Linguistics Professor and author John McWhorter (McW hereafter) is many things. He is an elegant and effective writer and perhaps an even better talker. Moreover, he knows his way around an argument and is often on the right side of one. And not least of all, he can be wickedly funny as anyone who has seen him on cable TV harpooning Donald Trump and others surely knows.
These days though, he is increasingly a man on a mission. In Woke Racism (2021), his recent crusade (sadly, it is hard to term it anything else) against those who would sound the alarm about the continuing impacts of racism in America, even at his best, he fails to put his points about the excesses of “Anti-Racism”—many of which are spot on—into the broader context of all that ails us today. At worst, e.g., when branding what he calls “Third Wave Anti-Racists”—like prominent authors Ibram Kendi and Ta-Nehesi Coates—as “high ‘priests’ in an ‘ideological reign of terror’” and “gruesomely close to Hitler’s racial notions in their conception of an alien, blood-deep malevolent ‘whiteness’”—he has, I fear, gone off the rails.
The full title of his book—Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America— gives you a good idea of exactly what he is up to. I’ll take its cue, focusing on the anti-Woke part, and then what follows after the colon.
First, the “spot on” part. With wit and passion, McW chronicles eight or ten instances where basically innocent, reasonable people working in elite academic institutions and at top-flight political journals have been confronted, in the name of the new Anti-Racism, with accusations that amount to pablum. In each instance, these professionals have been shamed and ultimately fired or forced out of their positions. Here’s one example.
In 2020, Leslie Neal-Boylan was hired as dean of nursing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. In the wake of George Floyd’s death, she wrote an email to her staff specifically calling out “the recent (and past) acts of violence against people of color” and evoking the “tragic history of racism and bias that continue to thrive in this country.” But in the eyes of her woke colleagues, she makes a fatal mistake of stringing the three words together—everyone’s life matters—as a precursor to an appeal that “no one should have to live in fear that they will be targeted for how they look or what they believe” and consequently she loses her job.
His other examples are equally perturbing. I have been warned by friends about “woke-ism” run amok, but even so McW’s stories were a bit of an eye-opener. It is hard to read them without sensing something’s gone wrong in certain censorious circles. And McW makes a strong case that this is not a matter of isolated cases. He places his examples within a broader discourse, focusing on what a significant group of people (mostly in elite institutions) are saying to, and about, other people in these same institutions—on a regular basis.
Professor McW is a true player when it comes to language games, as his best turns in this book demonstrate. He zeros in on particularly dumb stuff that has been said (or could well have been said) by sanctimonious souls who reduce issues like structural racism to touchy-feely precepts and then fashion those feels into a formalized doctrine, complete with a politically correct set of terms. He calls woke anti-racists’ tenets of personal responsibility their “Catechisms.” He’s alive to flamboyant contradictions in new pieties:
- You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people.
- You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do, you’re a racist.
AND
- Show interest in multiculturalism.
- Do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it.
McW’s catechisms are a nifty piece of social criticism, yet it is difficult (for me) to judge the extent of the threat posed by the woke mindset. In higher education, think tanks, charities, and journals are there really big waves of good-hearted, unbigoted people losing their livelihoods due to this scourge? McW, unfortunately, is not particularly interested in defining the scope of the problem.
Still, he’s right to be alarmed. Regardless of how many people’s careers are actually being upended (and any is too many), there is undeniably a broader shaming/censoring movement afoot. And even when it does not result in a full-on cancelling, these strictures can nonetheless put a chill in the air. Also, McW is surely right to point out that right now, especially in university settings, anyone with any credibility hurling the invective “you’re a racist” is wielding the ultimate weapon. (McW calls it the “supreme power in our public moral evaluations.”)
One reaction to woke injustices McW has chronicled, might be to call out counterproductive excesses that can bubble up in the pursuit of the most right-minded causes, naming the worst offenders and working to get a movement back on track. That is decidedly NOT what McW is up to, however. He has much bigger fish to fry, and he likes them deep fried. And here comes the “How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America” part. McW insists authors (like Coates or Nikole Hannah-Jones) who proclaim the continued existence of structural and personal racism in America are so wrong-headed they’re doing serious harm to the very constituency they aim to represent, i.e. African Americans. Per McW, their work is not merely harmful, it actually constitutes a form of racism itself.
McW warns that we are, all of us, beset by “the encroaching penetration of the Elect [McW’s pejorative term for Anti-Racists] into the gray matter of this country. . . No one can deny that Elect ideology has a stranglehold on institutions that barely knew it just a few years ago. The Elect are changing America.”
