6 protestors, however, are the vanguard of Trumpism, which has completely swallowed one of the two major parties and turned it into a borderline white nationalist, anti-democracy, full on conspiracy party. This is THE greatest threat to democracy in modern U.S. history, and it is still ongoing. Woke mobs on Twitter and in universities are a problem for education and, in a vaguer sense, for liberal democracy, and they certainly feed the Trumpian reaction, but they are miles from the power that the MAGA faction now exerts in our politics. JM was dead wrong in this area. He should avoid the "James Lindsey trap" in which never-ending feuding with hard leftists on Twitter leads one to think they are the true enemy of freedom and democracy, leading one (or, James Lindsey, at least) from sanity into full on illiberal, trolling, Maga-ism. I don't think JM will take that road, but his book might push some in that direction.
Finally, this book could have done a better job spelling out a liberal anti-racism, something I have been thinking about a lot. MLK had a liberal anti-racism, as, I think, does Obama; they focus on persuasion, modeling, assertions of dignity, and they avoid demonization in most cases. MLK, of course, varied in this approach and was far from a moderate, as his key texts show. However, he never said that civility, objectivity, and Christian forgiveness must be abandoned to achieve racial progress; those were the cornerstones of his quest for progress. It was "civil" disobedience, after all. JM offers some tactical ways to deal with WR harassment and gives a few issues (like ending the Drug War, which I agree with) that are practical ways to actually help black people. Still, there's no larger vision here of how to achieve a society where people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin (ditto for their opportunities, health, etc). I still think that public figures like JM should do more to spell out what a liberal anti-racism looks like, how it can be integrated into education, etc. It isn't enough to tear down WR; in fact, that isn't too hard given these ideas lack of quality. You have to counter it with a positive vision. I'm sure JM can do this, but it isn't in this book in any systematic form.
Overall, a strong, vividly written, and biting book with some flaws. Worth reading for getting a counterpoint to Kendi, DiAngelo, etc, but not as powerful as more narrative accounts like Thomas Chatterton Williams' memoir.
JM's most interesting argument is that the modern racial ideology of the Left (or the "hard Left" given that McWhorter seems to identify as left of center, as do I) has become a form of religion in that it is unquestionable, emotionally loaded, intolerant of criticism, and has its own creation myth and other forms of religion. This may be kind of hard on religion, as I've found dozens of very devout people far more willing to reason and genuinely debate with me on sticky issues like race than in the "woke mob," or whatever. While McWhorter's tarring of WR as a religion might unnecessarily alienate potential allies of faith, he has a point. This material is rarely taught with openness and critical thinking and is more often issued from on high as dogma, and the cudgel of accusations of racism is then used to silence or destroy heretics. It has its martyrs, ceremonies (like white people ceremoniously confessing their privilege or begging forgiveness from minority groups), holy texts (Btw the World and Me, How to Be Antiracist, White Fragility), original sin concept (whiteness) and creation myths (the 1619 project). JM insightfully notes that the deep commitment of many people, especially white people, to this ideology is not about money or even power but meaning; as with other religions and even secular ideologies, it is about taking part in the good side of an epic, Manichean battle with evil, which obviously grants purpose to one's life.
JM argues that this ideology hurts black people in several ways, and I think this is the territory where he is most persuasive. First, he says that this is a largely performative ideology that is mainly about white people seeking relief and absolution from guilt and to avoid being accused of racism, which is rightfully one of the worst things a person can be accused of today and an accusation that SJWs or whatever you want to call them throw around with abandon (I've been called one for such mild arguments as saying most statues of the founding fathers should remain up even as we take down Confederate ones, which I strongly support). If you read DiAngelo or Kendi, there's very little in there about how to actually help the poor and marginalized; the focus is on ritualistic and ongoing (really, never-ending) cleansing of racist thoughts. JM notes that this is popular because it is easy; it doesn't require critical thinking, it gives one cover from accusations while also giving one meaning, and it doesn't require that you do much of anything besides agree with everything that DiAngelo, Kendi, and other priests of this faith demand. White people interrogating their own biases and privilege is a generally good thing, as JM would admit, but it's a long path from that to closing the wealth, education, and opportunity gaps that remain between whites and African-Americans.
Second, JM argues that the simplistic doctrines of WR condescend to African Americans and hurt them in concrete ways. I think he's on to something here. DiAngelo, Kendi, Oluo, and others seem to present AA's as an extremely sensitive group prone to anger and trauma at the slightest microaggression or pushback. Remember that DiAngelo makes any retort against an accusation of racism into evidence of racism; this means that white people basically have to accept any claim an AA person makes about race/racism. JM rightfully notes that this is condescending; it treats black people as intellectual and emotional children who cannot handle being challenged, however respectfully. Of course, there's a difference between challenging someone's diagnosis of history or racism in the present or how to address it and challenging their personal experiences of racism; the latter is far more damaging and should be avoided. But JM believes that black people are stronger and smarter than this and cannot stand the ritualistic coddling these thinkers want for them. Just consider how little pushback Coates got for claiming he felt nothing for the cops and firefighters rushing into the WTC to save innocent people (regardless of color). This was a monstrous statement in an otherwise overrated book, and he was barely taken to task for it. That is condescending and coddling. Other critical race theorists say that black people should be exempt from civility, objectivity, individual responsibility, and other norms. That is condescending and coddling, almost a form of racism in itself. You could say the same thing of the shoddy ideas in Kendi, DiAngelo, and elsewhere.
Last positive note: JM has a brilliant argument against Kendi's simplistic formula for racial justice. Kendi argues that the only non-racist explanation for any gap btw white and black people has to be systemic racist oppression and the denial of opportunity. To say that black people at all contribute to any sliver of this gap is to say there is something wrong with them and is therefore to participate in racism in either a cultural or biological form. This simplistic formula wouldn't earn a B- grade in an undergraduate social science course, and JM shows how absurd it is. He argues that a racist history can create cultural forms and adaptations that endure past the existence of blatantly racist systems and ideologies and come to harm a group, such as the idea that school is a "white thing" or a confrontational attitude toward authority. JM presents reams of data showing that, in fact, AA students do get into fights more across the board, which suggests that the punishment gap btw white, black, and other groups of students may not be a product of racism (the only possible solution in a Kendi-an framework) and rather something stemming from those students themselves (stress from difficult home situations, single-parent situations, or poverty that black kids are more likely to live in, certain conceptions of masculinity). The Kendi-an way of thinking leads to an absurd lowering of standards and of the general safety of schools, which usually leads to the harming of (you guessed it) other black kids, either through violence or the disruption of their classes. JM is basically calling on us to see the complex ways that culture, racism (both past and present), policy, and other forces work together and to get other the simple ideological formulas that offer one explanation for all social phenomena related to race.
Ok, now some flaws. McWhorter is kind of out for rhetorical blood in this book, and I think that unfortunately his style, while often cutting and funny, is too informed by Twitter takedowns and his own anger at his intellectual opponents. He uses biological metaphors that over-dramatize the WR ideology as a kind of virus or infection; arguing this way is never a good idea because it is dehumanizing and it mirrors the nastiness of one's opponents. At times he is too sarcastic and dismissive; I would have preferred the more detached tone of Jonathan Rauch's work in Kindly Inquisitors. At times, this language gives the book more a polemical feel, which is not a great thing, even though the genre is kind of polemical anyway.
A larger problem: at times, McWhorter exaggerates the power and menace of WR ideology. Toward the end he claims that WR folks are more dangerous than the people who stormed the Capitol on 1/6 because they are slowly taking over institutions like education, media, etc. This is an untenable claim. Kendi, Diangelo, and their ilk are still quite far from real political power: vague versions of their ideas might seep into the fringes of the Democratic Party, but the Democratic Party remains a broad and fairly moderate tent. The majority of African-Americans and other minorities, as shown by polls and simple voting behavior (like black enthusiasm for the supposedly racist Joe Biden), reject most WR ideas, or just don't know about them. The 1/6 protestors, however, are the vanguard of Trumpism, which has completely swallowed one of the two major parties and turned it into a borderline white nationalist, anti-democracy, full on conspiracy party. This is THE greatest threat to democracy in modern U.S. history, and it is still ongoing. Woke mobs on Twitter and in universities are a problem for education and, in a vaguer sense, for liberal democracy, and they certainly feed the Trumpian reaction, but they are miles from the power that the MAGA faction now exerts in our politics. JM was dead wrong in this area. He should avoid the "James Lindsey trap" in which never-ending feuding with hard leftists on Twitter leads one to think they are the true enemy of freedom and democracy, leading one (or, James Lindsey, at least) from sanity into full on illiberal, trolling, Maga-ism. I don't think JM will take that road, but his book might push some in that direction.
Finally, this book could have done a better job spelling out a liberal anti-racism, something I have been thinking about a lot. MLK had a liberal anti-racism, as, I think, does Obama; they focus on persuasion, modeling, assertions of dignity, and they avoid demonization in most cases. MLK, of course, varied in this approach and was far from a moderate, as his key texts show. However, he never said that civility, objectivity, and Christian forgiveness must be abandoned to achieve racial progress; those were the cornerstones of his quest for progress. It was "civil" disobedience, after all. JM offers some tactical ways to deal with WR harassment and gives a few issues (like ending the Drug War, which I agree with) that are practical ways to actually help black people. Still, there's no larger vision here of how to achieve a society where people are judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin (ditto for their opportunities, health, etc). I still think that public figures like JM should do more to spell out what a liberal anti-racism looks like, how it can be integrated into education, etc. It isn't enough to tear down WR; in fact, that isn't too hard given these ideas lack of quality. You have to counter it with a positive vision. I'm sure JM can do this, but it isn't in this book in any systematic form.
Overall, a strong, vividly written, and biting book with some flaws. Worth reading for getting a counterpoint to Kendi, DiAngelo, etc, but not as powerful as more narrative accounts like Thomas Chatterton Williams' memoir.
October 28, 2021
I rarely buy books on their release date, but as a liberal who despises CRT/wokeness this book was a big deal. And it did not disappoint! The woke mob has been beyond criticism for far too long. They lash out at anyone who engages with them. They are infantilizing Black people and demonizing White people, and they are getting away with it because they immediately brand critics as racists unfit for polite society. Americans, left and right, need to recognize the very real threat posed by woke neoracists and this book can be an important tool for doing so.
![Profile Image for Namera [The Literary Invertebrate].](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1647896333i/31792110._UX200_CR0,96,200,200_.jpg)
December 20, 2021
⤅ This is a really powerful book, and I'm going to try and do it a measure of justice with a thoughtful review.
Recently, I saw on Twitter that Coleman Hughes - a young black podcaster - was decrying how 'f*cking racist' it would be for Harvard not to subject black students to the same admissions test standards as whites or Asians. He's absolutely correct. This is called the 'bigotry of soft expectations': patronisation masquerading as progressiveness.
I've seen this happen in the UK, where people have urged Oxbridge to drop their grade requirements for minority students in the name of diversity. This isn't the right solution; I say this as a Bangladeshi girl, someone from an ethnic group which is one of the lowest paid/employed in the UK. This policy would only result in those students feeling unprepared to deal with their actual degree workloads, which have been designed for applicants who met the requirements. Or worse, like affirmative action, they would develop imposter syndrome, in conjunction with facing possible resentment from white peers. I applied to Cambridge alongside a white girl from my school, both of us competing for one of six spaces alongside roughly 50 applicants. I would never want to think I was accepted not because of my quality, but because of my colour, and that she was rejected for the same.
I would urge everyone to maintain an open mind, and read this book. It's not long - only about 50k words - and McWhorter of course makes his points better than I can convey. McWhorter's foundational premise is that in recent years, America has moved towards an almost evangelical view on racism, where people are hounded out of their jobs for not having the right 'thoughts' in a racial re-enactment of the Salem witch trials. He points out that contemporary America is almost unprecedently opposed to racism, both legally and culturally. Yet, he argues, by preserving a vision of America where all black people are consistently oppressed, this harms black people themselves, who are held to a lower standard than others (the bigotry of low expectations) and internalise a sense of victimhood.
