Pod Insights Modern Wisdom How Does Anti-Racism Hurt Black People? - John McWhorter | Modern Wisdom Podcast 390 About this episode John McWhorter is a linguist, associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University and an author.
The last 5 years has seen race become a primary flash point for culture, news, protests, social justice, hiring, firing, media and politics. But why have race relations come back to the forefront and who is driving this new religion of Woke Racism forward?
Expect to learn what John McWhorter thinks of White Fragility and How To Be An Anti-Racist, whether cultural appropriation is an actual thing, how anti-racism actually hurts black people, why black people are attracted to a movement that treats them like simpletons, the problem with the concept of "whiteness" and much more...
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00:00 Intro
03:42 The Woke Obsession with Race
12:27 John’s Reaction to White Fragility
18:18 How Anti-Racism Harms Black People
29:22 Connotations of Whiteness
36:12 Is Cultural Appropriation Absurd?
44:43 Black Lives Matter Vs BLM
49:23 Where to Find John
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 There is a victimization complex that is a human trait. It is a way that human beings can go wrong, where you fetishize victimhood, you exaggerate victimhood, because being the victim gives you a sense of absolution and significance. This race, the Black American race, is encouraged to OD on that.
0:22 Chris Williamson? John McWhorter, welcome to the show.
0:24 Speaker 00 Thank you, Chris.
0:26 Chris Williamson? I've been wanting to ask someone this for quite a while, and as a linguist, the tasks fall into you. Have you looked at the development of the word woke over the last few years and where it's come from and how it's rose to prominence?
0:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, it's become pejorative, actually, and I've actually seen it happening. Even as recently as five years ago, woke just meant politically informed in a leftist way. But there's been a certain segment of woke people who have been so noxious in the public square, especially over the past couple of years, that usually now woke is used in quotation marks to mean that annoying kind of woke person. And so we really new term, because it doesn't mean what it meant in, say, 2015. It's weird how quickly these things can happen.
1:10 Chris Williamson? It shows the power of ridicule, I think. You saw that with politically correct. For a while, politically correct was a thing that meant politically correct, and then it got taken by people that objected to politically correct to use as a pejorative, and now woke has kind of supplanted that position.
1:24 Speaker 00 It really has. I remember when you could say politically correct and not flinch. It was in the early 80s that I first heard it. And even by 89, 90, it had already fallen down the well and now is virtually unusable. Woke was a very handy replacement, because it's good to have a word to indicate that you are enlightened in a leftist way. But, you know, once the fights start, then the word is going to get worn out and abused and hurt, and then you need a new term. I'll be very interested to see what the new term is, but it's too early to tell.
1:57 Chris Williamson? What's woke racism, then?
1:59 Speaker 00 Woke racism is that there's a certain kind of woke person who feels that it's not only about being leftistly informed, but that there's this basic proposition that we must be primarily focused on overturning power differentials and especially what they call white supremacy, that that must be the focus of intellectual, artistic, and moral endeavor. And if you're not doing that, then you are evil and you should be chased out of the public square. You should lose your job. You should be shamed. That's a kind of woke person. With that kind of person, they're so committed to this basic display that they know what racism is. That's it's become the it's the heartbeat of a religion,
2:43 Speaker 00 very much a religion. That has become so important that even when they do things and stick up for things that hurt black people, they don't pay attention and they don't care because what they really care about is showing that they know racism exists because that shows that they're good people. So it ends up being unintentional, but it is a woke racism and this book has been written to blow the whistle on it.
3:04 Chris Williamson? It seems like there's an inherent connection with virtue signaling there. If the reason that people are prepared to take a narrative over the top of its actual impacts, the reason for that is that they're concerned with how they're signaling to the world at large.
3:16 Speaker 00 I would even put it as the virtue signaling has become a religion instead of just something that people do idly. And it's really scary to see because people will fiercely virtue signal and claim that what they're doing is creating social justice. They're claiming that it's for other people, but they're much less concerned with the other people than they really would be if we hadn't gone from politics to a religion.
3:41 Chris Williamson? What do you think is the genesis of this obsession that we've got with race at the moment?
3:45 Speaker 00 Well, it's two things. One is that the George Floyd murder was particularly egregious and it happened and I don't make I don't want this to sound like people were being deliberately cynical, but it happened at a time when America was on lockdown. Everybody was stuck inside. Everybody was lonely and bored and angry and it was spring. And so I think There was an extent to which people valued the opportunity to go outside, to make some noise, to interact with other people. I think if that hadn't happened during the pandemic, it wouldn't have been at such a fever pitch because George Floyd's death was egregious. But unfortunately, we see things like that regularly in the United States. It wasn't
4:29 Speaker 00 that different. But there was that. And then there was also that we have social media now. And so even if there had been a pandemic, I'm trying to be an experimental social scientist, which is not my job. But if there had been a pandemic 10 years ago, and everybody had been stuck inside and a man had been killed the way George Floyd was, I don't think that all of this would have happened because there was no Twitter yet, or Twitter wasn't as influential. But people can communicate and kind of whip one another up with a speed and a fervor that just technologically wasn't possible until really over the past under 15 years. So combine the pandemic and social media, and you end up in this bizarre new
5:08 Speaker 00 moment where self-involved radicalism is being put forth as the heartbeat of progressivism on race. And we've got to undo that and get back to whatever we were doing before.
5:21 Chris Williamson? Just how racist is America at the moment?
