Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (John McWhorter)

from the video above:

...So, what is it about "the elect" that makes it a religion, even though not Supernatural? I Think I know but ,but uh...

For me the religion analogy was heartfelt. I really do feel as if I have seen a religion being born, especially in the 21st century. And, of course, it depends on what you call a religion. But where your cognitive processes are expected to be left behind in terms of logic going from A to B. And you're just supposed to have a certain Faith. You're supposed to take certain tenants as given, regardless of external evidence, that, to me, is religious thought. I'm Amazed by it, because I'm an anal kind of person who probably should have been a lawyer, and when I see people...

Well you're not a lawyer by the way, I'm very glad you're not a lawyer.

...sometimes I wonder, but watching people espouse things that really don't cohere except as according to this philosophy, I find, wow, you have one part of your brain that's sequestered off from this thing called logic, and for me that is religion.

So now, calling it Supernatural, to an extent for me, with all due respect to your friend, that's labels. But I think the thing people like least about Woke Racism is that I keep calling it a religion rather than, although the problem is what else would I have used, although I wasn't being exploitative. If I say "cult", I'm being mean, and also a cult would require more self-consciousness of organization than they have. If I say "ideology" not quite, because I'm talking about "not having a sense of things based on reality", whereas people can have different senses of how you're going to organize things which they can argue for carefully, that for me is an ideology. You're going from an ideology, you hang everything from your tree. Where a religion is where, frankly, you allow yourself not to make sense at all. And so to see, for example, good smart white people saying we cannot submit black people to standardized test, they're racist. And they're going from the fact that black people, for various reasons, often are not as good at them as white and Asian people. To say we should take them away from them. To not understand how condescending that is, to not understand that what you're saying is that black people just aren't as quick on the uptake as us, as opposed to thinking how do we make black people better on the test, that's religious. It means that you've been taught "that which bothers black people must be eliminated." "That which can be called racist," by a charismatic black person, "must be eliminated because I must show that I'm not a racist. And no one's thinking this, but, regardless of whether I'm actually reasoning from A to B. I see that as an unintentional kind of racism.

Now, "defund the police". Now that's all a little bit 2020-2021 now, but the fact that anybody would have said, "defund the police because of what happened to George Floyd," in the face of regular calls from disadvantaged black neighborhoods to have more police. And that's an ancient phenomenon that goes back to the 70s, and it was certainly there in '20 and '21. You get a kind of white person who kept saying that with their fist in the air in the face of the black grandmother who lost her nephew to gunfire a week before. That's not it's not a deliberate lack of compassion, but they are subordinating the feelings, the thoroughly legitimate feelings really, opinions, of black people who live in a neighborhood to their quest to demonstrate that "they are not racist". That, really, that, talk about supernatural, in order for that to really cohere of a good person, and I think that people like that are good people, it's that you've got a religion. It's the equivalent of you thinking that when you die you're going to be, you know, living in the grace of somebody who died 2,000 years ago. It's that disconnected from anything that we can actually see and reasonably describe right now. So to me, that's a religion. I literally see it that way. I think some people think it was a marketing ploy or I just want...

No no no, I think it's very convincing yeah, um and there's a very specific analogy to Original Sin, oh well, that's the privilege...

Yeah, and that you you can't live it down. None of that I mean it's a nice thing to talk about white privilege and to understand what it is. But the idea that you can't live it down, and that therefore, because you're a privileged white person, you can't write about other people than yourself, and then if you do write about privileged white people, you're John Chever and you're a racist, or that your opinion about anything connected to race is not valid because you have the privilege, although you can't specify exactly why it's not valid. And if anybody asks you to specify it, they get smacked in the face. All of that is religion.

