 Anti-racism, as currently configured, has gone a long way from what used to be considered intelligent and sincere civil rights activism. Today, it's a religion, and I don't mean that as a rhetorical faint. I mean that it actually is what any naive anthropologist would recognize as a faith. If advocates of wokeness, critical race theory and anti-racism seem to be acting like religious zealots who must crush all heretics, that's because they are. Argued Columbia University linguist John McWhorter had a 2018 debate at the SOHO Forum. For example, the idea that the responsible white person is supposed to attest to their white privilege and realize that it can never go away and feel eternally guilty about it, that's original sin right there. McWhorter first explored this idea of anti-racism as a flawed new religion in a 2015 essay in The Daily Beast. He's expanding the concept into a book tentatively titled The Elect, due out in 2022 that he's serializing on Substack. It lays out his argument about the misguided religious fervor undergirding the anti-racist movement championed by people such as Robin D'Angelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Meanwhile, McWhorter's latest volume to hit store shelves is Nine Nasty Words, a study of how curse words such as fuck and the n-word became commonplace, unsayable, or something in between. Reason talked with McWhorter about the shifting status of curse words and accusations of systemic racism in contemporary America. Thank you for talking to Reason. Thank you for having me. Let's start with a simple question. What's the elevator pitch for Nine Nasty Words? And I guess we're assuming it's an elevator that just has two people at it. The elevator pitch for Nine Nasty Words is not why do we curse? The book isn't about that because if you think about it, that's worth about three pages. We know why we curse. What it's about is the words that we use in order to be profane and how they got that way, how they change over time, and where profanity might be going. That's what the elevator pitch is. That is we need a roadmap for profanity, so we're always a couple of steps ahead of it. So can I ask you, because it gave me immense pleasure, the opening anecdote is about how Babe Ruth's father wrote in a court document that he had fucked Mrs. Ruth and she had asked for it, which as a baseball fan, and as an Irish-American, I was like, wow, this is kind of an important part of history. I did not learn in Catholic school. But could you recite George Carlin's seven words you can never say on TV? Well, a good while ago, Mr. Carlin told us that there's seven words that you can't say, and I can read them off here. They were shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. And what's interesting about that list is that it's actually a little bit archaic now. There's only one word on there that is conceivably still unsayable on TV or anywhere else. Yeah. And as opposed to, have you ever called anybody a cocksucker, for example? I'm 55. I don't think I have ever used that word. Well, you've got that to look forward to, you know? That's what the golden years are for, Joe. You know, tits, you know, it's not the word that, you know, you're going to pop out at the dinner table usually, but his sense of what these words are is different than what ours would be. And part of what Nine Nasty Words is about is how our sense of what profanity is has changed over time. And of course, he was also talking about, you know, you can't say on TV or radio, right? Because those were government-regulated broadcast, TV broadcast networks were regulated, you know, a place where, you know, the government had to say about it, but it is fascinating. So, you know, can you talk a little bit about how certainly fuck mother fucker variations on that have become ubiquitous to a point where we're two public intellectuals? It would have been a big deal. I mean, Norman Mailer, you know, didn't even know how to spell the word fuck. It is novel naked in the dead. It's fuck, but so how did fuck become okay to say in all sorts of circumstances? Well, it's part of something larger, which is that it used to be that profanity, as in the grand old four letter words, were about religion and about sex and excretion in the body. And so damn and hell are considered or were considered profane. I mean, frankly, it's at the point where they barely figure as profanity in the book because they're just not that potent anymore, but those were about religion. Then you have various words, the fuck, shit, etc., which came to be considered particularly nasty, especially in about the 1400s. That some of it has to do with the Reformation, believe it or not. And the idea that you're not supposed to refer to matters of the body openly in that way. Now, what's happened with fuck is that while as recently as say, well, I don't know how recent it is, but 100 years ago, Maxwell Perkins, the famous editor, would not say fuck. He would only write it down on his desk calendar and show it to you. And this is somebody who's publishing people like Hemingway who said it in real life all the time, but he really had to become famous before he could even use it in print at all. And so the fuck becomes something different because what we have today is a completely different set of curses, although we don't call them that. Over about the past 50 years, what's become profane to us? What our society is hung up on is slurs against groups. And so what was fuck to Maxwell Perkins today to us is words like the N-word, as even I sitting here with my black self and inclined to euphemize it as because of the way the word's been treated or the word that refers to gay men that begins with F or that horrible word that begins with C, four letters that refers to women. Those are our profanity, which means that fuck now is not what an anthropologist would recognize as profane. Fuck is just salty. So what does it, you know, is it a sign of social progress? And this