5:23 Speaker 00 It's kind of racist. You know, it is prescribed to be openly racist to a degree that I think we're beginning to forget how extraordinary it is. And the ordinary educated person examines themselves for personal racist bias. There are societal inequities where black people clearly are behind for reasons that you can't blame on black people themselves. And that's what's called awkwardly societal racism. I don't like that term, but there are racial inequities in this society that often are based on racism in the past. Almost never racism in the present, but there can be what are called legacies of what happened in the past.
6:03 Chris Williamson? What are some examples of those?
6:05 Speaker 00 Well, so for example, if um black kids are less likely to embrace school. The reason for it is not that black people are dumb, but it's because in the past, when schools were desegregated, white kids and teachers were so hostile against the black kids coming in, that a meme developed of thinking of school as the white man's game. That was racism. Now, that same sentiment got passed along as just one way of being a clique-ish teenager. And today, you'll have a black kid who feels like, if I really like school, it's like I'm doing something for other people, not my own people. It's a legacy of racism in the past, but it's not about racism now. That really throws a lot of people.
6:46 Speaker 00 Some, one writer has called it racism without racists, and that, there's very little room for that in our current discussion.
6:53 Chris Williamson? All right, so why do you call woke racism or anti-racism a religion?
6:58 Speaker 00 It is a religion, because there's a part of it that it's allowed to proceed without addressing logic. There's a part of many religions that entails that you give up logical sequential thinking in favor of suspension of disbelief. That's part of many religions. And when it comes to this modern anti-racism, you are supposed to suspend that disbelief when questions come up that are inconvenient to the general paradigm. And so, for example, if you are a black man in an underserved community, you are in more danger of being killed than, say, I am. Now, if you're gonna be killed, the chances that you're killed by a stray white cop are infinitesimal.
7:41 Speaker 00 The chances that you're gonna be killed by somebody just like you from six blocks away, if you are gonna be killed, are much, much, much higher. Under our debate, we scream to the heavens about the cop and just pay lip service to the fact that there's a problem within black communities themselves. And that's because the religion says you show that you're aware of racism. And so that automatically makes the stray white cop interesting, and it turns your head away from the murders being committed in much greater numbers by people within underserved communities. That's religion. The fact that if you bring that up to people, they get irritated, that there's a belief system that it's incommensurate with. It's religion because frankly, there's no answer. It's not that somebody like me is missing something. It's simple. Any 10-year-old could figure it out.
8:25 Speaker 00 And yet, you're treated, and this is why it's also a religion, you're treated as a heretic for bringing up the question and pushing it. It's a religion because if you don't agree, you're pushed out a window. If it were just an ideology, it would be, I don't like how you're talking about that. That's the way it was, say, 20 years ago. Today, it's if you are against the way I think, you have to leave. You can't work here. You shouldn't teach this course. You should go to another town. That's religion because that is exactly how the fundamentalist Christian used to treat heretics. And so, the terminology is different, but people who are woke racists treat people who don't agree with them as if they were heretics. That's exactly the sentiment.
9:06 Speaker 00 And they behave exactly the way prosecutorial Christians behaved in medieval Europe. Exactly. It's not about physical punishment, but the sentiment is the same, including wanting to deprive people of their livelihoods.
9:19 Chris Williamson? Who are the priests, or the popes, or the imams of anti-racism?
9:24 Speaker 00 The intelligentsia today. It's most of the professoriate and most of the people who lead the main media organs. And their views do not just stay in what's called the acella corridor here, named after a certain train on the northeast coast. It's not just, it's not just them. It ends up percolating into general society. And I find that process, in the clinical sense, fascinating. How do you get from what some woke racist professor at Harvard thinks, down to the way people are having conversations on street corners? And yet, it can happen. These people have major influence.
10:00 Chris Williamson? Yeah, it would be incredible if that was done purely by design, or if someone's able to work out a way to distribute this particular message down to people. I mean, that's an incredibly powerful bug to be able to get into the back of people's brains. If you can limbically hijack them in that way, and create an entire new lexicon, an entire new worldview around it, you bypass all of culture, you bypass facts and reason, that's powerful.
10:23 Speaker 00 It is, and that is how they use social media in particular. Twitter is a really scary thing. And I'm on Twitter. You know, I get it, and it can be kind of addictive. But what that thing can do in making us all a village is unfortunate, and especially so in that there's nothing that we can do about it. It's not just about the mobs. It's the influence that a disproportionately small number of people can have on so very many others. But we're stuck with that part. So we just have to put other messages out there. And that's what I'm trying to do with this, this new book.
10:54 Chris Williamson? I looked at some stats around this a little while ago. And I think 98% of content on Twitter is produced by 2% of the users. So you have this huge power law of just very, very vocal, loud people on there. So are those, is the intelligentsia and the writers and the academics, are they who you refer to as the elect? Because that's what the book was called originally, right? Because you did it on your Substack.
11:19 Speaker 00 That's right. I called it the elect. And as often, what I title a book doesn't make it into the final round because I suck at titles. But yeah, it's the elect and it's them. It's the, it's the media, it's the intelligentsia. But to be honest, I don't call it the elect because those people happen to have high positions in society. Because the elect is also a lot of humble school teachers and school principals. It's just people out there who have any kind of influence on the way people think, including what children are taught. And these are people who, I don't think they think of themselves consciously as having been chosen, but they behave like that kind of person. They think that they're bearing an invaluable wisdom against which nothing logical or moral can be said. So they, they are priests.