And yes, so much of it is resembles Christianity, including, "this isn't a safe space. I can't be here." That means that it's, you're saying that somebody's a heretic. It's the same thing that happened to Galileo. It's a different word, but the notion that "I don't feel safe" and a lot of people were saying this on Zoom, "this person can't work here, I don't feel safe." What do you mean, and what is it that you're worried is going to happen to you actually? We're not supposed to ask all of that is religious thought. That's somebody holding you know their fingers like this (sign of Cross). And so, I saw religion coming. And I wrote that, it's embarrassing, I wrote it in like 10 minutes, I was really, really angry. And I had a summer...

It's a, it's a passionate book.

God I'm getting mad now. But yeah, I wrote it because I felt that a lot of people felt the same way, that a lot of them are black. And that has very much turned out to be true.

So that point is very well taken, and the point about patronizing is seemly, welting, it's condescending, that's awful patronizing, yeah um I I found it very, very convincing.

Thank you.

And I recommend it to all sorts of people

But they're not white.

So so so so...

...you're racist, right? No, actually, that one did exactly its job, it's already becoming obsolete. It's clearly something somebody wrote on their porch in 2020. I think things are different now, than they were, in terms of peak wokeness, back then. I think people have retreated and understood racism exists, and that we must expunge it as much as possible, but stop defenestrating people.

But something needed to be written then. And if my book played any part in the questioning, and honestly, I think it did, I'm glad and um, yeah, now we we move on. That is, I'll bet it's the only book I'll ever write that will actually get translations. "Woke Racism" is now in what? It's in Portuguese, it's in German, and I think French is is coming. That'll be the only book I have that gets translated. But that makes me happy, too, because wokeness was beginning to take over the whole world, and I don't think it should. We need to go back to a legitimate, 2015 kind of liberal left thinking about race that actually helps people. So now we've got, they call them in German it's called "the chosen" is what they called it. And then in Portuguese it's just, um, "woke racism". But we, I.. I'm happy to see that book get around.

Yeah, yeah... good. Um, what else? It is interesting, isn't it, that um, being black is something which is... it behaves like a genetic dominant, even though it isn't. Um, it's a, it's a mimetic dominant, in the sense that if, if, if you have, um, almost any ancestors of, indeed, know a great, great, great grandfather who's black, then you're called black.

Mhmmm.

It's not it's not quite a a genetic dominant. It's a cultural dominant. Um, but I mean, Barack Obama could just as well call himself White.

Oh yeah...

...um, and yet um, I just... you've made the same point yourself so so...

...It makes no sense, yeah, and it is dominant in that even I, I am not the kind of person who would say that based on, you know, the cheek swab that I'm really half African, that therefore I'm not black, I was born in 1965, there's certain categories, and that's it. And I've got other things to think about. I would not say. "I'm not going to accept the category," but the fact that we now look at say, somebody who's a quarter black American, and say, "and therefore they're black." That is going to look so ridiculous in the future, and I think that future is coming ever sooner. But it recapitulates the way bigoted Southerners were thinking like 10 minutes ago, "if you got any black in you". And then you have somebody with a PhD say that you're denying your heritage. What's the Heritage? You have to specify. And if you ask the question, everybody's eyes roll, and that's religion. And so yeah, we live under that illusion. And it is quite dominant because I'm stuck in it. Although my kids are, you know, they're half me, and they're half their mother. technically they qualify as what used to be called, "mixed". But in the world they're living in, I'm frankly not sure that they are going to embrace a black American identity. I think they're going to think of themselves as just people, because they never knew the 20th century, and they're growing up affluent, in highly racially diverse places. There are already people in my life, and I'm sure people observing my life, who think that my wondering whether my daughters are black, is heretical. They're thinking, "he must not want to be black himself. He doesn't understand the racism that they're going to encounter." But the thing is, if I specify, "okay, what's the racism that they're going to encounter in this life, as opposed to, for example, racism I certainly encountered in the 70s and 80s, in this life, how often is it going to be, and how direct is it going to be? And if it's going to be something extremely rare, why do you base a whole identity on that? Why?" And of course, to put it that directly is considered socially obnoxious. But it's a real question in the 2020s, and the 2030s, are they, black women, aren't we supposed to be getting beyond race?

