
š§ John McWhorter on Why Woke Ideas Harm Minority Communities
John McWhorter and Yascha Mounk discuss whether "wokeness" is a religion and how it affects black Americans.
John McWhorter is an author, a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors, a Columbia University linguist, and a columnist for The New York Times. His latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, argues that we must understand wokeness, quite literally, as a religion.
In this weekās conversation, John McWhorter and Yascha Mounk discuss the nature of todayās social progressivism, whether it constitutes a religion, and how we can actually help to reduce racial disparities in the United States.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: What is the unifying principle of the body of thought that is, for lack of a better word, called āwokeā?
John McWhorter: Thereās a certain kind of person who feels that we should focus our intellectual, moral and artistic endeavors on battling power differentials, especially where white people are the ones in power. To the extent that you are not on board with that being the very center of things, you deserve to be hounded out of polite society, you should lose your job, you should be excoriated in public, you should be treated in an uncivil way in the same way as someone who was an advocate for say, pedophilia would be. These are people who are putting forth a very interesting but fragile proposition that battling power differentials should be the center of everything, rather than, say, one of ten things that should concern you.
The idea is that there is something called āwhitenessā, for one, and that weāre talking about white power over people who arenāt. Thereās also an idea that being a cis straight person is a kind of power thatās constantly misused. And you could argue that thatās definitely true. I think that in terms of our reckoning, though, since roughly May of 2020, an awful lot of it has been the whiteness issue. And the idea is that whites have always been in power and have abused it, and that our focus must be on decentering that power by any means necessary.
Mounk: By and large, it certainly seems right that a world in which power differentials are less steep in everyday life would be a better world. Why is it that you think we have reasons to worry about some of these ideas?
McWhorter: Because weāre not encouraged to think about whether or not we were sufficiently concerned with battling that kind of power differential before two years ago; weāre supposed to just accept that we needed to really step it up, that something more extreme needed to happen. What weāve seen since the murder of George Floyd worries me for two quick reasons. One, we have seen a real uptick in abuse carried out in the name of the supposed quest for social justice. One of many cases is that thereās a white curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He says that heās very interested in collecting art from non-white people, but that he wonāt stop collecting art by whites, because that would be āreverse discrimination.ā [Amid outrage, he resigned]. And I should say, Iāve done some digging: He isnāt an obnoxious person. He was very well-liked. This sort of thing became normal starting in the spring of 2020, and itās unjust.
I see a white man defenestrated for using the term āreverse discrimination,ā supposedly, in the name of justice for people of my race. Weāre being told that you have to push that man out of his job as a preliminary to helping black people who need jobs and childcare and health care. I donāt see the connection.
Mounk: The sympathetic way of looking at this is to say that excess is a normal part of any social movement. But activists are moving the country in the right direction, so perhaps youāre on the wrong side of history for opposing it?
McWhorter: Yes, there are always excesses. But the main point of Woke Racism is not me saying everybody needs to just sit down and shut up, or that black people need to just get over racism and pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Black people are being hurt, frankly, mostly by well-meaning white people, and it truly disturbs me.
Letās say that a white man gets fired for using a word. Whenever that sort of thing happens to someone, it seems like thereās this idea that you have to send an announcement of it to either Glenn Loury or John McWhorter. Frankly, itās exhausting, because I didnāt ask for that. But nevertheless, it does give me a very accurate picture of how often this happens. Itās literally daily. More to the point, black people are being hurt. What people donāt get is that all of this talk of anti-racism is often unintentionally racist against actual people living actual lives. And I think that someone needs to say it who is black themselves, and maybe not young enough to be considered inexperienced, and not old enough to be considered over the hill. I just want to contribute my voice to this because I think that a great many peopleāboth black and whiteāagree with me, but are afraid to say so because of the tactics that people like this use to have things their way.
Mounk: How is it that black people are being hurt by this?
McWhorter: A quick example is what anti-racism means in education, where the idea is that school boards and teachers propose that to be anti-racist, you canāt submit black people to real challenges, because the sorts of things that involve real challenges are white things such as precision, punctuality and having to raise your hand; that those are wrong, that you need to turn your whole field upside down in order to adjust to the presence of people of color, such that, for example, a classics department makes Latin and Greek optional.
