 This is a book saying there are black people who need help and the people who are calling themselves black people's saviors now don't understand this, but they're hurting black people because what they're caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help. In his best-selling new book, Woke Racism, how a new religion has betrayed black America. New York Times columnist in Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that the ideas of Robin D'Angelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and the 1619 project undermine blacks by sharpening racial divides and distracting from actual obstacles to real progress. Reason spoke with the 56-year-old McWhorter about what whites get out of cooperating with an ideological agenda that casts them as devils, what blacks gain by performing victimhood, and what needs to change so that all Americans can get on with creating a more perfect union. John McWhorter, thanks for talking a reason. My pleasure, Nick. Good to see you again. Thank you. Let's get right to Woke Racism, how a new religion has betrayed black America. What's the elevator pitch for Woke Racism? Well, the elevator pitch is that there is a group of people who are committed to what they call social justice, and they are certain enough of their moral purity that they are willing to hurt other people if they don't agree with their principles. And their notion is that they are saving people who are living under the power of the white hegemony. So a lot of this is about race. A lot of it is about black people. The problem with it is not only are these people mean, not only are these people unpleasant to deal with, but in the name of social justice for black people, they often either don't care about black people for real or they're hurting black people. And so I wrote Woke Racism not as some boring statement from the right wing about family values and people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. This is not what some people would think of as a John McWhorter book, although I've never written a book like that. This is a book saying there are black people who need help, and the people who are calling themselves black people's saviors now don't understand this, but they're hurting black people because what they're caught up in is more about virtue signaling to one another than helping people who actually need help. You know, just very briefly, you mentioned, you know, people are going to say this is, you know, a right wing book or might expect it to be. What are your politics? My politics are 1960 liberal. If it were 1960, everybody would think of me as a normal liberal. I would be this Adlai Stevenson voting pointy headed as they used to put it. Pointy headed intellectual. Exactly. That's me. Now in the late 60s, an idea settles in that on race, radicalism is default. And therefore I become a right winger because I don't have the politics of, say, Stokely Carmichael or Miri Baraka, but I have never voted Republican. I could, but I never have. I consider my company to be left-leaning people who, you know, read the New York Times in the Atlantic. I teach at a university and have never felt out of place there, despite what some people might think. But you do teach at a university that Eisenhower was the president of, right? So it's practically part of the Koch brothers conspiracy. I'm guessing. Well, of course, you know, he's an Eisenhower Republican. It's funny this painting is, you know, right up in the library. But yeah. And so I consider myself to be of that world. I'm not speaking from the right, but something has gone really wrong. I think something is really distracting people in my world lately into supposing that they're supposed to fall for a kind of purposeless extremism in order to be good people. So, yeah, I'm talking to my people in both senses of that word. I'm talking to Black people. And I'm talking to New York Times reading, Blue America, people who saw sideways kinds of people. Why is it important that, you know, you talk about woke racism and you, and you're, you know, we're talking about woke activism. So this is Robin D'Angelo, Ibram Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, that sort of, you know, kind of universe. Why is it important that you call it a religion? Why does it matter that it's religious and its sensibility? Yeah, I think that's being misunderstood. I predicted that my calling it a religion would irritate many people, especially religious people because it's so clear that I have such contempt for this woke business. And therefore, what do I think of religion? And I call it a religion partly because of various formal similarities between it and especially devout Christianity, starting with white privilege as original sin. And I think that not only are those parallels important, but I have a heuristic reason for it. There's an extent to which I think some people were expecting woke racism to be this examination of the nature of religion and the nature of wokeness and what the parallels are and making an argument that wokeness is a religion in great detail. Let's face it, for one thing, nobody would have read that book. And two, they shouldn't have. It's not that important. I consider it useful to think of this as a religion so that people can understand that we can't have productive exchanges with the particular kind of person I'm writing about. Many people think, well, if we could only get them to understand that we need a plurality of ideas, well, if we could only get them to understand that, you know, you catch flies better with honey than with what is that expression? You know, if we could only break bread with these people or people ask me, how can I get that kind of person to not call me a racist? And the answer is you can't. That's what they do. And they do it because they think that the whole issue is as simple as whether or not we're going to accept pedophilia. And so just as you're unlikely to try to convince somebody that Jesus does not love them, you're unlikely to try to talk someone out of their religious faith, it might work with the occasional person before. That's a tough one. You can't talk anybody out of this new way of thinking from the hard, hard left. The idea is to walk around these people and sometimes you have to learn to stand up to them. And framing it as a religion, I think, gets across that idea better than just calling it, say, an ideology. There's something different about this here. You at one point refer to woke activists as our Pharisees. Refresh for the audience and by which I mean myself. Who were the Pharisees? I know they got a couple of the best songs in Jesus Christ Superstar. But other than that, I think that illusion might be lost on people, but it's important. Could you kind of illustrate that a little? That's that one passage I wrote. What I meant by the Pharisees is that that particular tale highlights the difference between doing something because you're seen to do it and doing something because you wish to do it and you don't feel whole unless you do it. So it's basically a way of referring to virtue signaling while keeping the religious analogy going, meaning that a great deal of what we're seeing is people showing that they know that racism exists. And one particularly darling idea is to show that you know that racism can be systemic. That's what people get the high off of. But the overlap between that and helping people who need help is often not only partial, but very small. And so what you see is people gesturing and gesticulating and posturing. What I say in the book is that it's kind of like people who go to a village that you know has been inundated by a mudslide. And they are putting pictures on Facebook of themselves pulling people out of the mud instead of just pulling people out of the mud. That's what we see. I'm not sure this fits into your schema, but next to reasons office in DuPont Circle