12:04 Speaker 00 They don't put it that way. They'll roll their eyes if you say that. But they're priests and they are parishioners. They are a flock. And all of that is great, but we don't let religion run our society. And so I think that these people, I don't want to chase these people off of the planet, but they should retreat to their churches and worship together and stop shouting down everybody else who wishes to live in a secular fashion.
12:27 Chris Williamson? I've not read White Fragility or How to Be Anti-Racist.
12:32 Speaker 00 Please don't.
12:34 Chris Williamson? How would you describe those books to me?
12:38 Speaker 00 Well, White Fragility is the second worst book ever written. I mean, literally, in terms of the books that I've encountered. I read one book once when I was about 20 that was supposedly explaining how various old Hollywood cartoon characters got their names. But the person who wrote it didn't have any ideas. And so it was things like, well, Daffy Duck was probably called Daffy Duck because of his daffy personality. I remember back then thinking, this is the worst book I have ever read. Now, the second worst book I've ever read was when, two summers ago, I read White Fragility, just a truly horrific tome where the idea is that whites need to sit down in a circle
13:20 Speaker 00 and confront their complicity in an inherently racist society and understand that they're being subtly racist in just about anything that they do or say. And what you're supposed to do, once you go from there, is not clear. And D'Angelo even says to be hastily thinking about solutions, like, what are we going to do in society? Where do we go from here? That's wrong. You're supposed to, quote unquote, do the work of identifying the racism within you. And she's very careful about saying she's not trying to be hostile. She's saying that you can't help being racist in this society. She's not condemning. But still, the question is, what in the world would all of this Zen-like self-discipline do for poor black people who actually need help?
14:04 Speaker 00 And you can tell that she doesn't give a good goddamn. And when asked what she thinks of black people who don't agree with her, she basically calls us Uncle Toms. So that's, that's all there is. And then with Kendi, one doesn't want to go too far into his work. And I avoided doing so too much until about a year ago, when he started calling me out. But Kendi is somebody who thinks in binaries. He's not reflective. He thinks in, you know, binary oppositions. His stuff reminds me of book reports, essentially. And his idea is that if you're not being actively anti-racist, then you qualify as racist. Now, I don't even know what that means, but that's the way he writes.
14:47 Speaker 00 And he is the, um, he's the kind of black person who grew up actually thinking of white people as devils. That's a black nationalist kind of perspective. And he studiously makes sure to let you know that he's let go of it now. But that way of looking at things informs the way he sniffs the world. And you can listen to his talks and see that he really does think that we live in this country that is stamped from the beginning with racism and all about racism now. And he comes up with these prescriptions for what should be done in this country that quite simply are those of someone who does not know much about how modern societies work and has never had to think about it. And I didn't talk this way about him for a good couple of years because I'm not inherently mean.
15:31 Speaker 00 But he's been so nasty to me and he started it that I've decided, okay, I'm gonna have to be honest. He's not 25, he's old enough to take it. And so really Kendi is somebody who was working humbly, doing his best. And he was abruptly thrust into the spotlight two summers ago and he's doing his best. But I am baffled as to what sort of leadership he's gonna propose because he doesn't think subtly. That's it. So those are, those are the two people. And I don't, you know, um, they have sold a great many books and gotten very rich and that's fine with me. But the thing is, if you read the two of those books, it's very hard to see how they fit into America as it actually is, as opposed to this 1950 that Robin DiAngelo thinks we've never gotten past,
16:15 Speaker 00 or practically the 1850 that Kendi seems to almost wish we were still in because his dichotomies would apply more gracefully. So, yeah, they're both, um, I frankly consider both books utterly worthless. Kendi's, I wouldn't put on this worst book ever list. I just think that there's not a whole lot of there there. DiAngelo's book, as I've said elsewhere, should be used as furniture. It's a really, it's a nice size for if you've got a wobbly table, you could put that book under and your table would be solid. Truly terrible piece of work, but apparently some people disagree with me.
16:50 Chris Williamson? Is there a sense that these people would be afraid to admit victory? That if they were to achieve some sort of equality, they're basically putting themselves out of a job?
17:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, um, I wouldn't put it that way. It's not that they're thinking I wouldn't have a job. If any, if they had to admit that things were not the way they say, it would deprive them of purpose, essentially. I'm sure that both, both of those people and people like them at this point could retire. They never have to work again. It's not about having a livelihood. And I don't sense that, for example, with either D'Angelo or Kendi, that they especially like attention, looking at themselves on TV. I don't think that's either one of them. But if they had to admit that America is not the way they depict it, they wouldn't have anything to do. You know, all of us, as somebody told me when I was first starting out, we all have a few arrows in our quiver, essentially. There's a few things that we do and say.
17:46 Speaker 00 And if you can't use them, what else are you gonna do? And, you know, Robin D'Angelo's in her 60s, for example. Kendi is pushing 40. You can't completely reform yourself after a certain point. And nobody wants that. And I think just in general, you, you have a sense of your purpose on this earth. Well, if the job is already done, what are you gonna do in your spare time? I can understand why they can't let it go. But that means that there have to be voices speaking directly against people like that when they're less correct and less useful than many people are being told.
18:18 Chris Williamson? How does anti-racism harm black people, then?