Thatās all harmful to black people, because itās treating black Americans as if they arenāt as bright. In arguing that itās racist to submit black people to standardized tests because black kids often arenāt as good at them, youāre effectively saying black kids shouldnāt be subjected to a test of abstract cognitive skill. I can imagine Strom Thurmond saying that, and yet weāre not supposed to discuss it. This is doubletalk. Or assuming that if a disproportionate number of black boys are suspended from schools for violence, it must be because of bias. What happens in schools where people take that anti-racist counsel into account is that more black kids, not to mention teachers, get beat up. I consider that to be an unintentionally racist act itself. This isnāt the way social history is supposed to work. This stuff hurts black people.
The unspoken notion is that the most interesting thing about being black is thinking about how white people see us, or donāt, or whether they see us fully. I have to stand athwart this and ask, āHow much does it matter?ā What youāre telling me is, āThis white person doesnāt see me in my full essence the way my black friends do, and therefore that affects my success.ā Does it really? Somebody who interviews you might not see you quite fully, but these days, theyāre often operating under DEI imperatives, and even if theyāre not, how does it affect your success in life? Among human beings, there are going to be some racist biases. Civil rights leaders two generations ago had no idea that we were waiting for white people to be psychologically pristine.
Mounk: Why is it that people say, āIf a standardized test shows differential performance, it canāt be picking up the actual structural racism in our societyā? Rather, it must somehow be mismeasuring whatās going on. And how should we deal with the fact that, unfortunately, the performance gap still persists?Ā
McWhorter: The proper answer, if you ask me, is to ask, āHow can we make kids better at the test?ā There seems to be a proposition that to even ask that is utterly beyond the pale. And thatās partly because of a tacit sense that whiteness is to be decentered and resisted, and that having to get a precise answer is too uptight. I literally think thatās what some people are thinking. Thatās an interesting propositionāthat there is a kind of intelligence other than the ones that include, say, getting the right answerābut nobody is putting forth much of an argument as to how that really works. Whatās really going on is a kind of reflexive anti-whiteness.Ā
Mounk: How do you think the state of black America has changed over the last 15 or so years?
McWhorter: This will be read as arrogant, but thereās no doubt that the story is mostly positive. Terrible things happen. There are sometimes reverses. But anybody who thinks that the story of black America from 1965 to now is not dazzlingly positive in almost all regards is someone who simply is not especially inclined to look much into it. And youāre certainly not going to find evidence of it in the way that history is usually told.Ā
But if you pull the camera back and think about 1965, and think about last week, thereās been massive improvement. The question is why so many people pretend that thatās not true. And I hate to say āpretend,ā but it is a kind of pretense. Itās the victimization mindset, which psychologists recognize as a human thing. Itās not anything like all black people, but itās disproportionately represented in academia and the media.Ā
It is a pretense that things are never getting better. And I donāt think itās something conscious and practical. People like that have developed a sense of their purpose in life as being this kind of victim. If you took that away from them, they wouldnāt quite know where to stand, because they develop their sense of purpose and securityāitās almost a comfort zoneāin being the Cassandra.
That is a kind of person, and that is, frankly, an awful lot of the black punditocracy. They canāt admit progress. Fanatical movements are often like that. There can never be such a thing as progress, or the movement doesnāt have any reason to exist. It has gotten to the point that anti-racism is one of those.
Mounk: Make the case for why we should think about this [body of thought] not just as having certain religious overtones, not just as some of the adherents having a kind of religious fervor, but in a quite literal way as a new religion.
McWhorter: You have to take away the religious labels: there are people who talk about faith, the rapture, and the Second Coming, and there are people who talk about hegemony, social justice, and intersectionality. All of those things right there make it seem like weāre talking about something different. I call this a āreligionā not because Iām looking for a way to sell books. I started thinking of it this way six or seven years ago. Thinking of this as a religion is heuristically valuable in that there is no reasoning with this kind of person on issues such as race. Dealing with people like thisāotherwise very intelligent and reasonable peopleāyou can see a steel door go down in their eyes. There is a religious aspect to this.