Here’s how all this is supposed to have gone down. The petty authorities foisting psychobabble (like McW’s catechisms) and slinging pink slips are not merely fringe characters practicing a jaundiced version of social justice. Instead, they are part and parcel of a larger, cohesive movement at work in all of our institutions that is obsessed with rooting out racism where it DOESN’T really exist and, in the process, wreaking havoc on all of us, but especially on black folks. In McW’s figuring, Anti-Racists’ demand that the larger society recognize (and account for) the special difficulties blacks face is dangerous because the “studiously ‘antiracist’ conception of black identity invalidates calls for people to stress their individuality.” For this transgression against up by the boot-strap raps, McW claims Anti-Racists should themselves be branded for trafficking in a form of racism. I was surprised McW played this particular race card, especially after he’d decried Anti-Racists’ use of this “supreme” moral weapon, but I guess he couldn’t resist the chance to turn the tables.
The crucial move, however, in his overarching case that Third Wave Anti-Racism is a plague upon us is his contention the virus has spread from universities to our primary schools: the Woke dogma “is being preached in one school after another nationwide, even to children who aren’t even reading chapter books yet.” Moreover, “If the Elect are reaching our children, then this is real.” McW is surely right about the “then” part . . . IF he is right about the “if” part.
In this area, McW does not have a string of examples of woke over-reach to cite. He has two. First, he reports that the School Chancellor in New York City, Richard Carranza “presented his teachers and staff with the idea that the written word, objectivity, being on time, and individuality are ‘white things’.” McW does not quote any actual school materials or written remarks from Carranza to support the claim that this particular Catechism made its way to into the classroom and students’ heads. But, again, let’s agree that McW appears to have uncovered some real foolishness in the name of “virtue.”
Second, McW reveals that KIPP academies, a charter school network, recently abandoned their motto “Work hard. Be nice.” KIPP announced that to expose their charges to that mantra “diminishes the significant effort to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, supports the illusion of meritocracy, and does not align with our vision of students being free to create the future they want.” Again, KIPP is doing themselves no favors—dishing out jargon and trying to “cancel” Be Nice is likely a bad idea. On the other hand, it is probably not the worst thing for KIPPsters to raise the possibility that some people’s hard work may not take them as far as some others’ less hard work.
McW evades the larger battle over Race that is raging today in schools across the heartland where Anti-Racists are decidedly on the run. He offers no actual examples of runaway Woke propaganda at play in classrooms, or even something akin to actual Critical Race Theory being taught in the schools. Instead, he lodges the kind of Woke-ism charges that you might hear on Fox news. He blares that “School boards across the country are forcing teachers and administrators to waste time on ‘antiracist’ infusions into their curricula that make no more sense than anything proposed under China’s Cultural Revolution.” And he makes common cause with Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, claiming that in the hands of Anti-Racist educators, white kids are to made to feel “irredeemable”— that they possess a “blood-deep malevolent ‘whiteness.’”
As he makes these charges, McW does not even consider the possibility there might be another side to this story—that some parents in largely Republican, mostly white states may actually oppose not just the Anti-Racist over-reach that McW rightly decries, but any efforts to make students aware of this nation’s history of racial injustice. In fact, angry white parents have increasingly called for books on race to be banned from school libraries. And not just Anti-Racist texts by Kendi or Coates, but books like Hidden Figures. (Who knows? Maybe McW thinks such openly anti-black censoriousness is acceptable collateral damage in the battle to save white kids from feeling guilty.)
Another curious thing is how McW won’t acknowledge that his anti-CRT stance aligns so closely with that of so many far-right figures, including Donald Trump himself, whom McW has called “openly bigoted.” One would have thought that McW would have used this congruence on the “schools issue” to distance his views from reactionary culture warriors when it comes to the persistence of structural Racism and the thrust of social justice movements. And here we return to the crux of the matter. That is, distinguishing how much of McW’s exasperation with the Third Wave Anti-Racists lies with their particular tactics—e.g. focusing on thought crimes and imputed micro-aggressions—and how much reflects a resistance to the underlying concept that racism matters.
Unlike tens of millions of Conservative Americans who have told pollsters that racism does not exist, McW is not entirely in denial. Twice in Woke Racism, he acknowledges “racism exists” today but he does so grudgingly—as if acknowledging that racism is real could detract from that “greater” imperative to ensure that racism not be overblown. As McW says, “To all but the very most smitten fellow travelers with black people, it has always been quietly clear that much of our discourse on race entails a certain exaggeration of just how bigoted most whites are, of just how set against black achievement society has been since about 1970.” And again, “Anybody knows, if only deep down, that ‘racism’ does not explain everything that ails the black community—and not even ‘systemic’ racism.”