He's no Candace Owens or Lauren Chen. McWhorter is a leftist, a Democrat, and - as he notes wryly, most importantly for many - black. He knows he will be, and has been, called a 'race traitor' who's the 'puppet of white supremacists' for his stance. He also deftly points out the racism inherent to the assumption that black people must all think a certain way, otherwise they're being used by white people without realising it.
That actually reminds me of when I read Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education, which is a wonderful YA novel featuring a half-Indian protagonist written by a white author. As soon as it came out, it was torn into for being 'racist' since El didn't 'act Indian' - a charge which I categorically reject. I wrote a defence of it, using my own background as someone from the Indian subcontinent, and was overwhelmed by the positive response I received from people who read my article. McWhorter hits the nail on the head when he notes that nowadays, even good-faith acts from white people can lead to accusations of racism, on often very shaky grounds.
This gets four stars from me, and not five, only because I found a couple of the chapters repetitive at times. McWhorter goes to great pains to demonstrate the similarities between dogmatic attitudes to racism and actual religion - a comparison I'm not offended by, although I'm religious myself. He writes with humour and energy, knowing perfectly well that many people won't like what he has to say.
Recently, I saw on Twitter that Coleman Hughes - a young black podcaster - was decrying how 'f*cking racist' it would be for Harvard not to subject black students to the same admissions test standards as whites or Asians. He's absolutely correct. This is called the 'bigotry of soft expectations': patronisation masquerading as progressiveness.
I've seen this happen in the UK, where people have urged Oxbridge to drop their grade requirements for minority students in the name of diversity. This isn't the right solution; I say this as a Bangladeshi girl, someone from an ethnic group which is one of the lowest paid/employed in the UK. This policy would only result in those students feeling unprepared to deal with their actual degree workloads, which have been designed for applicants who met the requirements. Or worse, like affirmative action, they would develop imposter syndrome, in conjunction with facing possible resentment from white peers. I applied to Cambridge alongside a white girl from my school, both of us competing for one of six spaces alongside roughly 50 applicants. I would never want to think I was accepted not because of my quality, but because of my colour, and that she was rejected for the same.
I would urge everyone to maintain an open mind, and read this book. It's not long - only about 50k words - and McWhorter of course makes his points better than I can convey. McWhorter's foundational premise is that in recent years, America has moved towards an almost evangelical view on racism, where people are hounded out of their jobs for not having the right 'thoughts' in a racial re-enactment of the Salem witch trials. He points out that contemporary America is almost unprecedently opposed to racism, both legally and culturally. Yet, he argues, by preserving a vision of America where all black people are consistently oppressed, this harms black people themselves, who are held to a lower standard than others (the bigotry of low expectations) and internalise a sense of victimhood.
He's no Candace Owens or Lauren Chen. McWhorter is a leftist, a Democrat, and - as he notes wryly, most importantly for many - black. He knows he will be, and has been, called a 'race traitor' who's the 'puppet of white supremacists' for his stance. He also deftly points out the racism inherent to the assumption that black people must all think a certain way, otherwise they're being used by white people without realising it.
That actually reminds me of when I read Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education, which is a wonderful YA novel featuring a half-Indian protagonist written by a white author. As soon as it came out, it was torn into for being 'racist' since El didn't 'act Indian' - a charge which I categorically reject. I wrote a defence of it, using my own background as someone from the Indian subcontinent, and was overwhelmed by the positive response I received from people who read my article. McWhorter hits the nail on the head when he notes that nowadays, even good-faith acts from white people can lead to accusations of racism, on often very shaky grounds.
This gets four stars from me, and not five, only because I found a couple of the chapters repetitive at times. McWhorter goes to great pains to demonstrate the similarities between dogmatic attitudes to racism and actual religion - a comparison I'm not offended by, although I'm religious myself. He writes with humour and energy, knowing perfectly well that many people won't like what he has to say.
June 3, 2022
I didn't particularly want to read Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. (Then why did I read it, you ask? It was chosen by my book club. Plus, an uncomfortable book is simultaneously a challenge to engage.) I've read three other books by John McWhorter, all within his area of expertise: language. When talking about the impact of the spoken and written word, McWhorter is witty, urbane, and great at providing illustrative examples from life and history. In Woke Racism, he is on different mission, taking a stand against what he sees as an overweening, infantilizing and religious tone in conversations around race: a tone that he says has shut out dissent, flattened nuance, attacked our social fabric, and infected our institutions. He feels an imperative to take up this fight as a Black man, assuming he'll be taken more seriously than a white person would be saying the same things, but understanding many will dismiss him as a traitor to his race. He counters that he sees himself "as serving my race by writing [this book]".
What did I want to do even less than read this book? Review it. Goodreads says 2 stars means "it was ok" and 3 signifies "I liked it". 2.5 is not an option, so here we are at "it was okay". I'll concede one of McWhorter's points (he has them) by admitting a reluctance to even discuss criticism of the cultural conversation around race as a white man. I consider myself fully behind the project of representation and equity, but I've had the experience of others assuming the worst of me and working overtime to find it, or not allowing me the conversational grace to improve when needed. Typically, I prefer to play a listening role in these conversations. I have a lot to learn, and plenty of privilege (much of which I'm not aware of, because that's how privilege works) behind my assumptions. When someone tells me they're hurting, I want to hear them out. Here McWhorter would interject that I've been manipulated into accepting a religious creed: the unpurgeable original sin of white privilege! Its mere invocation renders my contributions null and void, and cows me into silence. Oh no! Poor me!
This is where I start to question the utility of this book. Who exactly is Woke Racism for, and what positive change does it hope to effect? McWhorter says it's for two groups: one being "the New York Times-reading, National Public Radio-listening people who have innocently fallen under the impression that pious, unempirical virtue signaling about race is a form of moral enlightenment and political activism..." (he goes on) and the other being "black people who have innocently fallen under the misimpression that for us only, cries of weakness constitute a kind of strength..." (he goes on more). I hate to put too much emphasis on a book's title, knowing an author often gets overruled in its selection, but I suspect that "Woke Racism" sells copies primarily to a third constituent: white people who are tired of being told they need to listen and make accommodations, and are looking for a smart Black person to make their case for them.
The opposition, in McWhorter's view - the "woke mob" - is not just misguided in its good intentions. It is religious. He refers to this cultural vanguard throughout the book as "the Elect": a phrase connoting members' fervor, smugness and chosen-ness. Here's where I take great exception. McWhorter doesn't say that wokeness is like a religion. It is a religion. He doubles down on this claim, drawing parallels to other non-spiritual groups he deems religious. The Elect "Scripture" is White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, or anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Elect "superstition" consists of arguments McWhorter finds self-contradictory. The Elect "original sin" is white privilege. This wanders into an area of my own expertise, and I'm not buying it. Calling his opposition a religion is incorrect, reduces the precision of the term, is unhelpful as a framing device, and distracts from some of the genuinely useful correctives he has to offer.
McWhorter details what he sees as contradictory demands placed upon potential Elect allies, putting them in damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't binds. Some of these observations ring truer than others, but I think one could make a similar chart for the positions of the "other side" just as easily. Life is complicated. Human interactions are messy, with balances to be struck. Individuals will draw individual conclusions, which may vary from situation to situation. I'll reproduce the chart here (with minor edits for length):
You may notice the focus on Black/white relations. There are a smattering of examples involving other racial groups, and only one brief acknowledgement that these same divisions transcend into issues of gender, sexuality, [actual] religion, and other facets of identity. Tying the discussion so narrowly to race seems to weaken some of its broader points when you realize the conflict would still exist if race weren't a factor.
But really... what's the harm? McWhorter's prime exhibits are people who have lost their jobs and reputation at the hands of the Elect. Many of us are familiar with Bret Weinstein's expulsion from Evergreen State for disagreeing with the underlying messaging of a "safe space" day in which white people were told to stay home. In another example, a professor loses his job for discussing a common Mandarin phrase pronounced "nay-guh". There's the museum curator who endeavors to collect more art from diverse artists, but doesn't want to rule out white artists in order to avoid "reverse discrimination": phrasing that costs him his job. Indeed, these are situations (based on McWhorter's telling) in which cooler heads did not prevail. The assumption of ill-will can obscure good intent, and vindictiveness can win over a spirit of education, or rehabilitation. The "problematic" label can quickly escalate to "irredeemable". An "abundance of caution" can shut down meaningful conversation. The “racist” label can be wrongly applied, and used as a cudgel. If there is a useful corrective in this book, it is the call to examine these run-away conflicts and seek ways to lower the temperature and find common ground when emotions get high. Online culture has exacerbated this problem, with participants declaring sides and seeking to "own" the other: selectively corraling evidence, shifting goalposts, eliding nuance, and never conceding on any point. I've seen this both online and in-person, and it's particularly frustrating to see coming from people you otherwise agree with. And yet, I can't help but think that even the worst consequences of "woke mobs" are a far cry from the historical domination, oppression, lynchings and police violence they are trying to move us away from. In comparison, this whinging about a handful of lost jobs and conversational intolerance feels small-minded. Optics are simply part of the conversation now, and one must constantly work to re-assert context and goals.
If the "Elect" can be accused of anything, perhaps it's an inability to settle for the natural pace of change. They want a better world, and they want it now. For those who can’t keep pace - be it from upbringing, priorities, lack of personal stakes, or even lack of acuity - so much the worse for them. McWhorter is happy to lionize civil rights leaders of the 60s, but decries the current generation as petty and lacking perspective. In a passage that made me chuckle, he rattles off a long list of improvements and concessions that have been made (offensive episodes of 30 Rock pulled, Splash Mountain retooled to highlight The Princess and the Frog, "Black Lives Matter" painted on the street in front of Trump Tower, and Kamala Harris chosen as Biden's VP), while bemoaning the Elect's inability to acknowledge those victories. It made me chuckle, because McWhorter seemed to miss the key to their success hidden in his gripe: one can't help but wonder if the Elect's inability to admit progress is precisely what drives change at an exponential pace.
To demonstrate that he's not against progress, McWhorter offers his planks for "saving Black America for real": ending the war on drugs, teaching reading properly, and reducing the stigma against people who don't attend college. These are all important aims, and well argued. No reason they can't work alongside other efforts to level the playing field. While the book's title and tone may be overblown, McWhorter is no traitor to his race. He's an intellectual with a particular set of priorities, and some interesting points to make. I think we need to make space for them. As grudgingly as I read the book, and as much as I struggled with it, the exercise was an opportunity to consider my priorities and the best way to be an ally without sacrificing my own perspective. Before reading this book, I might recommend listening to this interview with Chris Hayes, in which the MSNBC host does a fantastic job of pushing back on some of McWhorter's points (prior to the book's release) in a spirited and respectful conversation.
What did I want to do even less than read this book? Review it. Goodreads says 2 stars means "it was ok" and 3 signifies "I liked it". 2.5 is not an option, so here we are at "it was okay". I'll concede one of McWhorter's points (he has them) by admitting a reluctance to even discuss criticism of the cultural conversation around race as a white man. I consider myself fully behind the project of representation and equity, but I've had the experience of others assuming the worst of me and working overtime to find it, or not allowing me the conversational grace to improve when needed. Typically, I prefer to play a listening role in these conversations. I have a lot to learn, and plenty of privilege (much of which I'm not aware of, because that's how privilege works) behind my assumptions. When someone tells me they're hurting, I want to hear them out. Here McWhorter would interject that I've been manipulated into accepting a religious creed: the unpurgeable original sin of white privilege! Its mere invocation renders my contributions null and void, and cows me into silence. Oh no! Poor me!
This is where I start to question the utility of this book. Who exactly is Woke Racism for, and what positive change does it hope to effect? McWhorter says it's for two groups: one being "the New York Times-reading, National Public Radio-listening people who have innocently fallen under the impression that pious, unempirical virtue signaling about race is a form of moral enlightenment and political activism..." (he goes on) and the other being "black people who have innocently fallen under the misimpression that for us only, cries of weakness constitute a kind of strength..." (he goes on more). I hate to put too much emphasis on a book's title, knowing an author often gets overruled in its selection, but I suspect that "Woke Racism" sells copies primarily to a third constituent: white people who are tired of being told they need to listen and make accommodations, and are looking for a smart Black person to make their case for them.