may be beyond your purview, but is it a sign of social progress that, you know, we now do not allow the N-word or the C-word or the F-word to be brooded about in everyday conversation? I definitely think so. I mean, it will show that I'm an atheist and therefore maybe have a certain bias that I think that it's progress that we no longer take words like damn and hell so seriously. I will say with more confidence that I think it's progress that we're not so uptight talking about the body. And we're at the point now where the words that we really don't want our children to hear and we might be happy if our children never even use as adults are slurs against groups. Now, one can fetishize to a point. I feel it's gotten to that point with the N-word. Nevertheless, the basic impulse, which is that the worst thing that you can say is a slur against a group, that's evidence of social, moral, and even intellectual progress. I think it's a mark of sophistication that we're now more worried about the N-word than about, say, shit. We've matured. You know, one of the most, the book, Nine Nasty Words, is an incredible kind of sorty. You know, I don't know, maybe not a military mission, but it's an overflight of, you know, of the past 50 years worth of pop culture. And you point out how it shows that we're not just, you know, in common circulation, but we're in the top 10, you know, Norman Lear's shows, like The Jeffersons, the spin-off of All in the Family, has a huge number of moments where Weezy or George Jefferson are actually invoking the N-word. What's going on where, you know, and I don't know that The Jeffersons was about a black family, you know, that famously moves out of Queens next to working-class Archie Bunker to a, what is it, a high-rise? A deluxe apartment in the sky on the East Side. Yeah, even though they couldn't quite make it to the Upper East Side, I guess. But, you know, what was going on that that was seen as progressive, really, that people were willing to do real talking in that kind of context. And now, you know, I, after reading the book, I went and searched on YouTube, half expecting these to be blocked because of, you know, the N-word. But they're not, they're out there. What do we do with that? Is that, you know, is there anything to do with that other than kind of be kind of puzzled by it? What's interesting is that the Norman Lear sitcoms were celebrated for having real language in many ways. And they were actually depicting the way people really talk. And it's funny that that happened then in the 70s. And today we are so much more euphemistic. That shows how very much the culture has changed in terms of what it's hung up on. No longer excretion, but slurs. And so what you're referring to, it's funny. I've been watching my way through the Jeffersons, which is like 250 of those damn things. Watching my way through it because of the pandemic. Are you, do you like Lionel I or Lionel II? You know, Lionel, well, he's still alive, so I should be careful. Mike Evans was a really good actor. I mean, he did a great job with that character. Lionel II is a stage actor. And I find that his expressions are too large. I don't believe him as the Jeffersons child. And it's, I know we're not supposed to be talking about this, but with Berlinda Tolbert as Jenny, it's interesting. Mike Evans and Berlinda Tolbert really worked well together, which they had done a production of Raisin in the Sun. Whereas with Damon Evans, she starts popping her eyes and rolling around to it. He was not as good as the other one. But I've been watching my way through the whole thing. And what's interesting is that not only does George use the N word, occasionally the way black people use it, and not always to mean buddy. Sometimes he means the bad kind of black person. But there's one scene where Tom Willis says, and I am going to say what he says. George calls him a honking. He says, well, George, what if I called you nigger? And it's fine. I remember seeing that episode when I was about 13. He's referring to it. It's not a big deal. Today, you wouldn't show a white actor doing that on the equivalent show. Or if you did, it would be announced six weeks ahead. And there'd be all of these op-eds about it. It would be like showing the Prophet Muhammad in an episode of South Park. Exactly. It would be close to the national conversation. Yeah, that shows where it's gotten to. Because, yeah, the Jeffersons could be honest. Today, we can't. And that's because the N word is our profanity. It is our taboo today. Is that a problem per se? Or is that simply an indication of a different set of cultural mores that actually reflect the fact? Because I'm also thinking there's a Jeffersons episode. And I apologize to my audience, which I think has come to expect this type of thing. But there is an episode of the Jeffersons where an old navy buddy of George, who he hasn't seen in decades, shows up and is transgender. And so on the one hand, the Jeffersons may be trafficking in real talk about racial dimensions. But then this is, and almost every 70s and early 80s sitcom had an episode where a transgender person shows up and hilarity ensues. Is it a sign that social progress is happening, but it's always uneven? Is it actually not progress when we can no longer talk about those things that actually are, I mean, when things become unsayable? I think that we have gone further than I would prefer on the N word in particular. Oddly, I think that society had reached its maximal sophistication about the N word. In roughly the 90s, I was doing media interviews in the 90s. Actually, I was doing one media interview in the 90s, where I remember it was me, somebody white and a white interviewer. And we were talking about what I now call the N word. And we were openly saying the actual word with taste, not over and over again. But the idea was that, of course, we're going to be able to say the word in order to explain what we're talking about. That was considered