In fact, a commitment to the notion that racism is not a significant problem today (and not one that can, or even should be addressed) undergirds Woke Racism. And this notion is deeply entwined with his central thesis that a new band of Anti-Racists are busy abandoning logic, stultifying creative thought, and exacting penance from folks who are mostly unbigoted in the first place. Clearly, this belief has also helped heighten the indignation McW feels when confronted by high-minded Anti-Racists prescribing and proscribing other people’s conduct. And it may also help to explain why McW failed to distinguish between moralizers who have, in his mind, done dirt on a worthy cause and other thinkers and organizers who have tried to combat forces of racism in more effective ways. But McW has no use for such distinctions.
Instead he has settled on an ingenious way to hammer home his points. He offers not facts he has found, but artifacts he has created. Specifically, he conjures up a Religion/Cult that doesn’t really exist and then tars it with that pejorative name, the “Elect.” Next, he assigns people/ideas he doesn’t like to this non-existent religion. Finally, he trashes anything that could be associated with his creation.
Along the way, MC sets up and knocks down strawman doctrine and congregants. The artifice of his imagined group of devoted worshippers enables him to tar all members with the sins of any one offender. And he really digs in, characterizing them as “crazy” or “zealots.” In the coup de grace, he brands them as unable to even carry on a productive debate: “The problem is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion—true to the very nature of religion—cannot be reasoned with. They are, in this, medievals with lattes.” Well, l guess that solves that. Let us hear no more from them.
Notwithstanding polemical advantages this approach affords, it also brings some special challenges, including the task of trying to define tenets of a religion that doesn’t actually exist. McW cites books by Kendi, DiAngelo, and Coates (you likely know them) as germinal texts of the Anti-Racist Sect. Based on these works, it is safe to say all members of this new church must believe that racism continues to be a significant national problem—one that cannot be effectively addressed without more awareness that it remains an issue. Yet all the Creator (McW) adds to his church’s doctrines are those few inconsistent and incoherent Catechisms (see above). He doesn’t really try to outline a more detailed philosophy or set of values that a large number of real people would actually endorse.
It is also hard to figure exactly who, besides Kendi, Coates, DiAngelo, Hannah-Jones and the ten or so individuals he cites in his “woke-ism gone wrong” case studies, really subscribe to this new Anti-Racist faith. What about everyone else who has made fighting racism central to their lives? Where, for instance, is Isabell Wilkerson who, in her work Caste, has effectively imbricated the long history of America’s class system with the history of racial bias toward African Americans? Is she part of this new religion? Where to fit Heather McGee who has mounted a strong case that the Conservative movement has infected White America with a Zero-Sum Game mind-set whereby anything gained by blacks could only come at the expense of whites. And Bryan Stevenson who has brought new attention to thousands of lynchings that have taken place across America? Are they all up to no good?
How does McW see those in the world of real religions who have called out racism? The Rev. Dr. William Barber 2nd comes to mind. And what about Pope Francis, who has said: “Instances of racism continue to shame us, for they show that our supposed social progress is not as real or definitive as we think.” Does this mean that, per Woke Racism, Pope Francis is a member of the Elect?
In sum, the ill-defined nature of McW’s sect makes it hard to discern when and if those in the broad array of people who take a stance against racism (i.e. an Anti-Racist stance) can be implicated in the specific attacks McW makes on the extremist views he attributes to the anti-racist church. This ambiguity, I believe is intentional, enabling him to conger up an enemy that seems ever more potent as he amplifies the urgency of his own seemingly heroic resistance to their dogma.
For instance, McW claims that under the church’s doctrine, white people are to consider themselves as inherently sinful: “The Elect are to ritually ‘acknowledge’ that they possess white privilege, with an awareness that they can never be absolved of it.” Anti-Racist zealots assert a “blood-deep malevolent ‘whiteness’ . . . [and] that Whites must be held at metaphorical gunpoint and demanded to do ‘the work’ of becoming ‘antiracist’ in their every waking moment and to despise themselves for lapses in doing so.”
One problem with such proclamations is that McW has not been able to find any actual Woke Anti-Racists saying something like White folks must be compelled to despise themselves. Not Kendi, not even DiAngelo (author of White Fragility)—if he had, believe me, he would have quoted them. In fact, the people producing these edicts about White Guilt and White Sin are right wing politicians like Ted Cruz and Condoleezza Rice. It is Rice who says “somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past.” Though, of course, these politicos are not actually speaking for themselves. They are, instead, stuffing these words into the mouths of their political antagonists.