in D.C. there's a strip club. It's total coincidence that they're there. But on that strip club, which is called assets, it has a big sign that says Black Lives Matter. Is that the kind of virtue signaling you're talking about? Or is it something more pernicious? Well, frankly, yes, in that what's going on there is that that club is trying to show that they understand that racism can be systemic. But then again, if just kind of putting that fist salute up is all they're doing, then it's let's try this. There's nothing wrong with those people saying we agree with the premises of Black Lives Matter and by implication, this whole and by implication, the racial reckoning and dealing with systemic racism. All that is just fine. But if that is the soul of this entire racial reckoning, we're in trouble. I don't cringe when I see BLM signs, but the thing is a great many people pretend that they're doing anything other than that. So if the assets management is actually redistributing tips towards Black strippers rather than white or and I guess Asian strippers losing this to that would be better, especially if the people they're they're dealing with are disadvantaged and could use the extra help. Although I wouldn't take them especially to task, but that signaling is the general feeling of this entire supposed racial reckoning. When you you know, you critique the the term systemic or systematic racism, white supremacy, we should talk a little bit about what people mean when they invoke white supremacy. But isn't I mean, is it your contention that race racism, which certainly was, you know, it was systemic, I mean, there was for most of the history of the United States, there were laws that specifically and clearly said, if you were black, if you had one drop of black blood, you're not, you're not sitting here, you're not eating here, you're not working here, you're not welcome here, you're not learning here. Are we past the age of systemic racism? Well, if we're talking about racism in the present tense, it's much harder to identify than racism in the past. I don't like that term, not because the systemic, but because of the racism part. I think it's a real stretch of our cognition to go from racism being an attitude to racism referring to inequities within a system that are racial. And I think it's dangerous because you end up talking about inequities that are a very different nature. And you refer to them all with the term racism, which implies that there's this one particular issue and we can't help thinking that it's partly this emotion, this bias, and that therefore we can fight the racism. And it distracts our attention because we think, well, bigotry must be part of that in some way. And in general, all of these things will go away if we just fight the racism when really the problems are often due to all sorts of things today, even if they were due to racism in the past. It's a dangerously oversimplified way of looking at the complexities and the inequities in a society. But yes. And so for example, redlining. This is what I mean by complexity. Redlining. Go back to a redlined neighborhood in 1950. Most of the people in it were white. That's something that we don't talk about. Redlining was not as racially targeted as a lot of people seem to almost want it to have been. It was about class. It wasn't about skin. Nevertheless, a vastly disproportionate number of black people, proportion of black people were caught in these same neighborhoods. And so black people suffered disproportionately from redlining. Is that the reason today that a certain wealth gap between white and black people exist? And the answer to that is, to some extent, yes. As always, if you actually look at the numbers, if you distinguish between medians and averages, if you distinguish between regions of the United States, if you distinguish between social class, the wealth gap is not what people say. Nevertheless, once you clean up all of that, certainly the fact that so few black people could build up equity back in the day and not that long ago, that was a matter of racism. But today, to look at the wealth gap and say, well, this is systemic racism. No, no, the racism was way, way back in the past, why black people were disproportionately in the redlined neighborhoods. Today, there's an inequity. What do you do about it? Do you give black people a certain amount of money? Do you give black people houses? How much of a house? How much money? It's complicated. And that's usually not really what people mean. So what are we talking about that it is racism? That's a very odd way of using tense here. Racism did something that created a disparity today. It's subtle stuff, but the way we talk about it makes it all seem much easier than it ever was or is. Yeah, at one point in the book, I mean, you're in your late 50s. So you were born in 65, right? Mm hmm. Yeah. So I like to say mid 50s. Mid 50s. I'm sorry. I'm speaking for myself. Excuse me. I'm in my pre 60s. So but you write at a certain point in this stock, it really stuck with me partly because I'm of a similar vintage. But when you look at American culture in 1960 and 1970 on the issue of race, something really, you know, really amazing happened. There was a massive transformation. Can you talk a little bit about that and why, you know, and then why isn't that kind of, you know, sea change in attitudes as well as laws, mores and things like that doesn't seem to factor in it as if we're still talking about things before 1960. Yeah, it's really interesting what happens in America in between those two years 1960 and 1970 completely different worlds. 1960 is when the two parent family is still a norm even with with poor black people. And I'm not saying that we need family values. I'm just saying that that would throw a lot of people in time travel back to 1960 welfare is a mean spirited little program where you've always got the social worker knocking on the door, and you're encouraged not to stay on it for very long. That's what welfare was like. And there's a general idea that how Martin Luther King looked at things was the standard and reasonable way of thinking about race. Let's get rid of segregation, view people by the content of their character. Let us show what we're made of was the idea. You go to 1970 and there's this whole new mood. It's the black power mood. The new idea is we can't do our best because you won't let us and therefore you have to accept that we won't do our best and that sometimes we'll do our worst. And gradually the notion settles in that doing the worst or not doing your best is almost what black authenticity is because you therefore stand as a totemic demonstration of white racism. 1960 racism is about segregation. By 1970 it's standard in certain circles that racism is still present and indestructible because it's structural that that starts then. And because of the welfare revolution in 1966 it starts to become regular for people to just stay on welfare with no one concerned about whether they get job training. The knocking on the door gradually dwindles in the early 70s and it becomes this multi-generational program. It's not anybody's fault. People live from week to week but that happened. Black America turned upside down between 60 and 70 and I always have to watch out because I was born right in the middle of it and so it's easy for me to think that somehow before my life is different than before after. But really it's just an accident. It's also just an accident that television and film started being in color right after 1965 but there really was a change and I have a nostalgia for a time I didn't know. I think that civil rights up to about 1966 and Stokely Carmichael and people yelling black power and not knowing what it meant that's where it went wrong and we're still stuck talking about these things the way those people did. So let me ask you this. You know the woke activism