And there's a whole Cadre of people who don't want to get beyond it, and frankly, I think it's because the sense of alienation, and the sense of opposition to an other, can be a sense of group membership. That's the funny thing about being a human under modern, stratified conditions. You want somewhere to belong. And to be able to shake your fist at an outsider gives you a sense of warm tribalism. And I don't think that black people are exceptions to that, because no humans are. But that means that you're not supposed to ask the question as to, "isn't it time that we get Beyond race"? And of course a person will say, "but there's still racism out there." And then you ask, "well, okay, but what kind? And nevertheless, why does it mean that we can't start getting Beyond race and change our categories? Our categories are absurd."

But there are people, it's getting to the point where I'm getting old, I'm 58, Thomas Chatterton Williams in his 30s, Coleman Hughes in his 20s... these are up and coming, or up and came now black commentators. And Camille Foster, who was in his 30s, they are rejecting the category completely, especially seeing, you know, Thomas seeing his phenotypically white kids. I can't quite get there, but but they're right. So I'm kind of on the fence.

Yeah something else I going to say was, um well, what about the defenistration of historical figures like David Hume, um Lincoln, uh Jefferson, um, you say something about that?

Oh yeah, the defenistration of people in the past is a galloping absurdity. I can't even pull punches on that. To pretend not to understand, and I really do think it's pretending... I'm not saying people don't understand, to pretend not to understand that it's very hard for people to see beyond their time. And/ or to insist that you do understand that, but when it comes to black people in slavery you don't, which makes no sense. To pretend that, is a gesture. You're showing that you know racism exists, by showing that you know that it existed, and that of course there are legacies of that racism then, but to evaluate Thomas Jefferson on the basis of how he saw black people is willfully ahistorical. He was a great figure in so very many ways, and wow, big surprise, he thought black people were inferior, almost everyone did. The occasional person saw beyond it, but frankly, they rarely had a whole lot of influence in their view. It worries me in particular because, based on that way of looking at things almost anybody before about 10 minutes ago is somebody who you could barely get through dinner with now, including Martin Luther King, and homophobia, all of it. And so what it means is it allows you to assue history. You don't have to study history. And, you know big surprise, history is kind of difficult. History is a challenge. Well, if you are going to reject all of these people, you don't have to master how social history works. You don't have to learn all those old facts. You can just deal with the Charisma of thinking about people who you think are cool today. It's pernicious for education and honestly I really, I have no patience with it, whatsoever.

 
Now, there are degrees. So for example, Woodrow Wilson. Okay, he's white. He's Southern. He straddles the 19th and 20th century. Was he racist? Of course, but he was a especially racist. He wrote poisonous things about black people again and again, despite having a PhD, despite being president. I get why they took his name off of a building at Princeton. But it has to be an extreme case like that. It can't be just that you were white before last week, and that's where we're going.

It is remarkable, if you look at history, if you look at say the 19th century figure like TH Huxley, or Abraham Lincoln, who were in the Vanguard of progressive thought and at the time, and yet, read what they say. I mean, that Hideous racism by modern standards...

They were Progressive.

...and they were Progressive. And it makes you think about what people of the future, what a century in time going, look back at and um,

No one thinks of that. I mean for example, they're going to look at us and think that our sense of what white and black are, are ridiculous. But you know, feelings about maybe abortion? You know, feelings about owning animals? That may look appalling to people in the future. And the idea is, we're going to, you know, take somebody off of a building because they had a dog? That really is where we're going. Scares me. And it also, just, I think we can do better. It's a problem.

Well John, it's been such a pleasure to talk to you, and we better we better wrap up. I hope we can have another opportunity.

Richard this was fantastic occasion. I've wanted to meet you for 30 years. So this was great.

Many thanks.