perfectly ordinary. I still have it on cassette. And I don't think that was backwards. Something started happening right around then, where we have this new idea that you're just not supposed to utter that sequence of sounds at all. And if you do, you get in really, really big trouble. I personally feel that that depicts Black people, such as myself, as more delicate than we are. It's at the point where sometimes I'm a little embarrassed that we're policing the word that strongly, because the implication is that if anybody says nigger in any way, it's going to hurt me and remind me that my great-great-grandfather was a slave and about Jim Crow and about redlining. I feel a bit infantilized by that. However, I didn't feel infantilized by the word being prescribed as a word that you ever hurl at anybody. My sense is that there's a difference between using the word and referring to it. And there's some people who insist that if we keep on allowing people to refer to the word, then there's this slippery slope. And pretty soon, everybody will just start hurling it as an epithet again. I'm not sure what model of social development that expectation is based on. Slippery slope can be misused. And I think that a lot of people are being, I'd have to say, studiously paranoid about that. It's one way that I wish we could go back to 1995. And there aren't many, but it's one. And you're right about those episodes. You're reminding me of that trans theme in 70s sitcoms where they would start out serious, as the Jefferson's pretty much does. Then the second act has some guy walking on in drag and everybody's laughing and they never bring it back to the serious part. That was a backwards aspect of things. But interestingly, the Jefferson's was ahead on the N word. How do your students feel? I mean, you have been a college professor now for what, 20, 25 years? Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I realized that makes you feel old, but at least you don't look old. But how do students respond to this kind of stuff? I was talking with a friend of mine who is younger than me. And we were talking about Huckleberry Finn, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And what was kind of interesting to me, and I have a background in literary studies, but I don't think any single work is indispensable. I hate when people are like, oh, how dare you get rid of this work and put in this other work or anything. But she said that her memories of Huckleberry Finn, of the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was that it's that book with the N word in it. And it seems to me like something has gone wrong when that's the recollection of people who still read the book in high school and college. And that's kind of what you remember about it. And it reminds me, of course, that the classics, you never want to teach the classics in high school or college because then they become the enemy and nobody really wants to embrace them. But how are your students dealing with this? Or how have they changed over time? Are they leading the charge to say, hey, I don't want to hear that word? Or are they following something that is being pushed on them by elites? You know, it's funny, Nick. I don't know that I've ever come across a reason to use it or not use it. I don't happen to have taught Huckleberry Finn. I teach about language and I can say that I curse like a pirate in front of my students. I know I tell them in some of the early classes, I'm sorry, but you know, I don't censor myself. And if anything, they think it's funny. And then they start cursing to when they talk and I think it's great. I have had parents visit classes and I said, you have to tell your father that I'm crazy and that he has to expect that we're going to talk the way you say that I am a crazy motherfucker and what comes out of this mouth, you know, yes, I actually say, but not the slurs. Obviously, I would never do that. And I think, you know, 20 years ago, I would have said nigger in front of a classroom today. I would never dream of it. And I do think today's students would have a different feeling about it than the ones before even back before. I would have only used it in reference. I probably did, but today I would censor myself because sensibilities have changed so much. But in general, when I talk about profanity, which sometimes I have to for my linguistics classes, I say, I'm going to say this word one time and I'm not going to say it anymore, but I want to make sure you know, and I'll say something like the word is cunt. And then we'll talk about it and it has an interesting evolution. I'll say it that one time. And I figure I should be allowed to do that. I would do that with the n word if I had to, I think. And as a matter of fact, I once did. And a kind of a jocular white guy said, see, you just get to do that because you're black. And I said, yeah, you're right. I can get away with it. And you're also a professor. Yeah, it's like, do you feel like these kinds of linguistic prescriptions? Because you hear this a lot mostly from people on the right and that kind of question of like white people in particular being like, oh, you know, we're supposed to be the land of the free, but I'm not at liberty to use the n word or the c word or the f word, the other f word, et cetera. Do these proscriptions on certain types of words, do they get in the way of actual learning and discussion? No, I don't think so. I think that the prescriptions can be a nuisance if over, over prescribed for various reasons. I don't think that we're losing any knowledge by having it that we have to say the n word instead of the actual word. Where the problem does come in, though, is that the new strain, because there's a certain kind of person who feels a certain comfort in being offended, I hate to say that, but it's true, is that you're not even supposed to say negro. I know of three anecdotes of professors being brought up before the gods for saying negro as it