is you know it's fundamentally it's a kind of move or rhetoric that puts blacks in charge in the sense of they are the people that everybody needs to you know discursively rhetorically they are the people that everybody has to heal or make whole. They're the victims we owe them something. There's people like Robin D'Angelo who's white. I'm glad to see an Italian American getting in on some of this action. But you know it's mostly for black people. What do black or first let me ask you what do whites get out of subscribing to a kind of you know massive meta theory a meta narrative that makes them virtually irredeemable and sinners in the hands of an angry mob at this point. Because when you acknowledge that you are polluted in this way that you're a sinner that you're complicit it makes you goodly. You are morally ahead of the curve and you can share that with other people it's the beginning of what you could call a religion. It feels good to be ahead of the curve and to preach it to teach it to other people and so you feel good. I remember this is not in the book and I don't use this anecdote much but I remember way back in 98 I happened to be at a party it was in the Bay Area little party and it's about six o'clock p.m the sun is coming in the place look kind of like your your place and we were drinking white wine and it was the first new Star Wars movie had come out and this white guy who's just the type walks in and I wasn't thinking about these things then but I remember the impression this guy made on me. He had just seen the movie and not everybody had seen it yet and somebody said I'm going to call his name was probably Jason. So Jason you know how was Phantom Menace or whichever one it was and oh he said oh yeah well I don't know this Jar Jar Binks he had he had an accent it was like he was like racist so I don't know that's just this passing comment and everybody nodded and I got the feeling that there were women in the room and I think that made him kind of attractive they kind of like this and I remember the time thinking that's not what he got out of this movie he did not watch that three hour thing and come away from it thinking that the racism was the most important thing he's saying this because this makes him look good that was an early version of this that has now gone you know far beyond just this one guy now that's a standard attitude among people like him. Well I mean can we say though that Jar Jar Binks does seem to be a racist stereotype in a movie full of them there's the there's the guy who owns Anakin's mother who is a big hooked nose chiseling merchant who speaks like he's from the lower east side from where I speak this is all true yeah so and I mean but this is the thing back then in a way it was so long ago that people weren't as sensitized to it today I think we would watch that movie and instantly see this but in 1998 it was forced it was he was trying to seem like he was ahead of a certain curve and I don't think he was performing to me. So that's I mean he's kind of like a cool hunter or you know woke act white woke activists are kind of like cool hunters where they are you know they're the they're Michael Pollan but for racism rather than magic monsters. That is precisely it exactly yeah yeah and is it also I mean would you argue or would would you agree that it's also because the whites who are most into this never really suffer the you know the the implications of yeah America is irredeemably structurally racist it's white supremacist so we're going to make a bunch of other whites who actually don't have any power pay all the costs for you know this restructuring of society. Yeah there's there's a lot of that in that um you find that this ideology is much less readily embraced by white people who are not comfortable the idea that they're privileged just because they're white when often they have trouble with the cops too just doesn't come through to an extent adopting this religion is something that you do when actually your life is quite comfortable and that also gets to the black angle of it because many people find it perplexing that a certain kind of black american stresses victimhood so much seems to be almost looking for disparities and reason to be in despair about the black condition trying to find ever more subtle indications of how racism is abstractly baked into the system watching the Oscars just waiting for something to be offended about no matter who wins and for what and people wonder why why are you stressing the victimhood when generally we think that having a positive outlook is better and we watch black people in the past when lynching is ordinary trying to be optimistic trying to be constructive wanting black people's accomplishments to be focused upon in the media etc it's only after the late 60s that the idea settles in that the authentic black position is to stress the worst is to portray impediments as conclusive obstacles all of that is part of the new mood and people wonder why and it's not because of power it's because it assuages a damaged soul if there is a sense that it can be hard to have black pride because black people were treated so badly for so very long then one way that you can have a substitute pride is to be the noble victim that's a human type it's not anything I mean were people like Stokely Carmichael who is you know the I guess he's generally regarded as a person who came up with the idea of black power or the phrase or popularized it and later to move to Ghana but I mean were they noble victims or were the Black Panther party you know another group that is very much part of the real change in in kind of posture among black activists certainly different than Martin Luther King were they victims or weren't they trying to be like no we are a sort of you know black men especially Stokely Carmichael is famous for saying that the woman's the woman's place and the movement is prone but I mean they don't strike me as as being victim me victim I know what you mean but their idea was that our charisma comes from saying that white people are trying to hold us down and the crucial thing about Stokely Carmichael was I think personally he was not a victim kind of soul but the message had nothing to do with doing real things that's another difference between 1960 and 1970 Martin Luther King had certain goals then someone like Rustin had other goals that were less large grain than just getting rid of segregation but he had definite goals in terms of how to get poor black people jobs what to do with the school system it all seems very wonky and these were the stars it's after 1970 that you have people getting together at big black conferences for example and talking about things but you read about the conference and what you see is there was an awful lot of performance but nothing came of it no particular program that was brought to the powers that be people just came together and said we're powerful as a statement against the powers that be that supposedly we're trying to hold them down but that was considered the essence everything was considered complete just in going whoa that was post 1970 so that's victimry you know and that's taking pride in your victimhood is it I mean what is it fair to say or would you agree that also a lot of the the activism that came after that rather than saying okay we're gonna we're gonna you know kind of a Booker T. Washington we're gonna build our own schools we're gonna do our own stuff it was more we're going to get together and then petition the government to implement a bunch of programs that will help our community yeah the problem is that if you think about black history from say the Panthers once the Panthers eclipse then you go to roughly to tell you the truth hurricane Katrina what was going on in black history then and what was going on was an awful lot of very smart very well-intentioned people saying you must lower the