The opposition, in McWhorter's view - the "woke mob" - is not just misguided in its good intentions. It is religious. He refers to this cultural vanguard throughout the book as "the Elect": a phrase connoting members' fervor, smugness and chosen-ness. Here's where I take great exception. McWhorter doesn't say that wokeness is like a religion. It is a religion. He doubles down on this claim, drawing parallels to other non-spiritual groups he deems religious. The Elect "Scripture" is White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, or anything by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Elect "superstition" consists of arguments McWhorter finds self-contradictory. The Elect "original sin" is white privilege. This wanders into an area of my own expertise, and I'm not buying it. Calling his opposition a religion is incorrect, reduces the precision of the term, is unhelpful as a framing device, and distracts from some of the genuinely useful correctives he has to offer.
McWhorter details what he sees as contradictory demands placed upon potential Elect allies, putting them in damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't binds. Some of these observations ring truer than others, but I think one could make a similar chart for the positions of the "other side" just as easily. Life is complicated. Human interactions are messy, with balances to be struck. Individuals will draw individual conclusions, which may vary from situation to situation. I'll reproduce the chart here (with minor edits for length):
1A. When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt. 1B. Don't put black people in a position where you expect forgiveness. They have dealt with too much to be expected to.
2A. Don't assume black people like hip-hop, are good dancers, etc. Black people are not a monolith. "Black culture" is code for "pathological, primitive ghetto people." 2B. Don't expect black people to assimilate to "white" social norms, because black people have a culture of their own.
3A. Silence about racism is violence. 3B. Elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.
4A. You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people. 4B. You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you're a racist.
5A. Show interest in multiculturalism. 5B. Do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it.
6A. Support black people in creating their own spaces and stay out of them. 6B. Seek to have black friends. If you don't have any, you're a racist. And if you claim any, they'd better be good friends - albeit occupying their private spaces that you aren't allowed in.
7A. When whites move away from black neighborhoods, it's white flight. 7B. When whites move into black neighborhoods, it's gentrification.
8A. If you're white and date only white people, you're a racist. 8B. If you're white and date a black person, you are, if only deep down, exotifying an "other".
9A. Black people cannot be held accountable for everything every black person does. 9B. All whites must acknowledge their personal complicitness in the perfidy of "whiteness" throughout history.
10A. Black students must be admitted to schools via adjusted grad and test-score standards to ensure a representative number of them and foster a diversity of views in classrooms. 10B. It is racist to assume a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences, and racist to expect them to represent the "diverse" view in classroom discussions.
You may notice the focus on Black/white relations. There are a smattering of examples involving other racial groups, and only one brief acknowledgement that these same divisions transcend into issues of gender, sexuality, [actual] religion, and other facets of identity. Tying the discussion so narrowly to race seems to weaken some of its broader points when you realize the conflict would still exist if race weren't a factor.
But really... what's the harm? McWhorter's prime exhibits are people who have lost their jobs and reputation at the hands of the Elect. Many of us are familiar with Bret Weinstein's expulsion from Evergreen State for disagreeing with the underlying messaging of a "safe space" day in which white people were told to stay home. In another example, a professor loses his job for discussing a common Mandarin phrase pronounced "nay-guh". There's the museum curator who endeavors to collect more art from diverse artists, but doesn't want to rule out white artists in order to avoid "reverse discrimination": phrasing that costs him his job. Indeed, these are situations (based on McWhorter's telling) in which cooler heads did not prevail. The assumption of ill-will can obscure good intent, and vindictiveness can win over a spirit of education, or rehabilitation. The "problematic" label can quickly escalate to "irredeemable". An "abundance of caution" can shut down meaningful conversation. The “racist” label can be wrongly applied, and used as a cudgel. If there is a useful corrective in this book, it is the call to examine these run-away conflicts and seek ways to lower the temperature and find common ground when emotions get high. Online culture has exacerbated this problem, with participants declaring sides and seeking to "own" the other: selectively corraling evidence, shifting goalposts, eliding nuance, and never conceding on any point. I've seen this both online and in-person, and it's particularly frustrating to see coming from people you otherwise agree with. And yet, I can't help but think that even the worst consequences of "woke mobs" are a far cry from the historical domination, oppression, lynchings and police violence they are trying to move us away from. In comparison, this whinging about a handful of lost jobs and conversational intolerance feels small-minded. Optics are simply part of the conversation now, and one must constantly work to re-assert context and goals.
If the "Elect" can be accused of anything, perhaps it's an inability to settle for the natural pace of change. They want a better world, and they want it now. For those who can’t keep pace - be it from upbringing, priorities, lack of personal stakes, or even lack of acuity - so much the worse for them. McWhorter is happy to lionize civil rights leaders of the 60s, but decries the current generation as petty and lacking perspective. In a passage that made me chuckle, he rattles off a long list of improvements and concessions that have been made (offensive episodes of 30 Rock pulled, Splash Mountain retooled to highlight The Princess and the Frog, "Black Lives Matter" painted on the street in front of Trump Tower, and Kamala Harris chosen as Biden's VP), while bemoaning the Elect's inability to acknowledge those victories. It made me chuckle, because McWhorter seemed to miss the key to their success hidden in his gripe: one can't help but wonder if the Elect's inability to admit progress is precisely what drives change at an exponential pace.
To demonstrate that he's not against progress, McWhorter offers his planks for "saving Black America for real": ending the war on drugs, teaching reading properly, and reducing the stigma against people who don't attend college. These are all important aims, and well argued. No reason they can't work alongside other efforts to level the playing field. While the book's title and tone may be overblown, McWhorter is no traitor to his race. He's an intellectual with a particular set of priorities, and some interesting points to make. I think we need to make space for them. As grudgingly as I read the book, and as much as I struggled with it, the exercise was an opportunity to consider my priorities and the best way to be an ally without sacrificing my own perspective. Before reading this book, I might recommend listening to this interview with Chris Hayes, in which the MSNBC host does a fantastic job of pushing back on some of McWhorter's points (prior to the book's release) in a spirited and respectful conversation.
November 18, 2021
McWhorter's book is committed to the concept of racial justice while persuasively arguing that the current quasi-religion of Third Wave Antiracism (a la Coates, DiAngelo, and Kendi) is not only counterproductive to that project, but harmful to black Americans. It is a book written by a liberal for liberals, to help them parse the tenets of this religious ideology and to offer alternative solutions based on reason and fact.
I found this book to be wonderfully refreshing and a vital alternative to the toxic perspective that is taking root in many of our academic, governmental, and professional institutions. McWhorter certainly doesn't claim that racism or racial inequities don't exist, but he powerfully rebuts the notion of "systemic racism" and the damaging insistence that all Black people are victims of an all-pervasive oppression.
As good a job as he does eviscerating Third Wave Antiracism for its flaws, he doesn't do much to suggest what should take its place. He gives some good policy suggestions but not a rational foundation for how to think or talk about race and social justice. Perhaps that's for other thinkers to tackle; McWhorter certainly makes the case for its necessity.
This book is for anyone who cares about social justice but intuits that modern responses are counterproductive, harmful to the people they claim to advocate for, and even responsible for the rise of a conservative backlash that has sent more than a few genuinely racist "culture war" Republicans to Congress. This book certainly isn't the end of the conversation we need to have, but it's a fantastic beginning.
I found this book to be wonderfully refreshing and a vital alternative to the toxic perspective that is taking root in many of our academic, governmental, and professional institutions. McWhorter certainly doesn't claim that racism or racial inequities don't exist, but he powerfully rebuts the notion of "systemic racism" and the damaging insistence that all Black people are victims of an all-pervasive oppression.
As good a job as he does eviscerating Third Wave Antiracism for its flaws, he doesn't do much to suggest what should take its place. He gives some good policy suggestions but not a rational foundation for how to think or talk about race and social justice. Perhaps that's for other thinkers to tackle; McWhorter certainly makes the case for its necessity.
This book is for anyone who cares about social justice but intuits that modern responses are counterproductive, harmful to the people they claim to advocate for, and even responsible for the rise of a conservative backlash that has sent more than a few genuinely racist "culture war" Republicans to Congress. This book certainly isn't the end of the conversation we need to have, but it's a fantastic beginning.
October 28, 2021
There will be a certain mind that will dismiss this book as a right wing cash grab. That would be unfair, wrong, and deeply counterproductive. McWhorter is probably as liberal a person as you are likely to find among our public intellectuals. He is not a performative contrarian. He is making serious arguments against the case (coming largely from the far , hard left) make about race and disparities in US life early decades of the 21st century. His case is reasonable and well made. It’s worth examining. You may not agree with all or any of it. That is okay too.
November 18, 2021
The terrible rating is not because I think he's completely wrong - to be fair to him, he has two chapters in the middle on policy that are somewhat interesting, even if deeply unambitious and not novel (he thinks the left should support a platform consisting of only ending the war on drugs by legalizing all drugs, promote reading through phonics, and provide vocational training).
The real problem with centrist types like McWhorter is their stunning inability to reflect honestly about themselves. He has the audacity to claim that woke culture "discourages genuine curiosity," while writing a book where he assumes that religion is just dumb superstition and that all his enemies are literal inquisitors. While he claims that he does think racist paterns endure in society, by not charitably reading any of his opponents as engaged in serious thinking about how to solve those problems, he doesn't do justice how hard the problems are. Note that his own favoured policy of leglizing all drugs (even with some regulation) is just as infeasible as reparations, while promoting reading and vocational training will hardly alter the racial wealth gap.
One question then arises: Given how poorly his own proposal fares, why does he so confidently believe himself to be reasonable and right? Here is one answer. He writes:
While this is meant to be criticism of his opponents, what is striking is that it also seems to be an apt description of McWhorter's worldview. He seems to think that activists in earlier decades were pretty good in bringing about racial progress, that the current millieu is overrun by woke torquemadas, but that a better future is possible if we follow his directions. He clearly believes himself enlightened enough to dispense advice, even write books. He shows no interest in engaging with opponents intellectually, choosing instead to dismiss them in hyperbolic terms. In brief, he fits his own description of a religious fanatic, and his screed against the "Elect" is best seen as projection.
The real problem with centrist types like McWhorter is their stunning inability to reflect honestly about themselves. He has the audacity to claim that woke culture "discourages genuine curiosity," while writing a book where he assumes that religion is just dumb superstition and that all his enemies are literal inquisitors. While he claims that he does think racist paterns endure in society, by not charitably reading any of his opponents as engaged in serious thinking about how to solve those problems, he doesn't do justice how hard the problems are. Note that his own favoured policy of leglizing all drugs (even with some regulation) is just as infeasible as reparations, while promoting reading and vocational training will hardly alter the racial wealth gap.
One question then arises: Given how poorly his own proposal fares, why does he so confidently believe himself to be reasonable and right? Here is one answer. He writes:
in 1951, eric hoffer’s the true believer noted that movements such as fascism, communism, and nineteenth-century segregationists have attracted and retained their followers by appealing to an idealized past, a fantastical future, and an indelibly polluted present. Under the elect, black people’s noble past is africa; the glorious future is about those terms that we will come to; while the present, if the religion is to make any kind of sense, must always be a cesspool.
While this is meant to be criticism of his opponents, what is striking is that it also seems to be an apt description of McWhorter's worldview. He seems to think that activists in earlier decades were pretty good in bringing about racial progress, that the current millieu is overrun by woke torquemadas, but that a better future is possible if we follow his directions. He clearly believes himself enlightened enough to dispense advice, even write books. He shows no interest in engaging with opponents intellectually, choosing instead to dismiss them in hyperbolic terms. In brief, he fits his own description of a religious fanatic, and his screed against the "Elect" is best seen as projection.