was written in some now aging texts out of an idea that that too is a slur because some black people would rather not hear it. That takes it too far for me, but in general, the idea that there are words that one does not use and that these are words that are used to injure people, the idea that we don't do that is great. You look at an old movie where people can do that sort of thing so easily. You think about what the past was like. It's good that we're beyond that, but I do think that there's an extent to which we end up dealing with a kind of performed delicacy that I don't particularly enjoy being assumed to be a part of, but as you know, that's just me and most black people in my position don't feel that way. Who am I to impose? But that's how I feel. Do you think, going back to that George Carlin set of words, the seven words, the C word is the one word that is arguably is still unsayable and certainly in Pleasant Company and things like that. In England or the British Isles, the C word is used by everybody all the time kind of as a stutter word and things like that. Is that an indication perhaps that women or that female equality has not gotten as far that we still might hear that more than we seem to hear the other F word or the N word? Well, you never know just which pathway a word might be taken down in terms of what it's gonna come to mean, in terms of what its sociological associations are gonna be and that C word that you're talking about has had a different pathway over there as opposed to here where C-U-N-T can practically mean buddy, it's tossed around, it's odd for us to hear it there. Whereas here, what has happened to that word is very much a sign of changing attitudes towards women and I think that is a good thing. I mean, that word is so poisonous that for the audiobook of Nine Nasty Words, I had to adjust a bit, especially because I'm black, I could say nigger a certain amount and I figured, okay, there you go. I could not say C-U-N-T over and over again. I thought if I were a woman listening to a male voice saying that over and over would just be noxious and so I pulled back on it as much as I could and I think that's a good thing. However, I don't think it means that sexism is more rife in England and Australia. There's a chance element to these things and it's just that C-U-N-T hasn't gone along for the ride but that's just partly that they have a slightly different take on words that refer to sex. And so for example, talk about sitcom trash from the 70s. They had their are you being served where they're in a department store and the middle-aged slightly pretentious Mrs. Slokum is always saying, well, getting up this early means havoc on my pussy and the audience goes crazy and then she has to say something that makes it clear that she's talking about her cat. That joke would never have gone in the United States at the time even with Norman Lear sitcoms being so honest nobody could have made a pussy joke on Maud. That would not have gotten by standards. All you get are the occasional mostly urban legends that this that kind of exchange happens with. Alternatively, Ja Ja Gabor, Eva Gabor, one of the Gabor sisters and Johnny Carson or Raka Walsh, the the joke being, you know, the actor shows up on the couch with a cat on her lap and she says, do you want to pet my pussy? And Johnny Carson says something along the lines of, well, you know, if you move your cat, I'd be happy to. And I don't know if they're true or not. But this is, you know, that's a whole great subgenre of urban legends which have to do with talk shows and game shows again from the 70s, a strange and wonderful decade if only because I was young at it. Because we were young and saw it. You know, what is the, you know, part of all of your work really takes place against the backdrop of immense social progress in your lifetime and your parents' lifetime, certainly going back to your grandparents. Why does it seem so difficult for people? And this is this is by way of intro into your other book project that you're working out on sub-stack. It's a fantastic read. But, you know, why does it seem so hard for people to accept that there is progress? Not that progress is absolute or complete, but, you know, the idea that, you know, we're in a better place than we were in 1970 on, you know, I'll say every level. I mean, like, unless you're George Wallace, you know, or Norman Mailer, both of whom are dead. But, you know, like, we're doing better as a society but that seems never to be able to be admitted, you know, in these kinds of discussions. It's the funniest thing because, yeah, I grew up very aware of what life had been like for Black people before I was born, which was 1965, which is kind of emblematic. You know, I'm born the year that the Voting Rights Act is passed and my parents raised me with an awareness of the way it used to be. By the early 90s, when I'm in my 20s, my sense of the trajectory was that I had been lucky enough to live on the other side of something really seismic and that things were much, much better and always getting better. And I knew there was what was being called an underclass at the time, but I thought things are infinitely better. It was a victory. Black people should be proud. And I gradually learned in the 90s that that is not the way most especially educated Black people felt and that I was considered peculiar and even irritating by many Black people and some White people by thinking that things were so much better than they used to be. I was supposed to think that things only changed in terms of people's manners. And I just, I couldn't accept that. There's a part of me that should have been a lawyer and the reason you and I are talking about this subject at all is that I just couldn't let it go. I thought these people are not crazy. It's not that they're crazy. It's not that they're manipulative. It's not that they're not intelligent. And yet they're seeing a whole different world than I do. And