barriers of competition for us you must not expect us to perform even the way black immigrants do and so it's the era for example of affirmative action which in itself is a great thing but do you institute it forever and does it ever become about socioeconomics rather than race it's interesting how little happened and then you get a black president and after that here in the 2000 teens I think the black history books are gonna pick up because then you have the protests against police malfeasance and police murders etc but what happened something really went off the rails after the charisma the dashikis of Stokely Carmichael he goes to Africa and the black Panthers who predictably flame out nothing after that I think I wish it could have been better with you mentioned Obama in the Obama presidency there's a you know kind of fascinating changes in polling data of how important is race to outcomes in American life or how big a role does racism play white and black racism or you know white attitudes towards blacks etc and things intensify you know by the end of the Obama years there is much more racial animosity blacks you know according to Gallup and Pew blacks feel that racism has become a bigger issue in their lives a lot of whites agree liberal whites actually show routinely that they believe racism is much more of a factor in black people's lives than the average black person does what happened you know because one of the readings of this is that in America you know we elected a black president or you know a half black president but you know that created a backlash a racist backlash where we were you know we couldn't take having a black man in charge and America became more racist do you give any credence to that kind of narrative none none whatsoever and you know that's what they're going to make plays about that's what the mythology is always going to be what happened was two things one was social media and this is something that people forget Obama starts being president in 2009 and then comes the tea party and everybody thinks that that's because of his race or mostly because of his race but I always ask if John Edwards with his pretty boy white self but you know basically the same policies as Obama if he had become president would there have been no tea party with the Republicans have been nicer to John Edwards than Obama and some people immediately say oh yeah but I'm not sure they could defend why they're so sure I don't really think it would have been any different the tea party happened the way it did because in 2009 Twitter became default as did Facebook those things completely changed the contours of our lives even more than cell phones did so there was that then also from the vantage point of history it's becoming clear that in the 2000 teens on the American racing two things happened Trayvon Martin's murder and then Michael Brown's murder okay and those two things taught educated America and beyond that black people labor under the threat of being unjustifiably killed by stray or racist white cops and the saddest thing in the world is and I really mean this is sad is that it's become quite clear over the passage of time that the way both of those events were portrayed was complete myth and I was behind the people protesting both of those cases in the press at the time I now feel fooled just like we all feel fooled by bless his heart Colin Powell what happened to Trayvon Martin was not that he was killed unjustifiably by George Zimmerman it was a it was an unfortunate episode but Trayvon Martin was also a very different person than were led to think and then also with Mike Brown it was a lie it's just a complete lie for reasons we'll never know he kept on charging at that police officer the idea that Darren Brown just shot this guy dead with his hands up in the air is is false and yet those two things I'll just point out that Obama's Justice Department headed by Eric Holder himself African-American actually did an exhaustive investigation of the Michael Brown killing and came to the conclusion that you just yeah articulated and yet the myth will never die I hear black men on the street talking about Mike Brown to this hands up on some level that happened there's going to be a movie I'm sure having said that I mean it was useful I think the brown incident in particular did kind of reveal a system of peonage that whole communities particularly poor communities often disproportionately black were held under when you look at places like Ferguson where you know the tickets the amount of tickets that that cops would give out for speeding and other kinds of violations to gin up their own budget that was a useful outcome yeah that was real and their things their times when something is going on there's a racial disparity where it really does need to have the whistle blown on it and so for example Stop and Frisk in New York City had gone way way too far I wrote about that often made a lot of people mad yeah you can't you can't wish that away there just comes a time when you have to get rid of any ideology you might have yeah that had to go and with Ferguson yeah you learned about how unjust just policing in general and all the fines being levied were but the thing is the level of fury the level of property destruction that happened in Ferguson was about Mike Brown the level of destruction and fury was not about people getting a lot of tickets and spending a night in jail there could have been a more constructive way of addressing those things or if it is that the only way that we can get at those real things is to tell a big lie about one that's really a sad way of looking at how sociopolitical change has to happen you write in the book about and I want to try and understand this a little bit better because I'm not sure I was getting it fully you write about how blacks have a damaged sense of self based on you know centuries of just you know unfair treatment and whatnot and that that leads them to be more likely to adopt a kind of noble victim status can you talk a little bit about that because it you know I and the reason why I ask this is because it seems to me that a lot of the rhetoric of black empowerment and this is going back to even people like Booker T. Washington but certainly more recently is about you know not not struggling vainly but actually overcoming things and accomplishing things and I think about it in other and I realize there are you know serious differences between other immigrant groups and blacks but you know it seems there's a lot of similarities and that it's you know it's you know ascendant groups valorize success not failure but you seem to be saying that blacks are kind of stuck in a permanent failure mode yeah and only for about the past 50 years that was not the case until the sea change that we talked about in between 60 and 70 but yeah it's that and I don't want to make it sound too poetic about the damaged black soul it can be hard to have pride in black history it's one thing to say some things about sojourner truth etc but it's another thing to perhaps think wow there was all of this destruction there was this pain families were broken up we were always down on the bottom and we tried and we tried that can be a hard history to be as proud of as we might like so one way to feel proud is to say that we are people who survive while we're dealing with white racism all the time so what there is to be proud of about being black is that we're survivors that we work under a burden that other people don't I find that perfectly natural and it means that what you're doing technically is embracing the victimization mindset which is just you know the the tattletail person but if it can make you feel good and if it can give you a sense of group membership then you'll do it only though does this make sense when you're not really a victim this is something that is especially embraced by black people who