Actual Anti-Racists do routinely invoke the concept of White Privilege (though not sin or guilt), but generally in fairly straightforward senses such as… White people have a statistically verifiable leg up when it comes to inherited wealth and, consequently, outcomes like getting into the best schools, the best jobs, or getting mortgage financing for a new home. Such conceptions of privilege do NOT require whites to “self-flagellate,” or any other such nonsense. Still, it would be helpful if more white Americans were aware of such privileges when they evaluate relevant public policy initiatives. Maybe we could call this goal “White Awareness” or “White Discomfort” rather than White Guilt.
When it comes to black people, MC’s central claim is woke-ism exalts weakness, teaching blacks that “grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience.” This is, of course, another stretch. Who says someone like Coates’ son, who was warned in Between the World and Me that the proverbial deck is often stacked against him, cannot forge his own strong identity? Father Coates has certainly managed to form such an identity. Or think of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor proudly invoking benefits that could flow from a “wise Latina” whose way in the world was forged in part by the discrimination she faced.
We have already touched on how McW’s claim that Anti-Racists are coming for your children in our schools traduces a complex campaign being waged chiefly by those who would make students aware of a history of horrors without indoctrinating them in the culture of accusation and projected transgressions that seems to have taken root in too many of our universities.
While condemning those who would preach for a reckoning on Race (he thinks we have had enough of one already), McW concedes the value of trying to support struggling black folks. He suggests, for example, “would be” Anti-Racists would do well to be on the ground helping the homeless. As it happens, I have spent some time doing such work so I perked up when he brought up this subject. Unfortunately, McW seems to have cited working with the homeless merely to set up a dichotomy between preaching and doing. That is, if you are working to raise consciousness about lingering effects of racism—about, say, discrimination in renting affordable housing units or in offering mortgage financing—then you cannot possibly be doing the “actual work” of helping the homeless. Conversely, if you are on the ground working directly with those who need help the most, you cannot possibly be concerned about the broader challenge of raising consciousness or changing hearts and minds of the American people—who, after all, vote on programs that serve the homeless (and others in need).
Over thirty-plus years, this has not been my experience. The great majority of people I have encountered in the “business” of housing the homeless and providing/preserving affordable housing ALSO believe that more needs to be done to highlight both past and present injustices against people of color. Moreover, I have not witnessed much in the way of woke-ism or cancel culture in this area of public life. I have certainly not seen anyone try to make white colleagues feel they are inherently guilty or black colleagues feel they are born to be America’s victims.
There is, I am afraid, some…hype in McW’s underlying assertion that much of today’s Anti-Racism is unwarranted due to what he calls the “resplendent” progress that has been made against racism in America. McW’s view is simple. Racism was real and it was bad, but now it is not really so bad: “Segregation was outlawed, and outward racial attitudes began changing with unprecedented rapidity.”
In fact, McW reports that America is now “a functioning democratic experiment in which open racism is prohibited to a degree unknown to human history before five decades ago.” Moreover, progress has not merely been limited to laws and other formal structures that govern our lives. Indeed, MC claims there has been a “seismic sociopolitical transformation in how black people are perceived.” He underscores how “[m]ost Americans’ racial attitudes have progressed massively beyond what they were a few decades ago.”
McW is, of course, right that egregious crimes of the Jim Crow era and Apartheid-like conditions are generally a thing of the past. Much of the legalized racism has in fact been made illegal. And he is right that Anti-Racists who make light of these fundamental gains do their cause a disservice. “Since the late 1960s a contingent of black thinkers has tended to insist that things were as bad as they were in 1940, leaving even many black people who actually experienced Jim Crow a tad perplexed and even put off.” But it does not follow that our racial problems are light stuff.
It is admittedly hard to prove a negative, but MC does not even attempt to mount an evidentiary case for the evaporation of racism. He skips over manifest racial inequities in Income, Health, Incarceration, and Wealth. (The average white family has 10 times the wealth of the average black one.) And while McW has effectively called into question the notion that harmful “micro-aggressions” are a scourge in our colleges, he has done nothing to refute the many reliable studies showing that property owners still discriminate against black renters or that resumes from job applicants with non-traditional “Black names” remain less likely to be selected for follow-up interviews even when their experience/credentials are designed to be equivalent.