I think what it comes down to is this weird cocktail. It's that White people, really educated White people especially really enjoy the idea of showing that they're not racists. That's actually a victory in itself. I mean, think about how Archie Bunker would have felt about this sort of thing. But the 70s in particular where when the idea was not only that you get rid of segregation but that you're not supposed to be prejudice as people used to say. You're not supposed to be a bigot. And it worked. And I think many White people are very proud of themselves for that. And I think that it's slowly transmogrified into a kind of replacement for Protestantism as it eclipses where your grace is that you are not a racist. So you have White people who are ready to demonstrate this at the same time as you have Black people who after the Civil Rights Revolution are still haunted by insecurity because of how Black America was treated for almost 400 years. And if you are a human being seeking a sense of purpose and security and well-being and comfort, you might choose the victimization complex. Any human being can do this. But if you're a Black person, a particular way to do it is to exaggerate about racism and to found your sense of significance on being a victim of something now referred to abstractly as systemic racism, et cetera. And so there are many Black people who enjoy the condescension that I think comes from a lot of Whites in treating us as these delicate creatures. And so it becomes a kind of dance. Shelby Steel wrote about this better than I can ever say it way back in the early 90s. I read him at that time and I thought, this guy gets it and he clearly isn't crazy either. And so that's what it is. And so we're not allowed to admit how much better things have gotten. There's a certain kind of person and they are of all colors where if you point to the good news, they don't want to accept it. It's unpleasant for them to hear how much better things have gotten. And they're thinking that their job as moral actors is to find evidence to go against it. And that's a weird thing. I think that's probably unprecedented in human history for a group of people to not want to admit that things are better. We live in strange times, but that's what happened in the late 20th century in the United States. You know, the invocation of religion or religious impulse to some of this informs your controlling metaphor of the book project on Substock, The Elect. Can you, for those of us who are not versed in Protestant theology or Calvinism, I guess, could you talk a little bit about what the elect means and why you are choosing that term to talk about people who are kind of super woke, super politically correct, and reticent to acknowledge any kind of progress? Yeah, the elect, and I get that term from Joseph Bottom, it's not mine. The elect is my term for not just woke people. I might surprise some people lately, but I consider myself pretty woke. It's woke people who are mean. It's the nasty woke people. It's the nastiness that we've seen, especially since last summer during our so-called racial reckoning. And what I mean by the elect is they're people who seem to think of their purpose as being to demonstrate that they're not racist and to police the rest of us for racism and to defenestrate and shun people who they deem to be not anti-racist enough. And so their idea is that they're doing something that's maximally good for human kind. The idea is that to battle power differentials, and especially ones about race, is the paramount goal of the concerned human being. Everything is supposed to be centered on that. And this is important. All people won't understand it, but this is so important that it's okay to hurt people and it's okay to do things that you wouldn't urge your own children to do in the name of this larger good. And so although the people don't think about it, all of this is very, very cultural revolution, very Stalin. It's frankly metaphorically, it's Hitler in many ways, but as with all of those people, the elect today, the woke people who are okay with being mean in the name of wokeness, they think of themselves as having come to the ultimate answer. And the parallels with religion, especially evangelical religion, are almost uncanny, especially given that most of these people kind of look at scants at Christianity in its more extreme forms. But white privilege is original sin. The idea is that if you're white, you're privileged and that will never change. Even if you're poor no matter what you do, that's original sin. The idea that we're waiting for America to come to terms with racism, that has no meaning. What are the terms? What would that be? You say it and you nod in the same way as if somebody goes like this and puts, does that circular, you nod because somehow that means yes. Well, come to terms with race. That doesn't mean anything. What it is, is it's the rapture. It's that business of the end of days and judgment day. The reason that if a person says something that isn't sufficiently anti-racist, they have to be chased out of the room or their job is because it's about heresy. The idea is we can't even stand to have Andrew Sullivan in our midst, in a Zoom call. You know, Andrew Sullivan has to resign. And remember, the idea was that they didn't want him around when nobody was around each other because it was in the middle of the pandemic. That's because they think of him. They thought of him at New York Magazine as a heretic. They wouldn't use those words. The parallels just go, on and on. And so you have a clergy. You have writers who are looked to to say things over and over again, many of which are very hard to square with reality. But frankly, people like Ta-Nehisi Coates and now Robin D'Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi, they are priests of this religion. They don't think of themselves that way. They're certainly not saying it. But the way their writings are received is not as