A professed humanitarian with misplaced compassion
Originally published in Rome Magazine on Medium.com in Nov. 22, 2023.
John McWhorter is a linguist based at Columbia University who has designated himself as a culture warrior of a different stripe from what liberals usually mean by that term. He self-identifies as an anti-culture warrior who wants to show left-leaning social activists that he knows better than they and that they are wrong, wrong, wrong about what they believe and in the tactics they use.
Moreover, he claims their effects are counter productive. Instead of advancing the rights and cultural access of disadvantaged people, he says they impede those people’s progress toward attaining rights and social access. They are bad culture warriors. McWhorter lists among them Ibram Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Jamil Smith, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ayanna Pressley, all Black people like himself.
His book from 2021, Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America, provides the harmony to Ron DeSantis’s lyrics on ‘wokeism’ as the political left’s song and dance about systemic racism, LGBTQ rights, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) in government, industry, and education. All of which he wants to stifle. He believes himself able to pronounce on this presumed hurt to Black people, possibly because he is Black himself? I don’t really know his motivation.
He alludes to people who advance the rights of marginalized people as “inquisitors,” even though he admits the term, though apt, is pejorative. He instead heads for a more neutral label, Elects, latching onto a definition coined by Joseph Bottum. Bottum is a conservative Catholic writer and academic, who used the term in his book An Anxious Age, to identify the group of post-Protestants, college educated individuals, who trust in the creative power of their own minds to tackle America’s social problems. They are government reliant for their proposed solutions, rather than reliant on the private sector and, of course, are ignorant or doubt the “will of God.” It’s based on the connotations of the word elects that McWhorter allows himself to stretch the designation to characterize the “new religion” in his book title.
It’s not clear that McWhorter buys into the full characterization of how Bottum describes the Elects, but he does agree with the characterization that the Elect are “arrogant” in their world view and in their sense of “superiority.” McWhorter sees the aptness of that broad paint brush as analogous to the arrogance and superiority medieval Catholics of the Inquisition directed against Jews, Muslims, and Protestants. They ascribe, McWhorter says, to the same “brand of mission, just against different persons.” In short, he analogizes his designated bad culture warriors of today to the torturers of the middle ages who used the rack, waterboarding, pulleys, iron maidens, beds of nails, and, of course, psychological and religious intimidation.
McWhorter dismisses the notion that there is any value in claiming that racism is deeply embedded in America. He says it’s unproductive, because the idea perpetuates the hate of Black people for whites, and worse, because it leads to Blacks perpetuating a sense of their own inferiority. They presumably soak up into their self-regard the inferior status that the dominant society believes they embody. It’s a vicious circle that always comes back to bite them in the butt. McWhorter is indignant at that idea.
McWhorter’s rejection of any psychological or cultural reality to systemic racism means that he also dismisses much of the reality of Black people’s stories of humiliation, disrespect, and belittlement. These are the kinds of experiences commonly wrapped up in the word “microaggressions,” a word McWhorter is dismissive of.
He doesn’t, either, discuss the vast statistical evidence of wealth, health, education, incarceration showing Blacks are disproportionately disadvantaged. He himself, of course, is not disadvantaged. He has the proof of his PhD, an ivy league university position, publications, and a Wikipedia page. He also came from an academic family and attended Quaker schools.
So it seems we are to believe that his own personal narrative outweighs the concern that Black parents have in educating their Black sons and daughters to be wary, in other words, “woke” to the dangers around them.
Is it really the case that all these disadvantaged Black people complaining about their lot in life is so much fiction? Or is it really because they haven’t pulled themselves up by their bootstraps? Are they truly so delusional as to believe that we’re entering a revival of Jim Crow? Or that the advice Black parents dole out to their kids to bow before the powers (dictated by white legislators, police, principals, teachers, doctors, and bullies) are expressions of so much white hate? Or is it instead stating reality that if they don’t show the proper respect, they’re going to get whacked?