really pretty much have it all taken care of and then you can pretend that for example you endure racism every day every day every day as I see people putting on facebook no you probably don't but it makes you feel good to cast yourself as somebody who labors under that kind of a burden humanity is a weird thing and that's what you see with black people of that type and that persists even in a culture where you know black culture is you know in many of its kind of manifestations is idolized in american culture you know people want to be black in a way that among white ethnic groups i think only irish people actually come close to that there's i've been a lot of white people and even some black and asian people who want to be irish if they can pick their ethnicity but you know blackness is actually often sought after or or at least you know various kinds of uh aspects of it yeah the usual suspects find that inconvenient and so they'll say that it's only superficial that it's about music and speech styles and you know the art to an extent but that still we have the problem with the cops still we have the problem with the wealth gap etc and that's not a ridiculous point but i do think that we tend to miss because it's been so subtle that the culture is much browner than it used to be and the idea that america is united in a kind of hatred and contempt for blackness that really doesn't correspond to our modern situation um these days for example i very minor example i was listening to the cast album of the musical annie in the car yesterday because i had my six and nine year old girls in the car you are just throwing your privilege at me in lower manhattan without a car or without daughters for that matter okay so where where does this take us where does the story go this is going to go that the girl who played annie in 1977 is this very white girl and she's chirping and i remember thinking it's interesting that annie now lives with almost the default choice being for any national annie that annie is brown at this point there has been a black annie on tv and nobody batted an eye and you kind of figure why not she's an orphan it's it's the depression it makes sense and i was thinking that was not the case 30 years ago no black annie that would have been completely bizarre you know from a sort of thing from a libertarian point of view of course uh the the take on annie is daddy warbucks is the hero because he hates franklin resuel right so you know as did the creator of the cartoon of the comic strip i didn't know he did too how did um uh how did um how does any of this factor into also the like what is blackness at this point because it's not as if multiracial you know i mean you know there are vastly more interracial couples your children i believe are of next race right and which is like a white white black yeah um so how will they see themselves or you know have we loosened up categories it was in the late 90s for the first time that the us census actually allowed a kind of other and multiracial category um without kind of you know you know horrible kind of motivations behind it but you know is blackness um as tight a category as it used to be or shouldn't we be in a phase now where we're all i mean we're everybody's doing 23 and me and we're we're understanding that we're made up by many different types of people how does that kind of thing intersect with the current discussions of blackness and and wokeness well why this gets tricky is because there's a certain kind of person who because of this thing that i'm calling a religion is hopelessly devoted to the idea that the essence of blackness is laboring under this oppression from whites even if it's abstract and you have to show that you know that racism exists and so you have to you have to insist that brown people are enduring it even if they don't know it but the reality is that especially as we start producing new generations those category memberships are going to have to fray and i come from we come from a time when the mixed kid was mixed the idea was that they were going to have to accept as they got older that they were black in effect and that made sense in 1975 there was less room to maneuver in the culture that's not true now and i think some people hearing me say that are thinking that i mean that i don't like blackness or that i'm ambivalent about it but i just think that the category is beginning to not make sense and that includes with my daughters i don't know if they when they're 40 are going to identify as black women as opposed to just mutt women growing up in an upper middle class world where everybody is a different flavor and you know what they're basically just becoming is you know modestly affluent american urban kids and i think to myself of i'm not going to say who it was but an actress who is white black a very prominent actress was doing an interview where she talked about having an opportunity to express her blackness in a certain setting and the truth is with this actress that she plays racially indeterminate characters they're often supposed to be italian you don't she doesn't read as african-american in any particular superficial way and i remember thinking i wonder what she thinks of as this blackness that she expresses and i worry these days and i don't know anything about her i don't know her personally but i worry these days that when people say blackness what they mean is roughly not being buttoned up like episcopalian whites that blackness means that you turn it out so to speak but many people can be expressive i worry that blackness is thought of as roughly jamming that and i mean this as more than just dancing but that there's something that black people are in touch with in terms of rhythm and that it's that and that blackness is not being too exact and we're seeing that in so many educational materials and i think it runs throughout the culture to be black is to not be precise is to not be responsible for getting the exact answer you're you're holistic you you have a rhythm you jam you don't sit in one place it's about the beat which i worry that that blackness is primitive you know yeah well and you i mean you you underscore this point at various uh passages in the book but i mean it's as if what has been essentialized now is kind of the worst uh stereotypes of blackness from a hundred years ago it's a strong thurmond would love this stuff yeah now people are talking about it and using the word intersectionality i don't think strong thurman's daughter his black daughter does she identify as multiracial you know that was a very interesting case because i think she was perfectly normal and the black punditocracy did not know know what to do with it strong thurman basically disavowed her and left her this you know as you used to say back in the day mulatto person who lived her life she was a teacher and she she got past it she lived her life every finding out about her around the year 2000 a certain kind of black person was waiting for her to say that her life had been indelibly stamped and ruined by this white man who produced and then didn't want to avow his paternity of her in public but she just kind of thought i'm a human being i'm living and she probably had some awkward encounters here and there but she wasn't living by it and luckily i get the feeling she didn't strike me as a an especially self-aware person so she couldn't even pretend she's just being herself and wondering why everybody's paying so much attention i think that's the normal way people deal with trauma as opposed to what we're encouraged to do today yeah talk a little bit about that i mean how much of the kind of racial discourse is is part of this larger um yeah i don't know if it's valorization or you know kind of uh belief and in trauma that everything is trauma i mean it seems as if you you talked about surviving and the minimal self from the early eighties