October 7, 2023
I have read several of the books McWhorter is critiquing, and I think he is confused about which books he is referring to. For example, in How to Be an Antiracist, as I recall, Kendi specifically questions his own prior beliefs and concludes that everything is not all about race; e.g. a lot is about class. So McWhorter undermines his credibility by claiming vaguely that Kendi blames everything on race. This sort of error especially matters here because McWhorter makes a big deal about being on the side of Enlightenment, precision, academic ethics, objectivity and all that jazz.
Therefore, when he criticizes other writers, I expect him to have--at a bare minimum--specific references documenting exactly what they said and precisely where they said it. But we don't get that. Instead, there's a skeletal "Notes" section that doesn't tell me where DiAngelo decries "solutionism" or where Kendi says everything is about race.
Lots of groups have dogmas unsupported by evidence; I don't think that makes them all puritanical "religions." Thus the insistent gimmick throughout the book to take it literally that anti-racism is a sect of intolerance is a bit much. Also, the general idea that "you can't" have a rational discussion with the "woke mob" seems close to the circular reasoning of "white fragility," i.e. anyone who disagrees with white fragility is proving their fragility. It cuts both ways. Also, if you're going to accuse others of lacking evidence, then be sure to provide clear evidence for what you are saying. Again, it cuts both ways.
McWhorter also rants against performative "virtue signaling" instead of useful action. Wonderful! We should, for example, be teaching kids to read. A more rational, rigorous, objective argument would have served such valid points much better. In particular, evidence-based success stories about implementing effective measures to help people would have been useful.
Addendum:
I briefly revisited Kendi's book, specifically Chapter 12. The general theme of the chapter is "It is impossible to understand racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism." He includes an MLK quote: "It means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are all interrelated." He goes on to discuss how "... economic inequities within the races have broadened" and how solving the problems of poor Black people, cannot be done by focusing on race alone without also considering economic exploitation more broadly, including the forces that undermine the middle class in general. So Kendi is explicitly explaining how everything is not about race.
I am giving a reference here regarding a point of fact. It's not that hard. If people don't believe my point about what Kendi wrote, they can check it out for themselves and try to prove that I am lying or else verify that I got it right. Everything isn't just opinion.
Therefore, when he criticizes other writers, I expect him to have--at a bare minimum--specific references documenting exactly what they said and precisely where they said it. But we don't get that. Instead, there's a skeletal "Notes" section that doesn't tell me where DiAngelo decries "solutionism" or where Kendi says everything is about race.
Lots of groups have dogmas unsupported by evidence; I don't think that makes them all puritanical "religions." Thus the insistent gimmick throughout the book to take it literally that anti-racism is a sect of intolerance is a bit much. Also, the general idea that "you can't" have a rational discussion with the "woke mob" seems close to the circular reasoning of "white fragility," i.e. anyone who disagrees with white fragility is proving their fragility. It cuts both ways. Also, if you're going to accuse others of lacking evidence, then be sure to provide clear evidence for what you are saying. Again, it cuts both ways.
McWhorter also rants against performative "virtue signaling" instead of useful action. Wonderful! We should, for example, be teaching kids to read. A more rational, rigorous, objective argument would have served such valid points much better. In particular, evidence-based success stories about implementing effective measures to help people would have been useful.
Addendum:
I briefly revisited Kendi's book, specifically Chapter 12. The general theme of the chapter is "It is impossible to understand racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism." He includes an MLK quote: "It means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are all interrelated." He goes on to discuss how "... economic inequities within the races have broadened" and how solving the problems of poor Black people, cannot be done by focusing on race alone without also considering economic exploitation more broadly, including the forces that undermine the middle class in general. So Kendi is explicitly explaining how everything is not about race.
I am giving a reference here regarding a point of fact. It's not that hard. If people don't believe my point about what Kendi wrote, they can check it out for themselves and try to prove that I am lying or else verify that I got it right. Everything isn't just opinion.
October 27, 2021
Con:
In one or two places, McWhorter strawmans the tenets of antiracism. (He presents slightly less sturdy versions of its ideas, or exaggerates them a bit so that they seem more irrational, easier to take down.)
*edit: this is because he is not really trying to rebut them, but to prove that they fit into the mold of a religion.*
Pros:
This book is short, simple, clear, well-argued and well written. It’s clear that McWhorter is committed to racial justice, but believes that the current vogue of antiracism is regressive and anti-intellectual. He lays out the case that it is a religion and why that’s a bad thing. Spoiler: it’s like Christianity without the forgiveness part.
It’s funny, sobering, and inspiring, and thought-provoking.
In one or two places, McWhorter strawmans the tenets of antiracism. (He presents slightly less sturdy versions of its ideas, or exaggerates them a bit so that they seem more irrational, easier to take down.)
*edit: this is because he is not really trying to rebut them, but to prove that they fit into the mold of a religion.*
Pros:
This book is short, simple, clear, well-argued and well written. It’s clear that McWhorter is committed to racial justice, but believes that the current vogue of antiracism is regressive and anti-intellectual. He lays out the case that it is a religion and why that’s a bad thing. Spoiler: it’s like Christianity without the forgiveness part.
It’s funny, sobering, and inspiring, and thought-provoking.
August 29, 2021
A different roadmap to justice
In Woke Racism, black Columbia University professor John McWhorter describes the current-day social-justice antiracist movement, which he calls Third Wave Antiracism, as one that actually “harms black people in the name of its guiding impulses.”He says its followers see themselves as “chosen” “bearers of wisdom” and calls them the Elect , and he considers their beliefs equivalent to a religion. An interesting premise.
I have enjoyed several of McWhorter’s books on language, so I expected Woke Racism to be highly articulate and well written. My expectations were fulfilled, resulting in a LOT of highlighted passages in my kindle version. It was also impassioned, at times almost sounding like a sermon itself, which is perhaps appropriate for a book about a religion. He supports his contentions with a number of examples, some of them rather shocking, and says the Elect’s “prosecution of sinners contrasts with Jesus’s embrace of them”.
McWhorter lucidly explains what he feels is wrong with Electism, but he himself admits that he is unlikely to win any converts, because religious conversion is not something that normally succeeds through rational argument but through faith.
Ultimately he does not offer a solution that can dismantle racist structures but instead suggests three practical specific planks to save black Americans “for real” by improving their everyday lives. He advocates ending the war of drugs, teaching reading more effectively through phonics, and getting past the idea that everyone must go to college by providing good vocational training. They could be a good start, even if it does not cure the racism that the Elect believe is in the hearts of all white Americans.
In Woke Racism, black Columbia University professor John McWhorter describes the current-day social-justice antiracist movement, which he calls Third Wave Antiracism, as one that actually “harms black people in the name of its guiding impulses.”He says its followers see themselves as “chosen” “bearers of wisdom” and calls them the Elect , and he considers their beliefs equivalent to a religion. An interesting premise.
I have enjoyed several of McWhorter’s books on language, so I expected Woke Racism to be highly articulate and well written. My expectations were fulfilled, resulting in a LOT of highlighted passages in my kindle version. It was also impassioned, at times almost sounding like a sermon itself, which is perhaps appropriate for a book about a religion. He supports his contentions with a number of examples, some of them rather shocking, and says the Elect’s “prosecution of sinners contrasts with Jesus’s embrace of them”.
McWhorter lucidly explains what he feels is wrong with Electism, but he himself admits that he is unlikely to win any converts, because religious conversion is not something that normally succeeds through rational argument but through faith.
Ultimately he does not offer a solution that can dismantle racist structures but instead suggests three practical specific planks to save black Americans “for real” by improving their everyday lives. He advocates ending the war of drugs, teaching reading more effectively through phonics, and getting past the idea that everyone must go to college by providing good vocational training. They could be a good start, even if it does not cure the racism that the Elect believe is in the hearts of all white Americans.
November 10, 2021
The most coherent, most sorely-needed opposition to the religious race-essentialism gripping the Western -- not just American -- political left. I tried to be generous whilst reading White Fragility and How to be an Antiracist, but my heart was not really in it. It felt like grasping at every brief display of reason in order to excuse the dogmatism, doublethink, and neo-racist generalisation. It felt like a relentless, paternalistic shaming, with the goal to repudiate what we learned as children: that we should strive for race not to matter.
Woke Racism is just the opposite. If you must read Kendi or DiAngelo, or the like, then just read this as well -- it can't hurt, and it will probably satisfy the itch for sense-making that wokeness cannot scratch. As McWhorter describes, though, those who feel no such itch are beyond reaching:
Sound familiar? "Elect" refers to the tendency of the ultra-woke to act as if they have been chosen to spread a higher truth. McWhorter outlines all of the bizarre contradictions and failures of rationality in the Elect mindset, and says what a cowed majority quietly agrees with:
His answer is simple, and heartening, if difficult to pursue. Ignore the posturing, ignore the shaming, say no to the mob, and advocate for meaningful change that will actually help people of colour who are suffering; not help privileged white people feel good about 'doing the work' to recognise their 'complicity' in the 'systems'. This means talking about drugs and education, and it means politely telling the Elect to sit down and wait for their turn when they accuse you of 'blaming the victim', and try to tar you as a moral pervert.
The bravery and strength of mind required to take this stand is exemplified by John McWhorter himself (emphasis in original):
Yes, let's.
Woke Racism is just the opposite. If you must read Kendi or DiAngelo, or the like, then just read this as well -- it can't hurt, and it will probably satisfy the itch for sense-making that wokeness cannot scratch. As McWhorter describes, though, those who feel no such itch are beyond reaching:
A person fully committed to Elect ideology is not amenable to constructive discussion. They will deny the charge, but what they mean by "discussion" is that we will learn their wisdom...they seek not conversation but conversion... Attempts to break bread with them seem to do little but elicit their disgust with you.
Sound familiar? "Elect" refers to the tendency of the ultra-woke to act as if they have been chosen to spread a higher truth. McWhorter outlines all of the bizarre contradictions and failures of rationality in the Elect mindset, and says what a cowed majority quietly agrees with:
You are in Russia under Stalin. You no more question the KenDiAngelonian gospel than you question Romans or Corinthians. The Elect are not about diverseness of thought. Eliminating it, on race issues, is their reason for being.
His answer is simple, and heartening, if difficult to pursue. Ignore the posturing, ignore the shaming, say no to the mob, and advocate for meaningful change that will actually help people of colour who are suffering; not help privileged white people feel good about 'doing the work' to recognise their 'complicity' in the 'systems'. This means talking about drugs and education, and it means politely telling the Elect to sit down and wait for their turn when they accuse you of 'blaming the victim', and try to tar you as a moral pervert.
The bravery and strength of mind required to take this stand is exemplified by John McWhorter himself (emphasis in original):
I know quite well that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when they are written by a black person, and I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book.
A version of this book written by a white writer would be blithely dismissed as racist. I will be dismissed instead as self-hating by a certain crowd. But frankly, they won't really mean it, and anyone who gets through the book will see that whatever traits I harbor, hating myself or being ashamed of being black is not one of them. And we shall move on.
Yes, let's.
Read
November 7, 2021As the title suggests this is a polemic against what might be called Third Wave Antiracism, coming from a conservative African-American writer. McWhorter makes the case that this new movement that has crystallized over the past decade is a religion. As someone averse to religion he means this as a term of derision, but I'd argue that it is just descriptive. The religion in question in fact is not a mystery, but is identifiably a secularized form of Protestant Christianity that is unique to the United States. The details of how this progressive religious movement emerged over a century were explained masterfully in Joseph Bottum's book, An Anxious Age, to which McWhorter makes brief reference.
For his own part, McWhorter argues that Third Wave Antiracism is condescending to African-Americans and harmful to them in practice. In place of what he views as self-flagellating progressive rituals and word games, he calls for three practical policy changes that would help African-Americans: ending the drug war, changing the manner in which reading is taught to emphasize phonetics, and funding more high-quality vocational schooling for working-class people trying to make a living. These simple and practical recommendations seem to be intended as a retort to the vaguely apocalyptic tenor of some progressive activism, a characteristic that also has its roots in Christianity.