I know many people would prefer that I just call it an āideology.ā However, Iām talking about something more fervent than that. And then you have the other parallels to Christianity. Iām agnostic as to whether those are accidental, or whether itās because Christianity was already there in place, but white privilege and original sin are the exact same thing. And thatās not typical of all ideologies. This particular place of white privilege has a stain that you can never remove. Itās exactly like original sin, the white people who donāt agree being defenestratedāhow heretics used to be treatedāwhich is different from the way that kind of person was treated even five years ago.Ā
Iām not a theologian. But where do you draw the line? Why is it not a religion when you are also encouraged to believe things that donāt make logical sense? Youāre not just encouraged to embrace contradiction. Youāre encouraged to not think about things too hard, another part of religion around the world. To me, thatās not just Marxism. Thatās not just a cultural revolution. If labels were not involved, anthropologists would not say that this is an ideology; they would say that this is a religious faith, right down to the prayer.
Mounk: It seems to me that the ideologies that Iāve studied have those elements as well. If you look at actual Marxists like my grandparents in the early 20th century, they had a religious fervor. And they had a theory of a kind of original sin as well: if youāre bourgeois, you have original sin. And the only way to expiate it is to engage in revolutionary practice, to overcome your bourgeois interests. But you will never fully succeed.Ā
What do we gain by calling this a religion, rather than an ideology that has an incredible emotional pull?
McWhorter: Letās try this. I can imagine people drinking their cocktails in 1937, having arguments on the Upper West Side. Theyāre Stalinist, and they will not listen to the evidence of what Stalin is doing. And those people hold on into the 1940s. Nobody of any importance was holding on to that by the 1950s. They admitted it. Now maybe part of the reason they admitted it was because the nature of the evidence was so graphicābut people admitted it. That doesnāt mean they give up on Marxism. There was a certain openness to empiricism. Now, of course, thereās the kind of person who will say, āMarxism was just never tried,ā etc. But there were people who had to say, āOkay, Stalin was not a god,ā and would admit it quite clearly.Ā
But if you call it an ideology, based on where that word sits in our soul today, it makes it sound like you can reach these people. And I truly believe that you cannot reach a person like this, and that these issues are too important to waste time talking about John Stuart Mill, to try to sit a person like this down and say that there needs to be a marketplace of ideas and to ask them to be more open. And I know it now, based on a lifetime of grappling with them.
Mounk: There are many people who believed in ideologies who believed in them to the end of their lives, even after the terrible failure of those ideologies became blatantly obvious. Thatās true of many Marxists; it is true of many extreme nationalists. And there are some religious people who fall out of a religion or who become converted to a different religion. Itās not clear to me that these two things map onto each other as cleanly as you suggest.
McWhorter: Itās degree: āThere is an illiberal ideology afoot. These people are annoying, and itās because they are hosting an illiberal ideology.ā That to me sounds like itās time for forums and seminars.Ā
These people are adherents of a religion. We could, in terms of terminology versus reality, say that a lot of those old ideologies deserved the name āreligion.ā If we shook it up and started again, we could say those were religions too. But āideologyā sounds more approachable than āreligion.ā Youāre not going to have a seminar where you try to approach peopleās religion. You try to push peopleās ideologyāit encourages people to think of this as a current in intellectual history, and to think about the fact that a lot of those movements in the past eventually faded away. Whereas here and nowāIām thinking on my feet, and I may do it wrongāI donāt see it fading until racial differences become so obscure (in, say, about the next two generations) that the whole argument stops making any sense. This kind of person is so convinced that theyāre correct, and passing it on to new generationsāespecially with modern technology and social mediaāthat I canāt see it fading. Itās impregnable. And ideology, to me, sounds more pregnable.
Mounk: Ian Buruma, building on your characterization of this body of ideas as a religion, has written that we should expect that Protestant nations around the world might take it up more easilyānations that have an evangelical tradition might take it up more easily. But Catholic countries like France or non-Christian countries like Japan should remain pretty immune to it.Ā
Do you agree with Buruma and is that your prediction for how itās going to play out?
McWhorter: Yes, the problem is most acute in Canada, England, mainland Scandinavia, and Germany. Those are the places I hear the most from. Not France, yet. There are rumblings in Brazil; I couldnāt tell you exactly why, although thereās a certain racial historyā
Mounk: āBrazil is also at this point between 30 and 40% evangelical Christian.