christopher lash has a passage about how the term survivor slipped out of post-war concentration camp narratives of people who survived you know death camps in nazi germany and some gulags and then by you know by the end of the 60s it had become ubiquitous for everything uh betty for dan talked about um being in an affluent you know a suburban housewife was in a you know a form of concentration camp uh survivorship had gone from being something specific to the holocaust to something more general obviously black history in america has multiple holocausts or things that are equivalent to it but you know we're in an age now where being a survivor being traumatized and reliving that trauma and kind of making people around you aware of your trauma seems to be very much how we talk about things um does that is that prior to the black discussion or how is it informing it the black discussion goes right along with that there were psychologists who started doing sessions with between white people and black people where white people's responsibility was to sign on to the idea that they were creating what we're now calling trauma among black people and that now lives on in the model of diversity dei initiatives that robin de angelo is part of in her book white fragility and yeah it starts out as a useful way to call attention to the fact that people are hurting it's an analogy so of course somebody who's been teased in school hasn't suffered the way somebody did in the holocaust but you can say that both people are survivors but once that settles in and people stop processing it as extreme you do have this usage of the term kind of like the way we use the term racism that stops being really terribly useful and sometimes can be almost manipulative and even destructive of a person because if you are instructed to think that whenever somebody hurts your feelings a little bit you've suffered a trauma and you're a survivor well if that's the way you're going to feel about it you're not going to enjoy life very much unless you basically live in a basement or are an astonishingly boring person stuff is going to happen to you and we now teach that you're not supposed to just brush yourself off you're supposed to call attention to yourself as a victim and that's supposed to be okay because people are especially when people are descendants of african slaves i'm not sure i see the logic in it but that's what we're being told let's talk about your the sections of the book where you don't merely kind of piss on you know woke activism woke racist you talk about ways to you know make things better for black americans and at a certain point you suggest three planks to make america better and they are simply and the drug war teach reading properly and get past the idea that everyone should go to college let's run through these quickly um you know first uh end the drug war how is that you know why do you say that's a concrete thing that will actually help black americans because it'll eliminate the black market that you can make half of a living on if there's no black market selling hard drugs on the street you can't do that you can't drop out of school and do that you can't do that after high school there's no way to avoid getting some kind of legal work and that's not always going to be fun when you're from an underserved community because life is hard and if you've grown up somewhere where you aren't taught well and you aren't taught how to do anything you've got a problem which means that not only do you end the drug war because it destroys black communities by creating that black market temptation that sends people to prison and often to you know death but then you also want to have something to catch those men those men should be caught in a system that cherishes and funds and values vocational education with the idea being that that person instead of keeping the wolf from the door by selling drugs and not being sure what he's going to do next year will learn how to fix air conditioners and heaters and make a thoroughly middle class living for the rest of his life so that's that's getting past the idea that everyone should go to college um yes yeah no the idea that what that person needs to do is after high school go spend four years expanding their mind in ways that we know frankly don't much expand the minds even of most of us that needs to go college is something that should be a choice for some people the way it was before 1945 and the gi bill the default for i suspect what most people would rather do is after high school go train for a career just go right into it and go do it and if you want to go to college later in your life that should be allowed but it shouldn't be considered the default right of passage i cringe whenever i hear anybody talking to an audience about poor people and saying that college needs to be made more available no vocational school needs to be more available would you be okay if your daughters say hey you know what dad i uh you know you're pretty smart but you're boring i want to be an air conditioning repairman you know what i'd have to adjust to it but as long as they were going to make a living and they were going to be good at it yeah definitely all of us probably when we have working people come to our houses fixing stuff you marvel at their skill somebody who fixes your car especially with cars being what they are nowadays there's nothing undignified about that yes of course i expect my girls to go to college and get degrees after that and become me but no i would be if one of them said i want to be an electrician and i'm going to wire houses sure that's it's practically an art yeah um talk a little bit about the teaching read teach reading properly because this i i totally agree with the uh concept but uh how did you come up with that as because there are only three things you say this is what we'll do you know this is what will help uh you know most in a most cost effective way black america teach reading properly yeah teach it properly the reason that sounds so wonky and i think it sounds like i must have some sort of particular commitment to pedagogy or small children in school are you i know you are you are invested in hooked on phonics three or something like that yeah or something it's not that it's that i know from for various almost random reasons that something that keeps kids especially ones not from booklined homes from engaging with school is being taught reading wrong it started with the whole controversy over whether ebonics should be used in the schools in oakland in 1997 and if you really if you were part of that controversy you learned about problems with reading teaching in general that would lead anybody to think that the issue was black dialect that that wasn't the problem you wrote a whole book basically showing that black dialect is like a really effective form of communication that and i also wrote another book back then saying that black dialect is not the reason that poor black kids have trouble learning to read standard english is that they weren't being taught to read right at all and so if you've got a good phonics program you've got a kid who will not around eight years old turn away from school because they just find reading too difficult and like i say in the book i'm not sure how many people have the experience who are reading this book of knowing somebody who's about 25 years old grew up you know the hard way or maybe even just slightly hard way and i've known black people like this there are white people like it too they weren't my acquaintances but somebody where you're at the restaurant and they're moving their lips when they read the menu because it's hard and you know menus are tough to read and here they are having about as much of a challenge with the menu as most of us would have if the menus all in french or spanish like we know the language pretty well but you really don't want