informational tracks but as scriptural counsel so it's a rather alarming movement because you can't reason with people who are working from religion rather than logic. And that's not to say that religion is idiocy in itself. But a part of religion is that you sequester a part of your brain away from logic that goes from A to B to C. You have to suspend your disbelief. And the new wokeness, wokeness that's mean, electism as I'm calling it, is religious in that way. And the people in question can't be reached. And that's scary given how much power they're beginning to amass. Yeah. Well, let's talk about that power. What is the power? Critics of anti-racism or anti-wokeness will say, so a couple of people lose their jobs rightly or wrongly or they were racist. You know, Donald McNeil at the New York Times an old reporter who used the N-word trying to clarify a statement on a class trip at Peru for high school students. So it's already, I'm like, wow, this is taking place in a Philip K. Dick universe and an alternate reality. But, you know, he got cashiered for that. But you know what? He deserved to go. And it's not, you know, is that too high a price to pay for a kind of cleansing moral purity? You know, what are the consequences of this kind of electism? Yeah, the problem is that it's not just a few things. That's what a lot of people were saying, say in July, August, but it's been a while. These Don McNeil stories are now legion. And the idea that he deserved to lose his job is not something that a critical mass of people would agree with. It's the elect who think that he should lose his job. And what's going on is that the elect get their way because we're all so deeply afraid of being called racist. It's a reign of terror. The reason that a person can get fired for some minor transgression like that, that nobody would ever have blinked at or would have given him a snack on that hand about just 10 minutes ago, is because nobody wants to be called a racist on social media by these people. If there was no Twitter, there'd be no elect. Part of this is technology. You don't want to be called elect on, you don't want to be called racist on Twitter. It used to be that maybe they would call you a racist in a letter to the editor, but that didn't have the power that Twitter has. And so the problem is that this fear means that people lose their jobs for no moral reason. It means that educational institutions are being turned upside down into these anti-racism academies that don't give people a real education and excommunicate anybody who questions it. That's a serious problem right there. So some people will say, does this really matter? A few reporters lose their job, whatever. Some schools are changing. That's not a question that anybody concerned with the heart of a society would ask. Yes, this is a real problem. It's vastly transforming our whole intellectual, moral, and even artistic culture. And what bothers me so much about it is that it's mendacious. It's all about fear. It's not that these people are convincing most of society of these very narrow, extremist, and self-indulgent views that this hyper-wokism has. It's that everybody's just afraid of them. And I think it's time that we stop being so afraid. Who is driving this? As with most kind of vague social forces, it's not there isn't somebody cracking the whip in the rider's seat or something in the driver's seat. But who is driving this? Is it a series of black elites? Is it white elites? Is it some mix? At one point, you invoke at your sub-stack the phrase, and I'm going to butcher it because I cannot pronounce words very well, but kendi angelonianism, which is a portmanteau of Ibram Kendi and Robin D'Angelo, a black scholar and a white scholar. Who's doing this? Is it white elites? Is it black elites? Is it just elites? What's going on? It's them. And so part of the idea of kendi angelonianism is that it is that white person and that black person. I hate to say this, but the elect starts with black people. It's a way of thinking about race that acquired a certain hold on especially academics, some artists and a lot of media people. After about 1966, this is when segregation, like outright obvious bigotry and disfranchisement, that's over. And so you have to have a whole new kind of conversation about what the problems are. And frankly, it's them that a certain kind of black person devotes themselves to exaggerating, pretending that nothing really changed, pretending that black people are more powerless than they are. That used to be a type. And if you were white, who's an early incarnation? That starts with Stokely Carmichael. That starts with the people yelling black power and not really being quite sure what it even meant. And a lot of people look back on that era. And I think partly because of the fashions and partly because the music was good, they think that that was somehow significant, that that was special. But you have to ask, what has black radicalism done to help black America overall, other than be kind of a fashion statement, other than lend some inspiring speeches? You know, Huey Newton was very interesting. Stokely Carmichael was very interesting. Amiri Baraka was very interesting. But black America's victories have been in spite of them, not because of anything that they did. Nevertheless, you had that kind of person. And what this means is that the Ebron Kendi type has been with us for about 50 years. But it used to be that he was somebody who, you know, got a doctorate from somewhere and wrote some books and there you went. But now we have the D'Angelo type. And she's not as young as a lot of the whites who were doing this. Electness among white people tilts young, although they're people who are her age and older, who have always thought this way, who now have an influence that they didn't have before. And so white fragility. A year ago, I'd heard of it. I wasn't going to read it. And I don't think I was alone in that. That changed immediately