He also seems oblivious to the recent revival of hardcore racist tropes on the right. Think about the increase in white supremacist hate groups, the march on Charlottesville, the notion that it was OK in 2021 for three armed white men to hunt down a black man for the “crime” of jogging in their neighborhood. Echoes of these ugly extremes continue to reverberate. Consider the undying love of many Americans for the Confederate flag, the millions of southerners (and not a few northerners) fighting for the preservation of Confederate statues. And what about the constant repetitions of “Replacement Theory” on America’s most watched Cable news show? None of this would surprise the pollsters who found “[n]early two-thirds of Republicans said both being born in America and being a Christian are important to being an American,” and “[e]ighty percent of Republicans said America is in danger of losing its culture and identity.”
Remarkably McW takes the Trump years as proof of just how far we have come—in a positive direction! He writes: “White attitudes on race and the prevalence of racism were dramatically different in 2020 than they had been just a few years before…This shift in attitude helped deny reelection to the openly bigoted president Donald Trump.”
Apparently, McW is not troubled by the fact that 74 million Americans, overwhelmingly those white voters who have supposedly made such “massive progress” in their racial attitudes and undergone a “seismic sociopolitical transformation,” felt comfortable voting for someone that McW himself recognizes as an “openly bigoted President.” Let that sink in. He knows we have reached a good spot because the 74 million votes the openly bigoted candidate got were not quite enough to win the election.
It’s as if McW can’t allow that two discordant phenomena could be occurring simultaneously: the sanctimonious overreach by some “woke” witch hunters he sees in today’s universities couldn’t possibly exist in the same country, where millions of disgruntled citizens are committed to the idea that the only true Americans, the true Patriots, are white people.
In fairness, Woke Realism does include a brief chapter on what can be done to help “what ails Black America in the 21st Century.” Importantly, McW specifies that his prescriptions are not about taking on racism itself, which he insists “is impossible to simply get rid of” (and who, exactly, thought it could be simply done?). “More to the point,” he says “doing so is not necessary.” Instead, he promotes a kind of stealth approach to dealing with our inequalities: (1) Stopping the War on Drugs (2) Teaching reading using phonics (from McW’s area of expertise), and (3) Promoting trade schools as viable alternatives to college. These seem like reasonable, if insufficient, policy initiatives. McW does not end his book here, however, but instead shifts back to a longer, more impassioned call to action entitled “How to Work Around Them.” This chapter is less focused on people in need than on How to put the Anti-Racists in their place and get on with life as it should be.
Now, authors often complain when critics review not the book they’ve read but the book they’d like to have read. In keeping up my end of this venerable tradition, I’ll allow what troubles me most about McW’s book is what he does NOT say—what he has apparently willfully failed to take in. For all of his warnings about the risks of making up racism where it does not exist, there is absolutely nothing in his text about another danger—one that has been with us almost exactly as long as racism has. That is the denial of racism. In the bad old days, it was a denial that racism was actually evil at all, while more recently (as explicit, public bigotry is now routinely denounced) it is a denial that racism is really real. Either way—Deny, Deny, Deny. And this drive is especially strong in the wake of a galvanizing incident like the murder of George Floyd.
I cannot say how or why McW came to the conclusion that the public struggle against racism needs to be declared over and done. But he has, telling Sean Illing in a recent interview on racial attitudes: “We’ve gotten about as far as we’re going to go on that. I think that we have gotten to the point where a good number of white people, of all levels of education, know to look inward. And I’m not sure that we even need more than what there is.”
In the end, I fear, he may just be fed up with the fuss so many folks still seem to make about racism, especially when it is so hard to discern clearly effective remedies. As he says, “America is nothing less than obsessed with discussing and acknowledging racism.”
I can say that somewhere inside Woke Racism there was an insightful (if less inciting) book about the dangers of seeing micro-aggressions where they don’t exist and of confusing virtue-signaling with fighting a virtuous fight. But just as Professor McW has noted that Hannah-Jones’s (in my view) undeniably important work—The 1619 Project—could have made a more compelling appeal to would-be readers if it had only been more equivocal about the reasons why the Revolutionary War was actually waged, McW’s own book also suffers from an impulse to stretch its points.
Unfortunately, his exaggerations contaminate both his claims about the transgressions Third-Wave authors supposedly commit in the name of fighting racism and his assertion that a groundswell of racial progress has rendered efforts on this front unnecessary in the first place. But rather than trying to pass judgment on McW’s intentions or the values that have led him to this conclusion, I would prefer to offer the Professor the same advice he wishes more reviewers had thought to give to Ms. Hannah-Jones – that is, my regrets that the author “has slipped up” and a wish for “better luck next time.”