In McWhorter’s rejection of the “theory” of systemic racism, he’s left without explanation for the statistical realities of Black narratives ending in generational poverty and repeated instances of violence on Black bodies. For him it seems to have been all solved neatly somewhere between Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.
Actually, though, when you’re discussing theories, dismissing one makes you duty bound to propose some alternative. McWhorter doesn’t disappoint. In his alternative theory, he lays the blame for those depredations squarely on Black people themselves, aided and abetted by anti-racists. That second claim surprised me, especially since that group includes many Black and white proponents. Carrying that reasoning out to an obvious extreme, that anti-racists are themselves racists, because by his “logic” they keep Black people down.
Our justice system and our religiously based morality system promotes a belief in individual culpability for what befalls people, as well as individual reward for what comes positively to them. But social scientists are pretty sure that luck, bad and good, has a lot to do with outcomes. Our billionaires, those who are the captains of industry as well as those who won the lottery, were born right or punched in a set of lucky numbers. So-called skill and talent is often due way more to privilege of birth, outrageous chutzpah, and dumb luck.
In McWhorter’s case his alternative theory is premised exclusively in the conservative political beliefs he’s come to hold. He writes for instance, “The black conservative sees battling “racism” as futile, and seeks alternate ways of helping people make the best of themselves.” He proposes three particular remedies: 1) Decriminalize illegal drug use, 2) Use phonics to teach reading skills, 3) Promote vocational education and stop emphasizing college as the only ticket out.
If your response is, “Yeah, that should do it! Why didn’t I think of that,” you’d be still making your way out of the mid-1960’s. Which isn’t to say that these aren’t righteous tactics, but they don’t collectively constitute a strategy to some ultimate solution. They’ve been advocated for and they’ve been tried. The reason why they haven’t broadly succeeded is because all of this has to pass through political and social filters, through law enforcement filters, through religious filters, through educational filters. And all of these special interest groups will have their own particular objections and requirements. Think about how the states of Texas and Florida are taking their AK-47s to established history.
But more importantly all tactics, including those McWhorter is touting, have to be acceptable to the target groups themselves. And there’s no guarantee they would be. Take phonics as an example.
English is a rough language to learn to read because its spelling system is so — let’s just say it — stupid. It’s one of the problems that the linguistically mighty languages like English, Chinese, and Arabic take on. With millions and even billions of different speakers across a huge geography, people are going to eventually start pronouncing the “same” word differently. The result is that the spoken varieties differ, but the written language stays the same. It’s been that way in English for the last 400 to 500 years.
So the major battles in the so-called reading wars in America have from decade to decade switched from initial phonics instruction to whole-word instruction and back. We’re currently phasing into a strong phonics approach again and that’s okay. Certain kids never got the rhyme and reason of whole-word methods. However, there is thinking also backed by research, that phonics, which stresses words in isolation, can make it difficult to transition into sight reading in normal contexts, like books. The wheels will continue to spin the other way when phonics shows its own weaknesses.
There could be similar arguments made for McWhorter’s two other solutions to the racial inequality that he and I and most everybody else agrees is there, but which thinking people are supposedly not allowed to attribute to racism. But to apply Occam’s razor, if it looks like a bigot, talks like a bigot, acts like a bigot, then it’s probably a bigot. And since we’ve got a lot of them (read the tweets on X if you doubt it), we should probably admit that collectively we’ve got a racism problem in the country.
It’s not naive or misconceived to believe we do, it’s just the simplest answer. And we’re certainly not joining some cultish religion to call ourselves anti-racists. We’re being righteous, sure, but not religious.
Postscript: I try to keep my grievances under control, but I took kind of personal umbrage at McWhorter’s book because (full disclosure) I’m a linguist myself. And I hereby lay claim to being as logically inclined and as sound minded as Mr. McWhorter believes he is. So you can believe me too. The end.