to read that much of it and you look at somebody like that and almost always it's somebody who went to a school where they basically just threw some kid books at them and had them take it in by osmosis that's not how you teach people how to read and so it really worries me because disproportionately black kids suffer from that so i really do think have kids learn to read so they're less likely to drop out of school then you have them when they leave school no black market within the neighborhood where you hang out with the buddies and you know that's i completely understand why people would choose that but that shouldn't be available and then what should be available is good solid vocational training so that they can go out into the world and lead the kinds of productive lives that often their grandfathers did i'm modeling this on black communities in big cities and say 1949 that was no paradise by any means but most black men worked legal jobs it was better that was good i mean do you think that the issues with kind of black achievement for lack of a better term it's really that black men are not are not holding up their end of the bargain well i wouldn't say they aren't holding up their end of the bargain because they are you know just actors within a system where they're modeling their behavior upon one another's i have a hard time seeing assigning blame in a situation like that you speak the language you know you if you grow up with men doing or not doing certain things big surprise you're going to be like them it's not it's not your fault but i think that there does need to be a focus on what happens to especially men in poor black communities the women in question have fewer problems in that sense we need to focus more on child care that's something that i could add as a fourth plank but with the women the employment issue is less of an issue because the typical woman in a community like that does not sell drugs on the side that is a male dominated activity and i should say it's not that most men in those communities sell drugs on the side but enough do that it affects the whole tenor of the community what are the rhetorical and discursive strategies for dealing with the elect as you call them because this is also something and i i've heard you speak about this in public settings as well you know you you have some pointers because you say you're not going to convince you know you're not going to be able to have a really good you know meal with with robin de angelo and get her to be like hey you know what i was kind of wrong about this stuff so how do you and what's the best way to deal with it yeah i it's hard i felt bad writing this in the book but there's a certain kind of person who thinks that battling power differentials is supposed to be central to everything that we do and think that's what all of this is the power differentials for them are usually about race but the idea is that those power differentials exist and until they don't everything else is fiddling while rome burns or it's unjust to focus on it because we must battle these power differentials that kind of person if you disagree with them calls you a white supremacist and nowadays they can do it on social media so that's what they're going to do they are no more to blame than the black man in the underserved community who sells drugs on the side it's what they see they're upset and they're going to say it on social media just like all of us say all sorts of things on social media they haven't taught this to one another but they're going to call you a white supremacist there are two things that we have to do one is we have to get used to being called that name and walking on instead of thinking that to be called a racist on social media stains us like ester print and to that kind of person needs to be told no i think a lot of us especially since june 2020 and george floyd have thought that when that person comes along talking about social justice and hegemony and intersectionality and tells you that we're going to change all of our procedures and if you disagree we're going to call you names on social media or get you fired to push you out the window our job is to say yes because if we don't say yes there must be something wrong with us no that kind of person needs to sit down not leave they need to sit back down at the table where they were and that means that for example the most illustrative one of my vignettes i think is suppose you have a group of people maybe students maybe faculty who think that your school should be turned into an anti-racism academy with that permeating every subject permeating how admissions are done permeating how hireings are done and even necessitating possibly the firing of people who work and even how people respond in class who gets exactly on things yeah and this is this is happening in some schools the people calling for that need to be told no they don't need to be abused but just no we don't agree with you that battling power differentials should be the center of our endeavor here it'll be one of about a dozen things that we do it will not be the center and if you don't like it you have to leave and i don't care what you call me that kind of person would be really thrown by being stood up to in that way and they will go on twitter and they will yell white supremacist and if you just stand your ground then i think we can return things to the way they were two glorious years ago the hard hard left even despite how mean they can be are needed in this room we are needed we need to see where we could go but these things happen slowly and what they're doing is saying because george floyd was killed and there's a racial reckoning we get what we want and if we don't get what we want we're going to call you terrible names in public the response to that is no they're not any more right than anybody else has been who thought they had the solution to everything although they are remarkably effective i'm thinking back to i guess it was last summer or maybe yeah i think it was 2020 when princeton university essentially you know the president of princeton university said hey you know what we are like an you know unbelievably racist institution weirdly the trump education department called their bluff and said if you are that racist we have to investigate you and look at you know polling federal funding from you you're like a segregation academy the one good thing for me that came out of the trump administration was that move because it showed how utterly fake a lot of this stuff is and princeton unfortunately has been the site of an egregious amount of performance on this kind of issue where there are people who need to be told simply no uh john has two ruckers men talking i think we can appreciate or we can agree that princeton gets whatever it deserves they know and they should have twice as bad outcomes who are your um you know you are a linguist by trade who are your heroes and linguistics uh and then who are your heroes and kind of your you know as you write more about broader kind of social issues particularly dealing with blackness uh you know who are the people who who inspired you to to start thinking the way you do shall be steel is the person who changed me um on race issues because he showed me that you can feel the way i do and not be crazy he really that was my inspiration um in terms of who inspires me otherwise it's not it's not the list that many people would expect i know i'm supposed to give this noble list of black writers it's not it's not it i really like james baldwin i believe i've read everything he ever wrote so i can definitely say that and that's not display that is the truth but my other favorite writers are jack barzan the super duper polymathic intellectual i'm glad to say he was at columbia just how much he knew and how gracefully he expressed it and steven j gold you know he he had his lapses just as