because of this racial reckoning. And so it's a collaboration unwittingly between a certain kind of black radical who I, with all due understanding, think had more to do with posturing than actually creating change in America as we know it. That's not, they didn't do it on purpose, but I don't see them as as important as some historians do. But then you have a certain kind of white fellow traveler. That cocktail, it's another one of these cocktails, that is what's driving all of this. Whites who have founded their sense of purpose on showing that they're not racist and teaching other people not to. And black people who, because it can be hard to find your comfort zone and to have a sense of purpose for any human being, is a kind of black person who lives to paint white people as the enemy because therefore you are a noble victim. The noble victim complex, that's homo sapiens. Those together, when you have black people with that problem and white people with that problem, is the elect. And boy can that be powerful because those people like to call other people racists. And once there's social media, that can be really, really scary unless you're somebody who has the disease of not minding being despised. That's not most people. How, so how do you say it is kind of time to push back on all of this and to argue with it and confront it or engage it? What's to be done? What are the best ways to do that? Well, the truth is, and Nick, I'm working on having a more comprehensive answer to that because all of this happened so very quickly and we're all leading lives. And I want to be able to give counsel that ordinary people who need to keep their jobs can follow. But the truth is we have to understand that you cannot reason with people like this. It's very rare that you teach somebody out of their religion and this is a religion. And so to try to talk these people down doesn't work. All they know is that you're a racist and that's all you're going to get. So the idea is not to try to have a dialogue with them about these sorts of issues. You have to just shut down. But I think that we simply need to start telling people like this, no. And the question is not how do you stop them from calling you a racist on social media? You don't. That's what they're going to do. And it's time to start letting them do it and going on about our business and having our fellows around us, having our friends around us and just making these sorts of people realize that screaming that you were a racist isn't going to get them what they want. They've learned that that strategy works and so they're going to keep using it and they're never going to consider that it might not be the most humane or even constructive way of doing things. But these are human beings and all of us have that element. There's a Lord of the Flies element in these people although they would never recognize it in themselves. And so we need to start telling them no. And I am working on how to get people to actually consider doing that because I get at least three emails a day from people who are scared to death of the elect and understand that these demands don't make any sense and are destructive but they need to keep their jobs or they don't want to get screamed at. They have children, et cetera. Nevertheless, something needs to be done because these people will not stop and they're not open to reason. I just think my analogy is with sharks. I'm told, I don't know if this is true but I'm told that you can bop a shark on the nose. I do not mean violence against these people in any way but with these sorts of people I think if you just said no, I'm not a racist and I don't care whether you put it on Twitter or not and I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing and keep looking them in the eye and don't apologize. If you do that enough with these people, they'll back down but it has to be enough people doing it that subconscious group awareness emerges among people like this that just yelling dirty names is not going to change the world the way they're hoping. You feel there is an objective way or an empirical way you were saying you can't reason with certain people which I think is true but what are the factors that you point to to say you know what, Black America which is a ridiculous abstraction to begin with but is actually doing better than it was 50 years ago or 30 years ago. One of the curious facts of the past year or so or since yeah, I mean it's basically a year since George Floyd we have been every interaction that has gone violent between cops and Blacks has been shown on network news or cable news and everything ad nauseam yet the larger numbers don't seem to have changed very much over the past decade or even 15 years of the number of police killings of Blacks, unarmed Blacks or armed Blacks or white, unarmed whites, armed whites etc. What are the things that you point to to make a case for those who are looking for some kind of data to suggest what things are actually better than the way that we talk about them? Well, I think one thing that's very important is to talk about just the whole police issue in general as you just did because one of the main, well the driving factor in the idea that it remains a tragedy to be Black in the United States is the relationship between the cops and particularly young Black men and I don't want to sound like one of these people who's always railing at the mainstream media for having sinister agendas but we are really, really misled by the mainstream media's obsession with showing the deaths of young Black men while pretending that the same things don't happen to young white men too so it's at the point where I personally see one of these horrible things in the news happening to a Black man and I think to myself, I wonder how many white men that happened to over the past five years and every single time it turns out that that's the case it's just that those cases didn't make national news and that includes