McWhorter: There! In terms of whatās going onāthis is a prediction that Iāll make that I am happy to eat in ten years when we replay this and Iām bald and toothlessāI think what weāre seeing is a schism between academia and the arts [on the one hand] and real people [on the other hand] that will be relatively unprecedented in this country. Iām beginning to think that the hold of this particular ideology on academia is permanent. Iām not sure anything can be done about it; that type is already controlling who gets hired. Because these people are utterly impregnable. You cannot open them up to other ways of looking at things. That seems to me to be the case in a great many of the arts, and itās certainly what many people in the arts are telling me now. Itās kind of hard to resist this, if youāre in, say, an English department in a modern university. You canāt stand up to the whole department. Maybe we can contain it to these ideological hothousesāwhich, yes, I would think of as churchesāand then in the rest of society, we have a situation where the hard radical left are giving us counsel from the sidelines just like everybody else, but arenāt running the show by threatening to call us racist on Twitter and making us pretend to agree. I have more hope for local school boards than the typical history or music department at a university.
Mounk: What does that mean for people who see themselves as being on your side of the fight?
McWhorter: People have to be told āno.ā I actually have been privy to an episode this week, and I canāt be specific, but where a certain decision was made about a disinvitation because of a few grad students of this ideology who basically threatened to go to social media about this kind of thing. And their elders capitulated. That is not where we need to go, because if those elders had stood up to those few graduate students, nothing would have happened. Those graduate students would have been very unhappy. They would not have attended the talk of the person who was supposed to go. In other words, it would have been back to circa 2014, which was perfectly fine. 2014 wasnāt 1914.Ā
But it has to get to the point that people are not so afraid of being called some names on Twitter. That kind of person is being given disproportionate power. If I could really pull all the strings I would just have people for six months see that being called names on Twitter, in many cases, is not going to ruin your life. Thatās what we need to get used to.
Mounk: If you believe that the ideas you describe often harm the poorest African Americans, do you have some suggestions for how better to improve their condition?
McWhorter: I get impatient with a lot of the way we talk about these things today because I think that we could do an awful lot of good and relatively quickly with certain proactive, pragmatic, political strokes that are quite separate from people having kumbaya circles.
Ending the war on drugs would do more for black America than any amount of white people understanding their privilege. It would get rid of a market that understandably tempts poor black men to not seek legal work when they go to lousy schools and live under straitened circumstances. Those men would go into legal work, and society should receive them with open arms by offering serious, easy to access, and usually free vocational training.
The idea is not to just leave people with nothing, but to train these men in good, solid, working class jobs where they would have perfectly solid existences. And I know that would work because that was the way poor black communities worked until about 50 years agoānot paradise at all. But it would be better now because the world is better.Ā
School is a problem for a lot of black kids, a lot of poor kids, because reading is taught badly. If you donāt read well by a certain age, youāre probably never going to like school, and that tells on you for the rest of your life. I think that poor black kids should be taught to read the way reading scientists since 1965 have found actually works. I have a big issue about phonics, and specifically how phonicsāas in sounding out the lettersāshould be taught.
Those three things alone would make black people much less likely to encounter the cops. We can work on the cops, but with 18,000 precincts Iām worried that that is an ambitious thing to wish to change. Iām as disgusted with the cops as anybody else, but my goal is to get people away from them. Without any war on drugs, the number of interactions that black people have with the cops would be much, much less. Part of the reason cops wind up in black communities getting into peopleās business: a lot of it is connected, sometimes flowchart style, to the war on drugs.Ā
To me, this is anti-racism, because it would improve black lives. Iām afraid that the discussion weāre having now is needlessly abstract and more about virtue-signaling than changing actual lives. And it worries me because itās imposed mostly by fiat, because social media allows that if somebody disagrees with you, they can call you a really dirty name in the public square. This isnāt constructive and in some ways, it isnāt a genuinely compassionate situation. It took such an uptick two summers ago that I really began to worry for the state of this country and for the state of black people.Ā
With the Great Awokening, as Matt Yglesias so perfectly called it, I think thereās already a pushback that I detect. I think good-thinking, maybe progressive people can see that there is an excess that we need to do something about. Iām hoping that my book is one small part of getting people to think about the fact that you donāt have to give people like that everything they want just because theyāre kind of scary. Certain segments of society are going to be taken over by that religion. Most of society, I hope, will not be. Thatās my sense of it. I make no special claims to being a great prognosticator, but thatās my sense of how things are going to go from 2021.
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