18:22 Speaker 00 In many ways. So, for example, all of the effort that we are devoting to quote unquote, "defunding and reforming the police", all, at least 70% of that effort should be going into solving cases of homicide within black communities, to giving really special attention to the, to the organizations in those communities that are working to defuse violence. It ought to be a national marshal plan. And so you harm black people by focusing instead on the occasional stray white cop. You harm black people if... You see that black boys commit more violence in public schools than any other boys and that they therefore get suspended more, which is true. And you see that and instead you say that the only reason they're getting suspended
19:06 Speaker 00 more is because of bias, despite the fact that the data does not support that at all. And therefore you see schools starting to be more lenient with violent black boys and therefore the other black kids in the schools get beat up more and their grades go down, all of which is documented. And you watch all of that happening and still keep on enjoying that you can use three Bs in a row by saying that bigotry against black boys and you can get a certain kind of crowd to applaud. The way that debate is is conducted is racist because you're basically making it so that black kids get beat up more while you call yourself anti-racist by saying that there must be bigotry against black boys and people clap.
19:50 Speaker 00 That's racist behavior. And the book goes on and on in that vein. I would say that the chapter on that is the longest one because I wrote Woke Racism not to make somebody like Sean Hannity clap. It is not written for the Fox News crowd and I didn't write it just to describe the birth of a new religion. The description of that, I've done that in a couple of articles. It was boring to write that part. I've said that. What I want to write is that this new religion is harmful. It's not just that it's excessive. I'm not asking people to try to understand each other because I don't think the elect are subject to any kind of constructive discussion. I'm saying that to let these people do what they do is racism in itself. I don't think that people realize that because they're so afraid of these people, but that those are the stakes here.
20:35 Chris Williamson? Why is this worldview so popular then? If if people are afraid and it really does feel like it's quite detached from reality, why is the worldview so popular?
20:45 Speaker 00 Yeah. If you're white, it feels good to have something all figured out. If you're white and you're not religious, it feels good to have another one. If you're white, it feels really good to show that you're not racist. I can very much imagine being a white person and feeling it very important to show that. For example, it's very important to me to show that I'm not sexist. Yeah, the last thing I want is for somebody to call me a male chauvinist. And I would say that there's a bit of me that sometimes even puts blinders on as to what might be the occasional inconvenient truth. I just want to show that I am not a sexist because frankly, I'm scared. I can tell that's the way white people feel about the race issue. And then if you are a black person, to frame yourself as an eternal victim gives you a sense of belonging.
21:29 Speaker 00 It gives you a sense of significance if you're lacking a sense of it for some other reason. It's no surprise that a lot of black people feel insecure to an extent because of the history of the race. If you are a noble victim, which is the only possible if you're not one. You can't wallow in victimhood if you really are suffering from day to day. But once you're okay to frame yourself as a victim in some abstract way, feels good. It's a cloak and I completely understand people, you know, taking that cloak and wearing it. There is a victimization complex that is a human trait. It is a way that human beings can go wrong where you fetishize victimhood.
22:10 Speaker 00 You exaggerate victimhood because being the victim gives you a sense of absolution and significance. This race, the black American race, is encouraged to OD on that. So combine white people looking to show that they're not racist and black people who build an identity, not all black people, but enough who build an identity around their depiction of themselves as victims that doesn't really fit modern society. And you've got this new religion where terrible things end up happening for reasons that can't be coherently defended.
22:43 Chris Williamson? At the end of the day, if it negatively affects black people and black communities, you would imagine that after a while, there would have to be pushback. I know that some of the statistics to do with police with murders in inner cities is directly correlated with how many police are on the streets. And I remember reading an article and they said, this may be an uncomfortable statistic, but it seems like the best way to reduce homicides is to put police back on the streets. And you think, well, I don't understand why it's uncomfortable. If if someone has made a hypothesis that getting rid of the police will make the streets safer, and that turns out to be wrong, there's nothing uncomfortable about it. It's only uncomfortable for the people that had attached their sense of well being and ideology and self to the outcome of this. It's just, it's just wrong.
23:28 Speaker 00 Yep. And a critical mass of the people who argue for this quote unquote, defunding of the police don't live in those neighborhoods. And I want to give props to the ones who do. There's a certain kind of person who talks that way, who does live in neighborhoods where they listen to cop cars and, you know, they know that people have been killed not too terribly far away. But even with those people, the ideology reigns. And so they'll say something like, well, it's not like we need no cops, but the ideology means that they have to be anti cop. And that's the problem. Ideology can be a really dangerous thing when it comes to people in body bags. And it also, there's a condescension involved where you've got this woke person, and this could be a white one, or a black one, or a Latino, or an Asian one, who thinks that
24:12 Speaker 00 the police need to be reined in, that the police need to be defunded. And then you have, say, the black grandmother who has watched legions of kids being killed by other kids who she knows, saying, no, I want more police. And nobody disrespects that woman to her face, but she's generally thought of as somebody who doesn't know what's good for her. She doesn't understand the larger picture. And if the larger picture is just that we're sad about George Floyd, something that happened one night in Minnesota to one man, and we're not going to look at the larger picture, that's religion. And so it means that that grandmother is probably a devout Christian, that woke college professor is a devout elect. He's even more religious than her, but he doesn't know it.
24:54 Chris Williamson? It really does feel like anti racism treats black people like simpletons and cretins. Like, that's how it feels. It feels like they say, look, no, no, no, no, you don't need to worry about what's good for you. We know, we know what's good for you. Just put your faith in us.