A linguist by profession, McWhorter is a gifted writer. He is also clearly a genius and his sense of outrage of having his entire race, in his view, insulted and condescended towards is palpable. That said I don't think there is much new that I learnt from this book. As a polemic it is well and good, but there is little beyond that. The lack of novelty is ameliorated by McWhorter's very funny (“I make no apologies for not being a character from The Wire”) and eloquent writing style. Regarding his underlying political point, I would like to read some rebuttals that engage with his position.
For his own part, McWhorter argues that Third Wave Antiracism is condescending to African-Americans and harmful to them in practice. In place of what he views as self-flagellating progressive rituals and word games, he calls for three practical policy changes that would help African-Americans: ending the drug war, changing the manner in which reading is taught to emphasize phonetics, and funding more high-quality vocational schooling for working-class people trying to make a living. These simple and practical recommendations seem to be intended as a retort to the vaguely apocalyptic tenor of some progressive activism, a characteristic that also has its roots in Christianity.
A linguist by profession, McWhorter is a gifted writer. He is also clearly a genius and his sense of outrage of having his entire race, in his view, insulted and condescended towards is palpable. That said I don't think there is much new that I learnt from this book. As a polemic it is well and good, but there is little beyond that. The lack of novelty is ameliorated by McWhorter's very funny (“I make no apologies for not being a character from The Wire”) and eloquent writing style. Regarding his underlying political point, I would like to read some rebuttals that engage with his position.
January 18, 2022
I am arguing against a particular strain of the left that has come to exert a grievous amount of influence over American institutions, to the point that we are beginning to accept as normal the kinds of language, policies, and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction.
John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics, American studies and music history at Columbia University. This is a serious subject and he is passionate about it. His ideas are worth consideration whether you agree with him or not.
John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics, American studies and music history at Columbia University. This is a serious subject and he is passionate about it. His ideas are worth consideration whether you agree with him or not.
November 3, 2021
Great read with delicious, McWhorter-esque prose that inspires confidence to recapture logic and reason as legitimate tools to evaluate anti-racism’s agenda and methods. He shines a bright light on the elephant in the room to ask (and answer) the uncomfortable questions that arise when “Elect” ideology is professed in the name of social progress. (“Elect” is his word for the class of people who subscribe to critical social justice scholarship and activism, aka “the woke mob,” but whom he sees as just normal people trying to do good in the world.)
I wish John had spoken to: standpoint epistemology and specifically the sociological perspective versus the anthropological perspective; “demanding accountability” as the reductionist response to pointing out the harm of cancel culture; the meaning-making crisis and how our postmodern thirst for meaning tilled the fields in which the seeds of anti-racism’s religiosity could sprout.
John does not claim that racism isn’t real and doesn’t exist. Rather, he believes the anti-racist agenda obfuscates the true barriers to achievement for low-income people of color. In particular, John calls for three keystone strategies to help reduce disparities in racial outcomes:
1) End the war on drugs.
2) Pursue phonics-based curriculum to teach reading, particularly to lower-income students (of color).
3) Make vocational training as accessible as possible while eroding the perception of the necessity of a four-year degree.
Writing this small but positive review and making it a public comment with my name attached is nerve-racking for me. But bravery despite the potential to be cancelled is what John hopes of his readers.
I wish John had spoken to: standpoint epistemology and specifically the sociological perspective versus the anthropological perspective; “demanding accountability” as the reductionist response to pointing out the harm of cancel culture; the meaning-making crisis and how our postmodern thirst for meaning tilled the fields in which the seeds of anti-racism’s religiosity could sprout.
John does not claim that racism isn’t real and doesn’t exist. Rather, he believes the anti-racist agenda obfuscates the true barriers to achievement for low-income people of color. In particular, John calls for three keystone strategies to help reduce disparities in racial outcomes:
1) End the war on drugs.
2) Pursue phonics-based curriculum to teach reading, particularly to lower-income students (of color).
3) Make vocational training as accessible as possible while eroding the perception of the necessity of a four-year degree.
Writing this small but positive review and making it a public comment with my name attached is nerve-racking for me. But bravery despite the potential to be cancelled is what John hopes of his readers.
October 28, 2021
You're either going to like this book, or hate it. If you hate it, you probably have a very strong (religious) belief system, according to McWhorter. I'd like to think that people who disagree with him, or think he's gone too far, would at least give the book 2-3 stars for being funny.
October 27, 2021
As someone who grew up Mormon — an evangelizing religion McWhorter points to by way of analogy — I would point out that Mormons can, in fact, be reasoned out of their views. He is quick to assume that religion forms a sort of philosophical miasma one can never quite be free of. I disagree.
Rebecca Solnit spoke in a Harper's (Harper's, a publication so urbane and left leaning I doubt I could have tried grokking it til age 30, now "tainted" in the circles he targets because of the Letter™️) column about the pleasures of speaking to the choir.
McWhorter is likely to count me squarely among his parishioners, despite being from a set and setting that is about 25 years behind the times.
I do wonder what he'd make of a pre-publication review to "go suck a dick." The frisson of nasty words, to steal a phrase, hits different when you think such contact to actually be taboo — as an ex-Mo like me probably does on a deeper level than one not so taught at a tender age.
It's a slim tome and there's little of surprise here but still an enjoyable time, and funnier than I had hoped for.
If you're not already a fan it might seem like inside baseball.
Rebecca Solnit spoke in a Harper's (Harper's, a publication so urbane and left leaning I doubt I could have tried grokking it til age 30, now "tainted" in the circles he targets because of the Letter™️) column about the pleasures of speaking to the choir.
McWhorter is likely to count me squarely among his parishioners, despite being from a set and setting that is about 25 years behind the times.
I do wonder what he'd make of a pre-publication review to "go suck a dick." The frisson of nasty words, to steal a phrase, hits different when you think such contact to actually be taboo — as an ex-Mo like me probably does on a deeper level than one not so taught at a tender age.
It's a slim tome and there's little of surprise here but still an enjoyable time, and funnier than I had hoped for.
If you're not already a fan it might seem like inside baseball.
November 26, 2021
Although, at the end of the book, there were a few things I could agree with, most of the book was simplistic and lacked nuance. Many of the topics are complicated and he boiled it down to one or two points which favored his side of the argument. At times, he seems to be professing his version of “religion” and blindly painting a wide stroke against all wokeness.
May 17, 2022
John McWhorter should not be controversial.
Any open-eyed observer will see the kind of rhetoric and initiatives put forth by the woke left these days and come to the same conclusions that McWhorter reaches in this book. Wokeism is a religion, and its central dogmas are based on racism. The fact that you can’t say this without being shunned, shouted down, and increasingly these days, fired from your job, is a rotten state of affairs which cannot end well. McWhorter sees all of this and dedicates his ample intelligence and linguistic prowess to a frank and honest discussion on the matter.
Much of what McWhorter posits here is not new. This book comes rather late to this party, considering wokeism has been dominating social discourse for about five years. For instance, many pundits thinkers have regarded wokeism as a religion, notably Gad Saad and Vivek Ramaswamy. But McWhorter has been in the fray for decades and was one of the leading voices in opposition to the political correctness craze in the ’90s and more recently the rise of wokeism with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi (a podcast discussion between McWhorter and Coates delves into their differences).
What’s more is that McWhorter does a good job of encapsulating the phenomenon, especially with his recounting of the several contradictory tenets of what he calls “third-wave anti-racism”. The first tenet is as follows:
“1. When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt. BUT … Don’t put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you. They have dealt with too much to be expected to.”
Another:
“5. Show interest in multiculturalism. BUT … Do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it. Yet – if you aren’t nevertheless interested in it, you are a racist.”
In documenting ten such tenets, McWhorter exposes this new anti-racism movement as a fraud. Basically, it is impossible to meet the demands of anti-racism, so it is unlikely that anyone involved in the effort is genuinely seeking an end to racism and is only using racism as a pretext to push illiberal and ultimately self-defeating policy measures. As Barzun wrote in his 1968 edition of Race, “To change the supremacy of one ‘race’ for that of another leaves social justice as much violated as before.”
McWhorter does miss an opportunity to reveal the fallacy at the core of anti-racism, a kind of motte-and-bailey that redefines the term ‘racist’ to include just about everyone and then uses the old concept of the word to scold and belittle people who now fall into the category. I might even argue that McWhorter, critical as he is of the Coates-Kendi contingent, gives them too much benefit of the doubt. McWhorter claims that anti-racism is racism, but he also assumes that anti-racists are well intentioned. These days, I don’t know if that assumption can be so easily made.
Any open-eyed observer will see the kind of rhetoric and initiatives put forth by the woke left these days and come to the same conclusions that McWhorter reaches in this book. Wokeism is a religion, and its central dogmas are based on racism. The fact that you can’t say this without being shunned, shouted down, and increasingly these days, fired from your job, is a rotten state of affairs which cannot end well. McWhorter sees all of this and dedicates his ample intelligence and linguistic prowess to a frank and honest discussion on the matter.
Much of what McWhorter posits here is not new. This book comes rather late to this party, considering wokeism has been dominating social discourse for about five years. For instance, many pundits thinkers have regarded wokeism as a religion, notably Gad Saad and Vivek Ramaswamy. But McWhorter has been in the fray for decades and was one of the leading voices in opposition to the political correctness craze in the ’90s and more recently the rise of wokeism with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi (a podcast discussion between McWhorter and Coates delves into their differences).
What’s more is that McWhorter does a good job of encapsulating the phenomenon, especially with his recounting of the several contradictory tenets of what he calls “third-wave anti-racism”. The first tenet is as follows:
“1. When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt. BUT … Don’t put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you. They have dealt with too much to be expected to.”
Another:
“5. Show interest in multiculturalism. BUT … Do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it. Yet – if you aren’t nevertheless interested in it, you are a racist.”
In documenting ten such tenets, McWhorter exposes this new anti-racism movement as a fraud. Basically, it is impossible to meet the demands of anti-racism, so it is unlikely that anyone involved in the effort is genuinely seeking an end to racism and is only using racism as a pretext to push illiberal and ultimately self-defeating policy measures. As Barzun wrote in his 1968 edition of Race, “To change the supremacy of one ‘race’ for that of another leaves social justice as much violated as before.”
McWhorter does miss an opportunity to reveal the fallacy at the core of anti-racism, a kind of motte-and-bailey that redefines the term ‘racist’ to include just about everyone and then uses the old concept of the word to scold and belittle people who now fall into the category. I might even argue that McWhorter, critical as he is of the Coates-Kendi contingent, gives them too much benefit of the doubt. McWhorter claims that anti-racism is racism, but he also assumes that anti-racists are well intentioned. These days, I don’t know if that assumption can be so easily made.
May 30, 2022
So with his 2021 Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America distinguished African American Columbia University Linguistics professor John McWhorther attempts to depict (and in my humble opinion also totally but also rather frighteningly) generally succeeds describing the current usually pretty radically left of centre social-justice antiracist movement (which he, which McWorther has labelled as being Third Wave Antiracism) as a movement and philosophy that actually horribly, lastingly and often irrevocably harm and destroy instead of in any manner being able to help and support African Americans and all in the name of ridiculous and frighteningly reactive, extremist guiding impulses (with the main concept of Woke Racism sadly but unsurprisingly often being that ANYONE who is Caucasian is automatically a racial bigot, is automatically tainted forever just because of his or her genetics and ethnicity, leaving not only a pretty well insurmountable chasm with no chance of reconciliation and working together but also at least in my humble opinion sounding remarkably and as such also disgustingly NAZI like with regard to rhetoric).
And furthermore, throughout Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America John McWorther also points out that the followers and the philosophical “leaders” of Woke Racism tend to see themselves as being the chosen bearers of all wisdom and McWorther very much rightfully considers their beliefs as equivalent to a very dangerous and problematically terrible religion (and in my humble opinion, and although I know that John McWorther does not of course go as far as that in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, for me and to me, Woke Racism is pretty much exactly the same with its hatred and blinkeredly ignorant reactionism as White Supremacy, and that both movements are dangerous, horrible and the to be exterminated puss filled and putrid symptoms of a dangerous American disease, and one worse than any possible pandemic, period).