we all do but i loved his writing i love the way he thought i've read almost everything that he ever wrote except for that long one that nobody reads but other than that yeah those them and in linguistics linguistics is a weird little i have my favorite linguists they're not famous um i would not say that gnome chomsky was one of my favorite linguists but some of the best ones include people like marianne mithoon and and scott delancey i'd say i'm gonna rattle off these people that are not known outside of linguistics but i have now their reputations will suffer by being associated with you forever so i'm doing the woke mob's work for them but you know actually um steven pinker is you know has always been one of my gods in that department another linguist who i really admire although she doesn't always think i'm right is um sarah thomason there there are many who i model myself after but they tend not to be the ones that you see you know making national headlines to go back to baldwin for a second he's he's a fascinating character who fell out of fashion i mean he was a huge cultural figure in the 50s and for a chunk of the 60s he was eclipsed by you know black power radicals you know eldritch cleaver in the beginning of soul on ice and one of really one of the most despicable homophobic uh just awful kind of essays you know literally or figuratively rather you know sodomizes james baldwin because he says that's all baldwin did he just bent over for western culture and whiteness um is baldwin as relevant or rather not as he is relevant but does there need to be his critique of american society which i find you know incredibly powerful for when he was writing it is it time also to recognize that the power of his writing you know it it's in the past it doesn't really describe contemporary america i find him to be the most compelling most talented and in his way most polymathic describer of the way it used to be so whenever i read him i think this is the way people today seem to think it still is but this is somebody who actually lived that america and i like his general curiosity he he spread out wide he thought for himself um i don't think he's always right but he is a genuine thinker and he was not interested in that cleaver idea of whiteness as something to reject out of hand with the notion that true blackness is partly this sort of hyper masculinity that that whole thing is a perfect example of the sea change between 1960 and 1970 and one of the saddest pieces is where baldwin writes about the response from cleaver and he's heard he's surprised he would have thought cleaver would have been his brother and instead all cleaver could see was you know this fey little man who likes old white books that was unfortunate and that was the new flavor of the times then do you think and i and i say this with your with your daughters in mind and other people other younger people who are multiracial do i mean is there a way to kind of invoke an american ideal you know maybe it shouldn't be american maybe it should be universal but that what is interesting to you know kind of update crev cores you know what then is this new man this american to you know actually that an american is anybody who lives in america and is an amalgamation of a lot of different forces a lot of different races a lot of different ethnicities and experiences into you know really kind of celebrating the fact that we're all mongrels uh that we're all mutts i mean do we need that kind of new ideal to kind of pull past you know what seems over the past 10 years to be a real regression into old finite categories that you know most of american history were we were trying to get past but now we seem to be locked into those american this is a challenge because on paper it's wonderful to say that we're gonna be mongrels and we're gonna be defined by these abstract principles but in real life people are tribal people want something to celebrate and to to yop about as i've seen it put yawp and so part of what we see in the black identity is that you want to have something to rally around and for black america a lot of that is rallying around being victims of white oppression and therefore a success story in a way because we do what we do despite all of this oppression that is partly because americanness alone can sometimes seem too abstract but for a lot of black leaders black think thought leaders the idea that we would just think of ourselves as americans doesn't work because we're supposed to primarily think of ourselves as living in danger of being mulled by the police living in danger of being hurt by a microaggression and i think that's not healthy especially given that these things are so much less extreme in their force for most of us than they were say 50 years ago and before but yeah american first black second for many black thought leaders that's disloyal and naive you should think of yourself as black first and the americanness is kind of an abstraction that you mostly feel when you go to africa no i think it's opposed these days i think we need to reverse it again um you are not yourself insulated from uh you know for lack of a better term cancellation right you um you write in the book that uh you know various people will look at you and just be like oh well you you're insulated you can say what you're saying knowing that you'll never really suffer consequences but that's not quite true right you're not tenured faculty at columbia you're not in a tenure situation there and you are um you were recently hired at the new york times which is kind of a sign that maybe the times isn't as monolithic as you think but i assume that you you know you got to wonder when is uh nicole hannah jones going to finally get you fired well the things we're not allowed to talk about it so i have to be circumspect but i am always aware that the mob could come for me they certainly could come for me the color of my skin might help me a little bit but it would only help me so much and i'm prepared i could lose jobs however as far as i'm concerned for one thing just mystically i have a way of landing on my feet i have been for about the past 30 years but even if i didn't i would rather sell pencils on the street or have to live on somebody's couch then not say what i have to say i really do feel at this point that i have a duty because when i first started writing about race i was 30 and people would say that i was too young to have any authority not only am i just a linguist but what does he know he's only been alive 30 years if i were 80 it would be that i'm from another time and i don't know what's going down right now if i'm 56 i'm right in between and so part of the reason i wrote woke racism i started it when i was 55 i guess is that i thought i had one i'm black two a middle aged three i think these things i have to write this book right now and yeah i could not have it that my words weren't out there and lord forbid anybody meet me thinking that i think the way you know ebram kendi etc think which is an assumption that was often made about me before i came out so to speak reasonably you know most me's do think that way so yeah i the mob has come from me around the edges some little things have happened within linguistics that don't matter but yeah i am not immune it could happen to me anytime i'm always aware of it which is part of why i'm working myself to death because i'm kind of insulating myself from the disappearance of one of those jobs but i get the feeling i'm going to be here for a while well um i i think we'll leave it there i want to thank uh john mcwartier for talking to reason i also i think john edwards wants to thank you for reminding people that he existed and that he might even still be alive i'm not sure off the top of my head but uh john mcwartier's new book is woke racism how a new religion has betrayed black america john thanks for talking to reason thank you