25:12 Speaker 00 That, yep. And cretin isn't used as much in American English, and so I don't put it that way, but I wish it were. Yeah. Anti-racism treats black people like dum-dums. And yet, you see so many black people, including the very smartest ones, just lapping it up because the victimhood complex is a powerful attractant to all human beings. We all know professional martyrs. It's human. And so, once you've settled into that, and that's your comfort zone, you will accept any amount of condescension, as long as you can consider to think of yourself as a perpetual victim. It's a nasty social cocktail.
25:47 Chris Williamson? Do you have any idea about how much credit, are you enjoying the use of credit? And I'll just anglicize everything for the rest of the day. Talk about cups of tea and stuff, fish and chips. All right, governor. Have you got any idea about how the black community's views on racism and anti-racism are split? I'm aware the black community is not some person that we can just go and speak to. It's not an individual mass that we can survey. But do you have any ideas around this?
26:12 Speaker 00 I do. If you survey the black community, as in, people who have PhDs and write for the major media organs, you would get the impression that the black view, except for the occasional weirdo like me, is that racism in our era is largely unchanged since 1960. It's just that people are more polite, and there have been, you know, the deck chairs have been rearranged on the Titanic. You would think that is the way everybody thinks. The minute you go out into the real world, you find that it's different. I know that from my own family. I know that from listening to people on the subway in New York, which is a great way to get a sense of the real world. You know, we don't drive here. We sit on the train, and most of the people on the train do not have the salary or the
26:58 Speaker 00 circumstances of somebody like me. And you just listen. And you find that the actual view of the community
27:06 Speaker 00 Many intelligentsia understand there's a certain social conservatism among ordinary black people, but I don't think they fully understand that ordinary black people are not nearly as subject to this victimization complex as educated people are. The professional victim at, say, the black barber shop, that's one or two people. That's a type. And often it's somebody who's self-educated and has read a lot of the things that people in the media in the university write. The bookish person who maybe didn't go to college, but, you know, reads. That's where you get that sort of thing. Then there's kind of a street corner element, certain religious figures, certain churches. But that's not the default.
27:47 Speaker 00 I remember, it's almost like somebody wrote this for me, but I know they weren't performing for me. There was a black couple who were sitting next to me on the train. I think they had a child together. And there was a sign on the New York subway for a while where they showed five different authors, most of them of color. And I forget why, but it was advertising five books. And it was some sort of initiative from a library or something like that. All five of the books were very much the ones that today's intelligentsia argue are the good ones about race. Like, one of them was Ta-Nehisi Coates's book, Between the World and Me, and four others that were kind of like that. And they had other authors holding them up enthusiastically, as if these books needed advertisement. It
28:31 Speaker 00 was a rather insufferable sign. But it was just there for about six months. And I remember listening to this couple. And the woman just said, rocking the carriage, I get the feeling she wasn't college educated. And she said, them is all, did she say them? No. She said, those are all liberal books. And she had this frown on her face. And I don't think her husband quite got it. But she said, those are all liberal books. How come they can't have different kinds? Even she got it, that there was a bias in this sign, as if the only relevant black books are the ones that say that the world is going to hell. I don't think she was that unique. But you would never know she existed based on the sorts of people we're talking about. This is an intelligentsia issue, for the most part.
29:12 Chris Williamson? She needs to get on Twitter. If she got on Twitter, everyone would know about her opinion. We should find her.
29:17 Speaker 00 I almost wanted to say, who are you? But I didn't want to.
29:19 Chris Williamson? I'll sign you up for a Twitter account, because I will do that. What do you think about the concept of whiteness?
29:27 Speaker 00 I don't know what the purpose of it is. And so, you know, there, there, there are some white people and there is, um, there is disproportionate power. There is a sense of entitlement that a certain kind of white person has, a certain naivete. Sure, that's there from the world historical perspective. White people, these northern and western European people have had a disproportionate and in many ways grievous impact upon the world, certainly. The question is whether here in 2021, with all those things having happened, the solution to that is some grand revolution in our psychosocial consciousness right now. Is that really what we need?
30:08 Speaker 00 Or can we have a more meat and potatoes aspect to things and help people who need help live in the society which for better or for worse, these white people largely created when they started getting in ships and sailing across the ocean. And I think for a lot of people, there's a sense that somehow there needs to be some reckoning. I wonder if they wish we would all go back to living in bands of two or 300 people by the sides of the river. I mean, that seems to be what they want. Unfortunately, modernity developed through the actions and machinations and ravages and rapings and pillagings of a certain kind of white person advantaged by the geography of a peninsula called Europe. That happened. But here we are now, and there's so many things that we have to do. So I think that, yeah, there is a such thing as whiteness, but the question is whether
30:53 Speaker 00 we need to de-center it to the way that we're talking about and to the, to the degree that people are talking about de-centering whiteness. And if we completely de-center whiteness, the question is, what have we got? And is that really a world that we want? Maybe we just need to go back to the way we were thinking about these things about 20 years ago, where the idea was everything white is not good, a great many things that are not white are good, and let's make sure that we pay as much attention as we can to everything that isn't white, because whiteness is not all that's good. The new idea that you de-center whiteness and stigmatize it and pretend, for example, that music theory is white, that's Kabuki, or perhaps with more respect, that's religious fervor. That's not making sense of things.