And finally, while I was at first a trifle frustrated that in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America John McWorther does not in fact offer up any solutions as to how destroy and get rid of racist structures in the USA, actually McWorther's practical solutions of ending the war of drugs, teaching reading more effectively and getting past the idea that everyone must go to college by providing good vocational training, yes this would and also should do much more to help African Americans and to calm down the country's divisiveness than any philosophical ramblings (and in my humble opinion ALL Americans would actually be very much helped by John McWorther's suggestions as they are presented in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America as these solutions would work equally well for White Americans and would certainly also be a good tool against poverty).
And furthermore, throughout Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America John McWorther also points out that the followers and the philosophical “leaders” of Woke Racism tend to see themselves as being the chosen bearers of all wisdom and McWorther very much rightfully considers their beliefs as equivalent to a very dangerous and problematically terrible religion (and in my humble opinion, and although I know that John McWorther does not of course go as far as that in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, for me and to me, Woke Racism is pretty much exactly the same with its hatred and blinkeredly ignorant reactionism as White Supremacy, and that both movements are dangerous, horrible and the to be exterminated puss filled and putrid symptoms of a dangerous American disease, and one worse than any possible pandemic, period).
And finally, while I was at first a trifle frustrated that in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America John McWorther does not in fact offer up any solutions as to how destroy and get rid of racist structures in the USA, actually McWorther's practical solutions of ending the war of drugs, teaching reading more effectively and getting past the idea that everyone must go to college by providing good vocational training, yes this would and also should do much more to help African Americans and to calm down the country's divisiveness than any philosophical ramblings (and in my humble opinion ALL Americans would actually be very much helped by John McWorther's suggestions as they are presented in Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America as these solutions would work equally well for White Americans and would certainly also be a good tool against poverty).
October 28, 2021
Courageous, smart, witty, and necessary. And I can bet on how this will be received.
November 3, 2021
We must become more comfortable keeping our own counsel, and letting our own rationality decide whether we are racist, rather than entertaining the eccentric and self-serving renovated definitions of racism forced upon us by religionists.
-p173
I find John McWhorter’s hot takes on “woke racism” to be provocative and convincing.
In a calm and articulate fashion, he explains why this recent phenomenon is well meaning but, in his view, destructive, and must be resisted. He defines “woke racism” to be anything that puts battling power differentials as the central focus of human endeavor. Those who do this are “the Elect.”
He argues that reactionary “woke” shaming does not just affect celebrities or wealthy eggheads along the Acela corridor. Real people’s lives have been destroyed by a childish, simplistic racialized worldview, like a catechism, creeping openly into many of our personal and professional lives. JM argues that this phenomenon is a religion, and he makes many convincing claims. There is original sin, repetitive empty phrases, superstitions, apocalyptic ideas, banishment of heretics, and a clergy with a liturgy.
The most prominent print texts on this anti-racism movement (Coates, DiAngelo, Kendi) are harshly criticized:
Within this system, if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too “fragile” to admit it. The circularity here – “You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you are” – is the logic of the sandbox.
-p33
Redefining words (Merriam Webster did this with “racism” last summer) should be troubling:
Ask whether microaggressions merit the same response as physical assault and the Elect do not receive this as a challenging query. To them, it is splitting hairs to taxonomize assault in this way.
-p159
Because we are online constantly, woke behavior is obviously performative:
… her tweet was a form of testifying as a member of the Elect.
-p49
[A white appearing, half-Asian student claiming racism because people “expected her to be smart because of her Asian-ness”] was adopting a sense of existential grievance that her daily experiences did not justify. Being assumed to be smart can be something of a nuisance, I’m sure, but it is not exactly what most would consider suffering from the depredations of the Man.
-p119
JM wonders if well meaning, empathetic people are not assuming victimhood or self-loathing for understandable psychological reasons mixed up with one’s social circle’s expectations, media diet, and the progressive culture at large:
As often as not today, what the person “feels” is based on what they have been taught to “feel” by a paradigm that teaches them to exaggerate or even fabricate the “feeling.” In other words, much too often, the person who tells you to accept and go from how they “feel” has been, as it were, coached.
-p164
It seems that ideology can supplant real scholarship and expertise. If this happens, it is anti-intellectualism from the left. The well-meaning 1619 Project at the New York Times, criticized for historical inaccuracies in its portrayal of the American Revolution as being fueled by slavery, nevertheless goes on to win highest honors:
Someone has received a Pulitzer Prize for a mistaken interpretation of historical documents about which legions of actual scholars are expert.
-p108
Good people are being swept up into a simplistic, racialized worldview, exploding onto the scene in just the last few years. Its strategy is to “think hard” about “privilege” and deliberately conflates the obvious consequences of slavery and past racism for racism in the present. Or re-defines the term to include anything. Most of this is online Twitter mobbing, but that now translates into real-world harm of good, tolerant, ethical people. There is so much injustice to fight, and this "woke racism" phenomenon is distracting from the real progress that could be made in specific areas (Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is an example of a specific issue, that if solved, would improve human well-being immediately).
John McWhorter thinks that the Elect cannot be reasoned with, and that they are just one voice at the table. Those opposed to the Elect should not be scared of being called "racist". He lists examples of those who stood their ground to unfair and venomous attacks: lay folks, Unitarian reverends, Universities, computer science professors, corporations, others:
The Elect will be ever convinced that if you join these brave, self-possessed survivors, you are, regardless of your color, a moral pervert in bed with white supremacy.
But you aren’t, and you know it.
Stand up.
-p187
-p173
I find John McWhorter’s hot takes on “woke racism” to be provocative and convincing.
In a calm and articulate fashion, he explains why this recent phenomenon is well meaning but, in his view, destructive, and must be resisted. He defines “woke racism” to be anything that puts battling power differentials as the central focus of human endeavor. Those who do this are “the Elect.”
He argues that reactionary “woke” shaming does not just affect celebrities or wealthy eggheads along the Acela corridor. Real people’s lives have been destroyed by a childish, simplistic racialized worldview, like a catechism, creeping openly into many of our personal and professional lives. JM argues that this phenomenon is a religion, and he makes many convincing claims. There is original sin, repetitive empty phrases, superstitions, apocalyptic ideas, banishment of heretics, and a clergy with a liturgy.
The most prominent print texts on this anti-racism movement (Coates, DiAngelo, Kendi) are harshly criticized:
Within this system, if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too “fragile” to admit it. The circularity here – “You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you are” – is the logic of the sandbox.
-p33
Redefining words (Merriam Webster did this with “racism” last summer) should be troubling:
Ask whether microaggressions merit the same response as physical assault and the Elect do not receive this as a challenging query. To them, it is splitting hairs to taxonomize assault in this way.
-p159
Because we are online constantly, woke behavior is obviously performative:
… her tweet was a form of testifying as a member of the Elect.
-p49
[A white appearing, half-Asian student claiming racism because people “expected her to be smart because of her Asian-ness”] was adopting a sense of existential grievance that her daily experiences did not justify. Being assumed to be smart can be something of a nuisance, I’m sure, but it is not exactly what most would consider suffering from the depredations of the Man.
-p119
JM wonders if well meaning, empathetic people are not assuming victimhood or self-loathing for understandable psychological reasons mixed up with one’s social circle’s expectations, media diet, and the progressive culture at large:
As often as not today, what the person “feels” is based on what they have been taught to “feel” by a paradigm that teaches them to exaggerate or even fabricate the “feeling.” In other words, much too often, the person who tells you to accept and go from how they “feel” has been, as it were, coached.
-p164
It seems that ideology can supplant real scholarship and expertise. If this happens, it is anti-intellectualism from the left. The well-meaning 1619 Project at the New York Times, criticized for historical inaccuracies in its portrayal of the American Revolution as being fueled by slavery, nevertheless goes on to win highest honors:
Someone has received a Pulitzer Prize for a mistaken interpretation of historical documents about which legions of actual scholars are expert.
-p108
Good people are being swept up into a simplistic, racialized worldview, exploding onto the scene in just the last few years. Its strategy is to “think hard” about “privilege” and deliberately conflates the obvious consequences of slavery and past racism for racism in the present. Or re-defines the term to include anything. Most of this is online Twitter mobbing, but that now translates into real-world harm of good, tolerant, ethical people. There is so much injustice to fight, and this "woke racism" phenomenon is distracting from the real progress that could be made in specific areas (Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is an example of a specific issue, that if solved, would improve human well-being immediately).
John McWhorter thinks that the Elect cannot be reasoned with, and that they are just one voice at the table. Those opposed to the Elect should not be scared of being called "racist". He lists examples of those who stood their ground to unfair and venomous attacks: lay folks, Unitarian reverends, Universities, computer science professors, corporations, others:
The Elect will be ever convinced that if you join these brave, self-possessed survivors, you are, regardless of your color, a moral pervert in bed with white supremacy.
But you aren’t, and you know it.
Stand up.
-p187
February 12, 2023
Professor John McWhorter here speaks out against the brand of wokeness, based on critical race theory, that labels all whites as oppressors and all blacks as victims regardless of personal circumstance, achievement, and character. He compares it to a religion, which he calls Electism, complete with prophets (DiAngelo, Kendi), devils (white people), and the tenet that faith and feelings trump logic and science, which means you can’t argue with it by reason. Anyone guilty of hearsay is swiftly punished by cancel culture. It’s a religion that does not allow forgiveness or redemption and has successfully brainwashed millions of young people.
The first part of the book explaining how this is a religion. Then he explains how it hurts black people with its sinister racism. Then he asks his audience to not give in to it and resist it. One of the observations I found most interesting is how black people especially are not allowed to think about anything besides racism. If a black writer writes a book, fiction or nonfiction, that doesn’t address racism in some way, they get lectured about it.
The book is easy to read, it stays on topic, and Professor McWhorter is very intelligent. Sometimes I had to read parts again to understand them. I don’t quite agree with him a hundred percent, and that is fine. I found it interesting and gripping. I highlighted a ton of quotes.
Language: Occasional strong language
Sexual Content: None
Violence/Gore: None
Harm to Animals:
Harm to Children:
Other (Triggers):
================================================
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. … 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.
Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct. Under this paradigm, all deemed insufficiently aware of this sense of existing while white as eternal culpability require bitter condemnation and ostracization, to an obsessive, abstract degree that leaves most observers working to make real sense of it, makes people left of center wonder just when and why they started being classified as backward, and leaves millions of innocent people scared to pieces of winding up in the sights of a zealous brand of inquisition that seems to hover over almost any statement, ambition, or achievement in modern society.
But Third Wave Antiracism also outright harms black people in the name of its guiding principles. Third Wave Antiracism insists that it is “racist” for black boys to be overrepresented among those suspended or expelled from schools for violence, which, when translated into policy, is documented as having led to violence persisting in the schools and lowered students’ grades. Third Wave Antiracism insists that is it “racist” that black kids are underrepresented in New York City schools requiring high performance on a standardized test for admittance, and demands that we eliminate the test for admittance, and demands that we eliminate the test rather than direct black students to resources (many of them free) for practicing the test and reinstate gifted programs that shunted good numbers of black students into those very schools just a generation ago. That the result will be a lower quality of education in the schools, and black students who are less prepared for exercising the mind muscle required by the test taking they will encounter later, is considered beside the point.
Third Wave Antiracism’s needlepoint homily par excellence would be the following: Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.
It can seem an oddly particular perspective, this rigid focus on battling differentials in power. Power is rampantly abused and creates endless suffering, to be sure. An enlightened society must be always addressing this and trying to change it. However, given the millions of other things that constitute human life and endeavor, to impose that undoing power differentials must center all possible endeavor in what we call life is a radical proposition.