George Floyd there's been a white boy named Tony Tempo was killed that exact same way a few years before him and so there's that talking about the cops but also there's a very handy kind of mental picture that you might want to give people if you took a George Wallace or if you took one of these Dixie Crats from back in the day and you reanimated them now and had them watch a laptop I want to say watch TV but I'm not sure what that is today watch a laptop for a couple of days drive around that kind of person would have to pull over and wretch on the side of the highway seeing how deeply Black people and Blackness have permeated all levels of this society Strom Thurmond would be nauseated at the America that we have achieved today even since his death how much Blacker of the United States has gotten and that matters that very much matters and nobody could possibly deny it anybody who says that all of the civil rights victories were basically negated because of what happened to George Floyd one are not thinking about the fact that that same thing happens to white people as well and we simply don't hear about it and also that the country has come a very very long way and you know it's one of those things where I am you know I'm 55 so I don't feel old yet but I know that 55 isn't young I worry sometimes this is going to be a little bit you know get off my lawn but you have to you have to say what you feel there are people who are too young to understand what it used to be like and I wasn't alive when it was really like what it was like but I remember the 80s I remember how openly racism could be expressed by some white people as late as the 80s I remember not getting jobs openly in the summer because I was black and that's it I remember two cases like that where I could tell that's what it was and then ask later somebody who knew and that's what it was and yet yet the 80s compared to the 60s was like the second reel of the Wizard of Oz even then there had been immense progress but still the way it is now the the browning of the culture the very idea that everybody in the country is listening to young black men bragging as their favorite music and loving the music as poetry and loving it the way people used to love Walt Whitman and Edna St. Vincent Malay and that's not superficial I mean hip-hop is a religion too that's another creed that being a religion that crosses races these are unprecedented things and yet you have a certain kind of person who wants to tell you that nothing significant has really changed since 1950 except manners and that what shows that is George Floyd no that's highly childish reasoning and unfortunately the elect have such a beautiful big word to express these things that it often sounds like they're saying something more sophisticated than they are what what do you think undergirds what what drives progress of the sorts you're talking about because it's it's you know it's clearly happened but you know why why did it happen and can we identify that and thus either speed it up or make sure that it doesn't get blocked or detoured we convinced the country that racism was a bad thing a lot of very hard work was done in Congress we tend to remember the people who did it for things like marches and speeches but you know Martin Luther King and his comrades worked very closely with people in power to make change happen I think we need to start thinking about that now we think of it as activism to chase people out of their jobs for not using the n-word the right way that's not something that I think King would have quite understood there was that and then there was a social revolution in the 1960s that I don't think we fully understand yet where a significant number of people learn to understand that being a bigot is wrong I think sometimes people lack a little historical imagination go to a cocktail party in your mind in 1964 if you watched mad men look at those people how would they have felt about how you're supposed to feel about a black person they would have been all but unreachable something changed very quickly and that is a wonderful thing too and then black people were able to do what we were capable of once segregation was no longer in the way once people didn't openly hate us just by seeing our faces as often as they had we got to do what we can do now there are still some obstacles there is an inner city problem as we used to call it the drug wars that was a problem there are things that we need to get over but the idea that America is all about despising black people and murdering our black bodies that's fantasy that's something from a comic book and yet there are great many brilliant people who are determined to make us think that we're supposed to base our whole lives on this cartoon vision designed for self-indulgence of both white and black people instead of actually creating change on the ground the way the people who made a life like mine possible did I think we're dishonoring the ancestors at this point well we're going to leave it there I've been talking with John McWhorter a linguist at Columbia University and the author most recently of nasty words English, nine nasty words excuse me English in the gutter then now and forever John just has a final point what is your favorite curse word when you are mad at your children and wish to admonish them what's your go-to expletive? I'm big on fuck I don't curl it at my children but they know the word very much from me when something happens it's fuck and I like motherfucker I like to use that word in various ways if something bad happens what I often say is motherfucker that's what I often say and so yeah I like motherfucker there's a final chapter on motherfucker in nine nasty words because for me I wanted that at the end because it's kind of like a nice little nice little post-prandial kind of liquor so I guess it's motherfucker that's my favorite all right we're gonna leave it there John McBorder thanks for talking to me thank you