31:36 Chris Williamson? Or turning up on time, or the nuclear family, or grit and determination.
31:42 Speaker 00 Or precision, right?
31:43 Chris Williamson? Yeah.
31:44 Speaker 00 Yeah.
31:44 Chris Williamson? Like those things, that, to me, was one of the most disturbing things to see.
31:52 Chris Williamson? Especially when it got demonized to as something that the black community shouldn't aspire to as values which no one should aspire to and that the solution for is not to play the game well but to rearrange the rules of the game so that people who don't play that game well can play it badly and still win. That to me is so pernicious. It's like turning up on time for a thing is required throughout the rest of your life. Whether that's a doctor's appointment, you've got a doctor's appointment, you have an important surgery and you rock up two hours late and the surgeon's on to somebody else and you want to complain about the fact that that's structurally whiteness and I don't adhere
32:34 Chris Williamson? to your concept of what being on time is. Or rules when you look, when you roll the clock forward to do with levels of poverty, black boys and black girls growing up without a father in the family, like nuclear family, it's one of the core central supporting structures that having a good childhood that forms a robust and effective adulthood is built on top of. It actually feels to me like the sort of thing that you would slip below the surface if you wanted to make black people fail.
33:05 Speaker 00 Yep. All of that stuff sounds like something some white supremacist in 1895 would come up with and promulgate. And then we could look back at that person now and talk about what a monster they were. And yet here's all this stuff. I think that once the religion comes into it also in that what you're saying is clearly not an opinion. That's just logic. Anybody understands that. The idea that to be precise is white. The only thing you can get out of that whole idea that precision, that making deductions and inductions, thinking about results, et cetera, that all of this is white, is roughly that black people are supposed to just, I swear, this is what people are thinking. Black people are supposed
33:49 Speaker 00 to jam and dance and have raggedy conversations where we intuit one another's feelings and reinforce each other. That frankly, that's what it sounds like. Like, what are we gonna do? Dance? You know, if we're not gonna do real physics, I think we're supposed to just dance. And once again, that sounds like-
34:09 Chris Williamson? You do dance better than white people, though.
34:12 Speaker 00 That frankly, that is true. And I think a lot of them are thinking that. You know, they don't move as well.
34:17 Chris Williamson? No.
34:17 Speaker 00 So we're gonna do what we do, which is jam. But jamming wouldn't have created the world that we sit here saying those things in and, you know, getting listened to. So it's just, none of it makes sense. And that's why I'm saying that all of this is a creed, rather than something anybody's thought out.
34:32 Chris Williamson? It's this expansion of the term whiteness and white supremacy. So Dave Chappelle got called a white supremacist the other day because of his comments on gender. How do you square that circle?
34:46 Speaker 00 Well, the idea is that there are white people, and then there's everybody else. And everybody else is dealing in intersectional fashion with oppression and denigration and not being seen at the hands of whites. If you take on a perspective of antipathy towards one of those groups underneath, and even if you belong to one of those groups, you become in C2, that's a misuse of that expression, so just scrap it. You become an honorary white person. That's what's going on. So Dave Chappelle, you know, with that rangy black English, and it used to be he's standing there smoking and, you know, one of the blackest men on the planet. Because of those things that he's saying about trans people, he becomes a white supremacist.
35:31 Speaker 00 All of that is play acting. Everybody knows that doesn't make any sense. And, you know, he's had a very black adulthood, a very black oriented career where he left his TV show because he was worried about what it was making white people think. And yet now he's a white supremacist because he's not on board with the way everybody thinks about gay people and trans people. And of course, is anybody surprised, listening to his whole career? So that's, a lot of this is more of that. So now he's becoming a heretic, even though he's black himself and is fully quote unquote woke. Because you have to make him a heretic because you are part of a religion where it's your job to put up your fingers like this at people who say the wrong thing. This won't do.
36:12 Chris Williamson? What do you think about cultural appropriation?
36:16 Speaker 00 I think the concern over that is absurd. I think cultural appropriation is inappropriate if somebody from on high apes somebody from below and makes money off of it that they didn't.
36:27 Chris Williamson? What's that mean?
36:27 Speaker 00 That there's, for example, if you say that Elvis Presley took on the rock and roll inflections and music and moves and became a billionaire, while the black men who originated all of that did not have as much success and some of them labored in obscurity. I can see an argument that that's cultural appropriation, but the idea that it's cultural appropriation when white people do things that anybody else does, as opposed to the anybody else who do things white people do and that's considered okay. That is as if people are looking for a reason to be angry, as if imitation isn't a form of flattery, as if people living in proximity aren't going to imitate one another to a certain extent, and as if any of us wouldn't want
37:10 Speaker 00 America's popular music since about 1890. If cultural appropriation is wrong, there's no ragtime, there's no jazz, there are no show tunes, there's no rock and roll, there's no Porky and Bess, there's no nothing. Yeah, basically, our music, no offense, but I don't, I don't think, this isn't an insult for your country, but our music here would be Europop. We would have that shitty music that you hear if you go to a dance club in Finland. That would be what, except the music from America. And yet, we're supposed to call all of this cultural appropriation and do high fives because the religion is all about identifying racism. It doesn't make any sense, but we end up having these fruitless debates over it because of the imperatives of this religion.