Third Wave Antiracism’s claims and demands, from a distance, seem like an eccentric performance from people wishing they hadn’t missed the late 1960s, dismayed that so much of the basic work is done already. Seeking the same righteous fury and heart-warming sense of purpose and belonging, exaggerations and even mendacities become inevitable, because actual circumstances simply do not justify the attitudes and strategies of 1967.
Third Wave Antiracism exploits modern Americans’ fear of being thought racist to promulgate not just antiracism, but an obsessive, self-involved, totalitarian, and utterly unnecessary kind of cultural reprogramming. One could be excused for thinking this queer, glowering kabuki is a continuation of the Civil Rights efforts of yore, the only kind of new antiracism there could be. Its adherents, now situated in the most prestigious and influential institutions in the land, preach with such contemptuous indignation that on their good days they can seem awfully “correct.”
In 1500 it was about not being Christian. In 2020 it’s about not being sufficiently antiracist, with adherents supposing that this is a more intellectually and morally advanced cause than antipathy to someone for being Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim. They do not see that they, too, are persecuting people for not adhering to their religion.
We will hear that this is a book “against antiracism,” and thus racist (cue the fist bumps). But as mot of us can see, there is a difference between being antiracist and being antiracist in a hostile way, where one is to pillory people for what, as recently as ten years ago, would have been thought of as petty torts or even as nothing at all, to espouse policies that hurt black people as long as supporting them makes you seem aware that racism exists, and to pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism and privately almost hope that it doesn’t, because it would deprive you of a sense of purpose.
One is born marked by original sin; in the same way, to be white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege. The proper response to original sin is to embrace the teachings of Jesus, although one will remain always a sinner nevertheless. The proper response to white privilege is to embrace the teachings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo … with the understanding that you always will harbor the privilege stain nevertheless.
The general idea that America is in some kind of denial about race—or racism, which is what people really mean when they said this—is perfectly absurd. America is nothing less than obsessed with discussing and acknowledging racism, and those who insist year after year that America wants to hear nothing of it are dealing in pure fantasy. America has most certainly not heeded the Elect’s particular and eccentric requirements on race and racism, but to phrase this as a general neglect of the whole topic is not a matter of mere sloppiness; it’s a willful commitment to believing something demonstrably untrue.
They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. (Andrew Sullivan)
This is a religious faith. It has a creation myth: that all of today’s problems with race trace to the first Africans being brought to our shores in 1619, and the Revolutionary War was fought because Britain was moving toward abolishing slavery, despite leading historians noting the inaccuracy of the historical premise. … And Electism is a successful creed, quite compellingly evangelical. Its adherents make Americans more religious by the year—and this possibly includes you.
A new religion in the guise of world progress is not an advance; it is a detour. It is not altruism; it is self-help. It is not sunlight; it is fungus. It’s time it became ordinary to call it for what it is and stop cowering before it, letting it make people so much less than they—black and everything else—could be. There is nothing correct about the essence of American thought and culture being transplanted into the soil of a religious faith. Some will go as far as to won up to it being a religion and wonder why we can’t just accept it as our new national creed. The problem is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion—true to the very nature of religion—cannot be reasoned with. they are, in this, medievals with lattes. … The Elect see themselves as speaking truth to power, not as occupying it.
Don’t be fooled: Religion knows no culture. Nor do all religions entail the worship of a God (the Elect lack one), or even forgiveness (which the Elect do not seem to have exactly caught up with just yet). As Eric Hoffer put it, religions don’t need a God, but they need a devil, and the Elect have that down quite comfortably. Superstition, clergy, sinfulness, a proselytizing impulse, a revulsion against the impure—it’s all there. They think of it all as logic incarnate.
Critical race theory tells you that everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses—and that if you are not Caucasian in America, then you are akin to the captive oarsmen slave straining belowdecks in chains. Almost anyone can see what a reductive view this is of modern society. … It is a fragile, performative ideology, one that goes beyond the passages above to explicitly reject linear reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s “story” constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.
“CRT” is the root of the idea today, seemingly so senselessly manipulative, that any claim of racism a black person makes must qualify automatically as valid because … they are black and speaking from “their experience.” For anyone who perceives that his makes no sense at all because any human’s take on something might be erroneous, they are unlikely to get a genuine explanation from people espousing it. The black person has usually internalized the assumption subconsciously and embraced it as almost any human would, as a tool that keeps people from disagreeing with you—who wouldn’t find something like that at least preliminarily attractive? The white person embraces it as a way of showing how thoroughly they understand that racism exists (and, I suspect, often out of a quiet sense that if black people insist on this, they must, deep down, be somewhat cognitively deficient, and therefore the most human strategy is to just placate).
Repeatedly, the Elect verge on telling black people—the supposed object of their veneration and eternal moral commitment—that they don’t know what’s good for them. For example, black people in tough neighborhoods commonly revile the idea that we ought to “defund” the police because of what happened to George Floyd and so many others. However, the Elect narrative—promoted heavily by mainstream media sources—sidelines this resistance as something that merely merits “consideration” (and of a kind that qualifies largely as dismissal). The condescension here is brutal, and what drives this squaring of the circle is religious fervor, complete with the sense of personal pleasure that it lends. The joy of finding order and of feeling important overrides how black people actually feel.
If Elect philosophy were really about changing the world, its parishioners would be ever champing at the bit to get out and do the changing, like Jane Addams and Dr. King. It would be a problem among their flock: the navel-gazing, set-jawed, hermetic reprogramming exercises rather than going out to do real things for real people in need.
Michael Lind is sadly accurate in his take on the Elect, who he sees as “reviving the preliberal, premodern religious approach to society, conceived of as a congregation of the virtuous and like-minded. Either you are a true believer or you are a heretic. There can be no compromise with wicked people, and the chief measure of wickedness isn’t action—[such as] engaging in overt discrimination on the basis of race—but expressing disapproved attitudes and refusing to use ritualized politically-correct [sic] language.” One of the cognitively weirdest things about the Elect is that they, despite being so articulate and so convinced that they harbor a wisdom the rest of us languish without, are ultimately more like people coming over the hill with pitchforks than the prudently informed redeemers they see themselves as.
Consider also the idea that our main focus must ever be on smoking out remnant racist bias, with its implication that this bias is a conclusive obstacle to black success. But no such argument has ever been made for any other group in the history of the human species. We, and only we, because of something peculiar to postindustrial conditions in one nation, can truly look forward only once we have upended basic procedure. We, and only we, require a vast transformation in psychosocial and distributional procedure in what is, despite its flaws, a functional democratic experiment in which open racism is prohibited to a degree unknown to human history before five decades ago, and to a degree that would have been considered science fiction as recently as three decades ago.
Racism, in all of its facets, is real, but since the late 1960s a contingent of black thinkers has tended to insist that things were as bad as they were in 1940, leaving even many black people who actually experienced Jim Crow a tad perplexed and even put off. There is a reason for this exaggeration. If you lack an internally generated sense of what makes you legitimate, what makes you special, then a handy substitute is the idea of yourself as a survivor. If you are insecure, a handy strategy is to point out the bad thing someone else is doing—we all remember that type from our school days—and especially if the idea is that they are doing it to you.
Many educated black people wrestle with a sense that they may be seen as having left their community behind, that they are not engaged in what used to be called the Struggle. One way to ease that sense of being a prodigal is to adopt an identity as a beleaguered black person, where you are united with all black people, regardless of social class or educational level, by the common experience of suffering discrimination. But the theme here is that being Elect can be, for a black person, like a warm blanket. You belong to something. Anyone who questions how “black” you are because of your speech, appearance, interests, or upward mobility is likely to hush up if you’re on the barricades with them decrying the racism of your university—or, later, your workplace, town, or country.
Ayanna Pressley … means a general idea that being oppressed by white racism defines the black American condition, experienced by all of us to a crushing degree, such that to deny or even downplay it can only be read as dishonest, and therefore inauthentic. … So many whites now think of this view not as defeatist oversimplification from certain black radicals, but as truth they are mortally bound to evangelize.
We must ask whether the Elect approach actually shows signs of making any difference in the lives of black people, other than by making educated white people infantalize them. While purportedly “dismantling racist structures,” the Elect religion is actually harming the people living in those structures. … You are to turn a blind eye to black kids getting jumped by other ones in school. You are to turn a blind eye to black undergraduates cast into schools where they are in over their heads, and into law schools incapable of adjusting to their level of preparation in a way that will allow them to pass the bar exam. You are to turn a blind eye to the willful dimness of condemning dead people for moral lapses normal in their time, as if they were still alive. You are to turn a blind eye to the folly in the idea of black “identity” as all about what whites think rather than what black people themselves think. You are to turn a blind eye to lapses in black intellectuals’ work, because black people lack white privilege. You are to turn a blind eye to the fact that social history is complex, and instead pretend that those who tell you that all racial discrepancies are a result of racism are evidencing brilliance.
The Elect will see only “racism” here, but only because their religious commitment numbs them to the harm their view to real children living their lives in the real world. Obviously, poverty can make kids more likely to be violent—there is no reason to see these boys as pathological beings. But to insist that bigotry is the only possible reason for suspending more black boys than white boys is to espouse harming black students.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
The first part of the book explaining how this is a religion. Then he explains how it hurts black people with its sinister racism. Then he asks his audience to not give in to it and resist it. One of the observations I found most interesting is how black people especially are not allowed to think about anything besides racism. If a black writer writes a book, fiction or nonfiction, that doesn’t address racism in some way, they get lectured about it.
The book is easy to read, it stays on topic, and Professor McWhorter is very intelligent. Sometimes I had to read parts again to understand them. I don’t quite agree with him a hundred percent, and that is fine. I found it interesting and gripping. I highlighted a ton of quotes.
Language: Occasional strong language
Sexual Content: None
Violence/Gore: None
Harm to Animals:
Harm to Children:
Other (Triggers):
================================================
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. … 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.
Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct. Under this paradigm, all deemed insufficiently aware of this sense of existing while white as eternal culpability require bitter condemnation and ostracization, to an obsessive, abstract degree that leaves most observers working to make real sense of it, makes people left of center wonder just when and why they started being classified as backward, and leaves millions of innocent people scared to pieces of winding up in the sights of a zealous brand of inquisition that seems to hover over almost any statement, ambition, or achievement in modern society.
But Third Wave Antiracism also outright harms black people in the name of its guiding principles. Third Wave Antiracism insists that it is “racist” for black boys to be overrepresented among those suspended or expelled from schools for violence, which, when translated into policy, is documented as having led to violence persisting in the schools and lowered students’ grades. Third Wave Antiracism insists that is it “racist” that black kids are underrepresented in New York City schools requiring high performance on a standardized test for admittance, and demands that we eliminate the test for admittance, and demands that we eliminate the test rather than direct black students to resources (many of them free) for practicing the test and reinstate gifted programs that shunted good numbers of black students into those very schools just a generation ago. That the result will be a lower quality of education in the schools, and black students who are less prepared for exercising the mind muscle required by the test taking they will encounter later, is considered beside the point.
Third Wave Antiracism’s needlepoint homily par excellence would be the following: Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.
It can seem an oddly particular perspective, this rigid focus on battling differentials in power. Power is rampantly abused and creates endless suffering, to be sure. An enlightened society must be always addressing this and trying to change it. However, given the millions of other things that constitute human life and endeavor, to impose that undoing power differentials must center all possible endeavor in what we call life is a radical proposition.
Third Wave Antiracism’s claims and demands, from a distance, seem like an eccentric performance from people wishing they hadn’t missed the late 1960s, dismayed that so much of the basic work is done already. Seeking the same righteous fury and heart-warming sense of purpose and belonging, exaggerations and even mendacities become inevitable, because actual circumstances simply do not justify the attitudes and strategies of 1967.
Third Wave Antiracism exploits modern Americans’ fear of being thought racist to promulgate not just antiracism, but an obsessive, self-involved, totalitarian, and utterly unnecessary kind of cultural reprogramming. One could be excused for thinking this queer, glowering kabuki is a continuation of the Civil Rights efforts of yore, the only kind of new antiracism there could be. Its adherents, now situated in the most prestigious and influential institutions in the land, preach with such contemptuous indignation that on their good days they can seem awfully “correct.”