37:54 Chris Williamson? Yeah, the power dynamics and punching up versus punching down when it comes to cultural appropriation really just doesn't seem to make sense to me. I remember last year, right in the thick of it, or it might have been this year, when it was St. Patrick's Day on the 17th of March, and someone had highlighted that there's a potential hypocrisy here that people are allowed to wear the hats and say good morning to you and like pots of gold and stuff like that and everyone's got a ginger beard on. How is that not cultural appropriation? And I remember this brand tweeted out saying, that's not appropriation, it's appreciation. And I thought, like, this is just lexical Brazilian jujitsu here.
38:29 Speaker 00 Yes, it is. And what it really is supposed to be about is brown people, for the most part, having a reason to feel aggrieved. And as we've said before, there are reasons why white people would pretend to buy into it. There are reasons why brown people would pretend to buy into this. You're appropriating me. Whereas you can see cultural mixture in so many places, such as, you know, this pot of gold business. And you can think, if that's okay, why not okay for a white person to say you demand? What's the difference? Who does it hurt? You know, it's not as if if a white person imitates black people, it's taking away from us. You know, you took our word, people say, but if we keep using it, that's fine. And there are 99 other words that black people use that white people
39:13 Speaker 00 never pick up. What are the contours of this argument? But it's all just for that purpose of the genuflection.
39:20 Chris Williamson? What is, what are some of the ways that we can lessen this grip on culture then? Because it does feel, to use the Brazilian jiu-jitsu analogy again, it does feel like it's locked in pretty tight.
39:31 Speaker 00 It is, but I'm not sure how tight. And I think that something really went wrong in about June of 2020, which is when I started writing that book in Fury. And social media really did focus some things. But I think there's a backlash now. I think that a lot of that moment had to do with the fact that people were locked up inside and whipped up by the chat function on Zoom into some opinions that were overblown, some decisions to fire people, which wouldn't have happened in a room where people could actually breathe each other's air and see each other's facial expressions. I think a lot of it was that. And so you just need there to be a pushback. And I'm trying to be part of that. I think in the conversation, we're seeing an amount of pushback against this way of looking at
40:15 Speaker 00 things that we weren't seeing a year ago. Because I think a critical mass of people in America, I think the majority of thinking people in America see that this is wrong. The issue is just creating a bit of a backbone in people. So that people will be willing to be called a racist in the public sphere and not think of their lives as being over. Social media creates a space where we have to get used to. Being mobbed sometimes, being roasted to an acrid kind of dialogue. And that includes being called things. I find myself thinking of, I don't spend as much time on Twitter as many people like me, but that doesn't mean I don't look at it several times a day. And I've noticed that you go on there and there'll be a kind of person who writes you something really, really nasty, you know, go the fuck to hell.
41:00 Speaker 00 Or, you know, your career has disappointed me, et cetera. And I've noticed that with that person who's the meanest, you get used to mean, but that person who's just like a bad out of hell, they inevitably, inevitably that person has six, six followers. It's always some lone wolf. And I don't know if it's a troll. I don't know if it's somebody who doesn't bathe and is just sitting there in their chair. I get the feeling those people are perfectly normal executives. But the people who are that mean don't have any friends. And I always think of that as kind of an analogy. The people who are defenestrating people for saying things like reverse racism, et cetera. It's a very vocal minority of people who've been caught up in something. Most of us are just watching those people.
41:44 Speaker 00 And the reason they get away with this stuff is because we're scared. We don't want to get that tweet from them, you know, that tweet that I get from the occasional person. That person's almost always male, you know, it's a type. Well, you know, that person says it and who cares? You know, I don't hear from that person again. I'm certainly not going to write to them. In the same way, this sort of mob, we just have to start letting people say you're a white supremacist and just take a deep breath, have some bourbon, let it pass after about a couple of weeks. If you don't respond to those people, often they just walk away. Now, some people are going to be in more of a position to deal with people like that than others. But we have to make a climate where people with elect viewpoints are not able to labor
42:26 Speaker 00 under the illusion that their views are truth and that everybody's just going to bow down. They think everybody's bowing down because we realize we're racists and we're just listening. We will never get through to people like that, but we just need them to sit down. They used to be sitting at the table. It's not that people who believe in critical race theory had never been heard from until a year and a half ago. It's that they used to be seated at the table with the rest of us. The elect need to sit down. They don't need to leave the room. We need to hear from people on the hard left all the time. They have interesting things to say, but we need them to sit the hell down. And the only way that's going to happen is we have to stop being so afraid of the rhetoric that they spout when you go afoul of their religious tenets. We can't let them win. And I think
43:09 Speaker 00 that at this point, America is still so unaccustomed to that kind of person having so much of a presence that we're getting a sense of how to deal with them. And I know it's happening in Canada, Australia, and the UK as well. What do you do with that kind of person? What you do is you tell them to sit down and you don't rest and you don't look out of their eyes until they do. And if we don't learn how to do that, then we're going to be run by prelates. We're going to be, we're going to have our lives run by anti-intellectual priests who have no genuine concern with the well-being of the people they claim to speak for. That's not the way this is supposed to go. And I think we all know it. We just have to, we have to frankly, grow a pair, so to speak.
43:50 Chris Williamson? Even if you're not an Ibram X Kendi or a John McWhorter or whatever, somebody who is online with a big following that can cause swaths, that's a traffic weapon, that can just direct people around the internet. There is a role, I think, that everyone else can play, which is to observe the compulsion inside of themselves to be a part of a cancel mob, to pile on someone on Twitter because you think this is, this tweet's got, calling someone out's got 10,000 likes. I, I, I need to reply to this because it's a virtue signal. And to just think, well, hang on a second. A lot of the time, there's wisdom in the individual and madness in a crowd. So should I actually look at this group behavior as a signal that there's something behind this or that there's a signal that there's something
44:32 Chris Williamson? not behind this? Is this mass hysteria or is this mass accuracy?
44:36 Speaker 00 Exactly.
44:37 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I think.
44:38 Speaker 00 Mass accuracy.
44:40 Chris Williamson? Yeah, because it very rarely is. Uh, final thing. Talk to me about watching the lexical change from Black Lives Matter to that now being bifurcated into Black Lives Matter and BLM when people refer to it, because that was fascinating for me to watch.
44:58 Speaker 00 You know, to be honest, Chris, I've never thought about that as a particular transition, but BLM shows that Black Lives Matter has drilled itself into the general consciousness to the extent that it's no longer about the words and their meaning. It's a sentiment. It is a, it's a position. BLM becomes one of the, the markers, the shibboleths of whether you have the right kind of thought. And I don't think Black Lives Matter is wrong in itself. I wish there were something as powerful with the cute acronym that was about fixing black on black homicide as well, but I guess I'm wrong to call, call it black on black homicide. That's a whole other rant that people have. But BLM now is a way of essentially almost, you know, mumbling as you go past somebody in a prison
45:42 Speaker 00 yard, you know, some sort of code to make it clear that you're on the same side. Black Lives Matter also was awkward because theoretically, it would have been more useful to call it Black Lives Matter 2, because that's what was meant. It didn't mean only Black Lives Matter. But a lot of people on the right pretended not to understand that and started saying, no, white lives matter too. And Black Lives Matter 2 wouldn't have been as catchy a slogan. You, you want it to be three things. But it being called BLM shows how much this has gotten down into the consciousness. It's all over windows. It's drawn on streets. Businesses that have nothing to do with politics will have BLM in their window. That is an interesting development, but some of it means, I'm not racist. It means I'm a good person.
46:26 Speaker 00 Don't call me names on Twitter. And the problem is, what kind of ideology are you espousing? You're defending yourself against being called racist, but a lot of the people who would mark you as okay are also people who think that it's kind of cute when black people riot through an inner city and then go into the downtown of a city. And that some of the black people in question start breaking things and stealing things, which has nothing to do with making a statement about, say, defunding the police. And all of that is okay, because we have this apocalyptic vision where we're going to burn the mother down. We're going to just burn down the master's house. And so that's what it is when you break into a Best Buy and steal a TV because George Floyd died. No, that's not progressive,
47:11 Speaker 00 but we're not supposed to talk about it because the religion isn't compatible with treating it for what it is. So.
47:18 Chris Williamson? I brought that up with someone yesterday. I had David Pakman on the show, who's a very well reasoned left, as far as I can see, very well reasoned left leaning commentator. And I referred to the BLM riots from last year and immediately he pulled me up on it and said, "The BLM riots? I've never heard it called that." And I thought, "You've never heard the incidents that we saw last year with shops being burnt." Like, if you were to look up riots in a dictionary, it would be, for me, things on fire, bricks through windows and stuff being stolen. Like, those are the three horsemen of the riot apocalypse. And that was what we saw. So I can't tell, it would very much surprise me if that was actually the case, that he hadn't ever heard that before. But yeah, that really shocked
48:03 Chris Williamson? me and it seemed to shock him that I used that term. So more than anything, what that taught me was we exist, two content creators that move in similar spaces, David's shows bigger than mine, but still, that we can see completely different worlds, which is crazy.
48:18 Speaker 00 Very much so.
48:19 Chris Williamson? And the thing about BLM that I thought was interesting was, what you see now is people referring to the movement itself and the organisation, sorry, you see people referring to the organisation as BLM, but the movement as Black Lives Matter. And I think that what we're seeing with that is people using BLM to distance themselves from things like the founder buying a $15 million home in the whitest neighbourhood, like just gentrifying themselves into oblivion. And BLM, perhaps as a organisation, has found itself to be wanting, failing, toxic, associated with a bunch of other things, that people can no longer use that. So they've actually had to split that term into two. Now you have
49:01 Chris Williamson? Black Lives Matter, which is the fundamental principles that undergird that movement, and you have BLM, the organisation. But I don't agree with the way that their founder got caught with his sand.
49:10 Speaker 00 Co-opted, right.
49:11 Chris Williamson? Yeah, correct, correct, correct.
49:12 Speaker 00 I hadn't been aware of that lexical bifurcation. I'll be on the lookout for that now. That's useful and interesting.
49:18 Chris Williamson? Yeah, I like it. John McWhorter, ladies and gentlemen. Woke Racism will be linked in the show notes below. And if people want to keep up to date with everything else that you do, where should they go?
49:28 Speaker 00 Well, I do a podcast about language, not about race and language especially, but just hardcore linguistic-y stuff, but made fun. And that's called Lexicon Valley, and it's at booksmartstudios.org. It used to be at Slate, but now it's at booksmartstudios.org. And I write an essay for The Times twice a week. I don't know why I signed up for this, but I do that for The New York Times twice a week now. So you can find my hot takes there. And we'll see what happens after that. I love it. Thanks, John. Thank you, Chris.
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