In 1500 it was about not being Christian. In 2020 it’s about not being sufficiently antiracist, with adherents supposing that this is a more intellectually and morally advanced cause than antipathy to someone for being Catholic, Jewish, or Muslim. They do not see that they, too, are persecuting people for not adhering to their religion.
We will hear that this is a book “against antiracism,” and thus racist (cue the fist bumps). But as mot of us can see, there is a difference between being antiracist and being antiracist in a hostile way, where one is to pillory people for what, as recently as ten years ago, would have been thought of as petty torts or even as nothing at all, to espouse policies that hurt black people as long as supporting them makes you seem aware that racism exists, and to pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism and privately almost hope that it doesn’t, because it would deprive you of a sense of purpose.
One is born marked by original sin; in the same way, to be white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege. The proper response to original sin is to embrace the teachings of Jesus, although one will remain always a sinner nevertheless. The proper response to white privilege is to embrace the teachings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo … with the understanding that you always will harbor the privilege stain nevertheless.
The general idea that America is in some kind of denial about race—or racism, which is what people really mean when they said this—is perfectly absurd. America is nothing less than obsessed with discussing and acknowledging racism, and those who insist year after year that America wants to hear nothing of it are dealing in pure fantasy. America has most certainly not heeded the Elect’s particular and eccentric requirements on race and racism, but to phrase this as a general neglect of the whole topic is not a matter of mere sloppiness; it’s a willful commitment to believing something demonstrably untrue.
They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. (Andrew Sullivan)
This is a religious faith. It has a creation myth: that all of today’s problems with race trace to the first Africans being brought to our shores in 1619, and the Revolutionary War was fought because Britain was moving toward abolishing slavery, despite leading historians noting the inaccuracy of the historical premise. … And Electism is a successful creed, quite compellingly evangelical. Its adherents make Americans more religious by the year—and this possibly includes you.
A new religion in the guise of world progress is not an advance; it is a detour. It is not altruism; it is self-help. It is not sunlight; it is fungus. It’s time it became ordinary to call it for what it is and stop cowering before it, letting it make people so much less than they—black and everything else—could be. There is nothing correct about the essence of American thought and culture being transplanted into the soil of a religious faith. Some will go as far as to won up to it being a religion and wonder why we can’t just accept it as our new national creed. The problem is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion—true to the very nature of religion—cannot be reasoned with. they are, in this, medievals with lattes. … The Elect see themselves as speaking truth to power, not as occupying it.
Don’t be fooled: Religion knows no culture. Nor do all religions entail the worship of a God (the Elect lack one), or even forgiveness (which the Elect do not seem to have exactly caught up with just yet). As Eric Hoffer put it, religions don’t need a God, but they need a devil, and the Elect have that down quite comfortably. Superstition, clergy, sinfulness, a proselytizing impulse, a revulsion against the impure—it’s all there. They think of it all as logic incarnate.
Critical race theory tells you that everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses—and that if you are not Caucasian in America, then you are akin to the captive oarsmen slave straining belowdecks in chains. Almost anyone can see what a reductive view this is of modern society. … It is a fragile, performative ideology, one that goes beyond the passages above to explicitly reject linear reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s “story” constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.
“CRT” is the root of the idea today, seemingly so senselessly manipulative, that any claim of racism a black person makes must qualify automatically as valid because … they are black and speaking from “their experience.” For anyone who perceives that his makes no sense at all because any human’s take on something might be erroneous, they are unlikely to get a genuine explanation from people espousing it. The black person has usually internalized the assumption subconsciously and embraced it as almost any human would, as a tool that keeps people from disagreeing with you—who wouldn’t find something like that at least preliminarily attractive? The white person embraces it as a way of showing how thoroughly they understand that racism exists (and, I suspect, often out of a quiet sense that if black people insist on this, they must, deep down, be somewhat cognitively deficient, and therefore the most human strategy is to just placate).
Repeatedly, the Elect verge on telling black people—the supposed object of their veneration and eternal moral commitment—that they don’t know what’s good for them. For example, black people in tough neighborhoods commonly revile the idea that we ought to “defund” the police because of what happened to George Floyd and so many others. However, the Elect narrative—promoted heavily by mainstream media sources—sidelines this resistance as something that merely merits “consideration” (and of a kind that qualifies largely as dismissal). The condescension here is brutal, and what drives this squaring of the circle is religious fervor, complete with the sense of personal pleasure that it lends. The joy of finding order and of feeling important overrides how black people actually feel.
If Elect philosophy were really about changing the world, its parishioners would be ever champing at the bit to get out and do the changing, like Jane Addams and Dr. King. It would be a problem among their flock: the navel-gazing, set-jawed, hermetic reprogramming exercises rather than going out to do real things for real people in need.
Michael Lind is sadly accurate in his take on the Elect, who he sees as “reviving the preliberal, premodern religious approach to society, conceived of as a congregation of the virtuous and like-minded. Either you are a true believer or you are a heretic. There can be no compromise with wicked people, and the chief measure of wickedness isn’t action—[such as] engaging in overt discrimination on the basis of race—but expressing disapproved attitudes and refusing to use ritualized politically-correct [sic] language.” One of the cognitively weirdest things about the Elect is that they, despite being so articulate and so convinced that they harbor a wisdom the rest of us languish without, are ultimately more like people coming over the hill with pitchforks than the prudently informed redeemers they see themselves as.
Consider also the idea that our main focus must ever be on smoking out remnant racist bias, with its implication that this bias is a conclusive obstacle to black success. But no such argument has ever been made for any other group in the history of the human species. We, and only we, because of something peculiar to postindustrial conditions in one nation, can truly look forward only once we have upended basic procedure. We, and only we, require a vast transformation in psychosocial and distributional procedure in what is, despite its flaws, a functional democratic experiment in which open racism is prohibited to a degree unknown to human history before five decades ago, and to a degree that would have been considered science fiction as recently as three decades ago.
Racism, in all of its facets, is real, but since the late 1960s a contingent of black thinkers has tended to insist that things were as bad as they were in 1940, leaving even many black people who actually experienced Jim Crow a tad perplexed and even put off. There is a reason for this exaggeration. If you lack an internally generated sense of what makes you legitimate, what makes you special, then a handy substitute is the idea of yourself as a survivor. If you are insecure, a handy strategy is to point out the bad thing someone else is doing—we all remember that type from our school days—and especially if the idea is that they are doing it to you.
Many educated black people wrestle with a sense that they may be seen as having left their community behind, that they are not engaged in what used to be called the Struggle. One way to ease that sense of being a prodigal is to adopt an identity as a beleaguered black person, where you are united with all black people, regardless of social class or educational level, by the common experience of suffering discrimination. But the theme here is that being Elect can be, for a black person, like a warm blanket. You belong to something. Anyone who questions how “black” you are because of your speech, appearance, interests, or upward mobility is likely to hush up if you’re on the barricades with them decrying the racism of your university—or, later, your workplace, town, or country.
Ayanna Pressley … means a general idea that being oppressed by white racism defines the black American condition, experienced by all of us to a crushing degree, such that to deny or even downplay it can only be read as dishonest, and therefore inauthentic. … So many whites now think of this view not as defeatist oversimplification from certain black radicals, but as truth they are mortally bound to evangelize.
We must ask whether the Elect approach actually shows signs of making any difference in the lives of black people, other than by making educated white people infantalize them. While purportedly “dismantling racist structures,” the Elect religion is actually harming the people living in those structures. … You are to turn a blind eye to black kids getting jumped by other ones in school. You are to turn a blind eye to black undergraduates cast into schools where they are in over their heads, and into law schools incapable of adjusting to their level of preparation in a way that will allow them to pass the bar exam. You are to turn a blind eye to the willful dimness of condemning dead people for moral lapses normal in their time, as if they were still alive. You are to turn a blind eye to the folly in the idea of black “identity” as all about what whites think rather than what black people themselves think. You are to turn a blind eye to lapses in black intellectuals’ work, because black people lack white privilege. You are to turn a blind eye to the fact that social history is complex, and instead pretend that those who tell you that all racial discrepancies are a result of racism are evidencing brilliance.
The Elect will see only “racism” here, but only because their religious commitment numbs them to the harm their view to real children living their lives in the real world. Obviously, poverty can make kids more likely to be violent—there is no reason to see these boys as pathological beings. But to insist that bigotry is the only possible reason for suspending more black boys than white boys is to espouse harming black students.
CONTINUED IN COMMENTS
December 8, 2021
This book is an excellent example of straw man argumentation. The first 138 pages are just great example after great example of him attributing extreme characteristics and positions to a fictitious left-wing anti racist horde and then pointing out how the horde is not sensible.
Then, from page 139 to 144, he briefly outlines three policy recommendations that a great many on the left support: end the war on drugs, teach phonics, and encourage more people to pursue career credentials short of four-year degrees.
It makes me wonder if he put all of the right wing red meat up front just to get people to read those five little pages in the middle?
Weird.
Then, from page 139 to 144, he briefly outlines three policy recommendations that a great many on the left support: end the war on drugs, teach phonics, and encourage more people to pursue career credentials short of four-year degrees.
It makes me wonder if he put all of the right wing red meat up front just to get people to read those five little pages in the middle?
Weird.
October 10, 2021
If Jason Whitlock wrote a book, this would be it 🤮
October 30, 2021
Turning Black people into objects of pity is NOT anti-racist.
More Black people are thriving in today's America than at any point in US history.
And rather than being a despised minority, Black people are probably the most admired, respected, and emulated minority in our country.
Yes, Black people are disproportionately poor, largely due to historic racism.
But poor whites suffer from the same social problems that are typically associated with Blackness and blamed on racism (addiction, high incarceration rates, unstable families, abuse, housing insecurity, poor academic performance, teen pregnancy, etc.)
Middle and upper middle class Black people do NOT suffer from these issues, but poor whites absolutely do.
It's the poverty, stupid.
To claim that all Black people experience the same level of oppression is absurd, and extremely self-serving for economically privileged Black people.
"Woke Racism" exposes the fact that endless navel gazing and self-flagellation by whites does nothing to help Black people.
Economic justice will disproportionately help Black people, because Black people are disproportionately poor.
But the antiracist cult will make sure that poor whites and poor Blacks remain divided from each other, and will never join together to demand living wages, affordable housing, universal healthcare, paid family leave, universal pre-k, or anything else that would disproportionately lift up the Black community.
Instead, identity politics will continue to divide the poor, and woke allies will remain consumed with moral purity at the expense of genuine change.
More Black people are thriving in today's America than at any point in US history.
And rather than being a despised minority, Black people are probably the most admired, respected, and emulated minority in our country.
Yes, Black people are disproportionately poor, largely due to historic racism.
But poor whites suffer from the same social problems that are typically associated with Blackness and blamed on racism (addiction, high incarceration rates, unstable families, abuse, housing insecurity, poor academic performance, teen pregnancy, etc.)
Middle and upper middle class Black people do NOT suffer from these issues, but poor whites absolutely do.
It's the poverty, stupid.
To claim that all Black people experience the same level of oppression is absurd, and extremely self-serving for economically privileged Black people.
"Woke Racism" exposes the fact that endless navel gazing and self-flagellation by whites does nothing to help Black people.
Economic justice will disproportionately help Black people, because Black people are disproportionately poor.
But the antiracist cult will make sure that poor whites and poor Blacks remain divided from each other, and will never join together to demand living wages, affordable housing, universal healthcare, paid family leave, universal pre-k, or anything else that would disproportionately lift up the Black community.
Instead, identity politics will continue to divide the poor, and woke allies will remain consumed with moral purity at the expense of genuine change.
December 28, 2021
A much needed check-and-balance to the current climate of hyper-wokism; specifically, in this case, on issues of race. Not meant as red meat for the Fox News crowd, but thoughtful and uncompromising pushback against what McWhorter calls "Third Wave Antiracism."
Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,005 reviews