Woke Racism E-Book

John McWhorter

• Herausgeber: Forum
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 246

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

People of good will on both the left and the right are secretly asking themselves the same question: how has the conversation on race gone so crazy? Bestselling author and acclaimed linguist John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting black communities and weakening the social fabric. We're told to read books and listen to music by people of colour but that wearing certain clothes is 'appropriation.' We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we'll be seen as unwoke, or worse, labelled a racist. According to John McWhorter, the problem is that a well-meaning but pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion – and one that's illogical, unreachable, and unintentionally neoracist. In Woke Racism, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of 'white privilege' and the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervour of the 'woke mob.' He shows how this religion that claims to 'dismantle racist structures' is actually harming his fellow black Americans by infantilizing black people, setting black students up for failure, and passing policies that disproportionately damage black communities. The new religion might be called 'antiracism,' but it features a racial essentialism that's barely distinguishable from racist arguments of the past. Fortunately, for all of us, it's not too late to push back against woke racism. McWhorter shares scripts and encouragement with those trying to deprogramme friends and family. And most importantly, he offers a roadmap to justice that actually will help, not hurt, black people. A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Leseprobe

This book is dedicated to each who find it within themselves to take a stand against this detour in humanity’s intellectual, cultural, and moral development.

Contents

Preface1. What Kind of People?2. The New Religion3. What Attracts People to This Religion?4. What’s Wrong with It Being a Religion? It Hurts Black People.5. Beyond “Dismantling Structures”: Saving Black America for Real6. How Do We Work Around Them?AcknowledgmentsNotes

‌Preface

I’m not one for long introductions. However, before we begin I would like to give the reader a sense of the lay of the land.

This book is not a call for people of a certain ideology to open up to the value of an open market of ideas, to understand the value of robust discussion, and to see the folly of defenestrating people for disagreeing with them. My assumption is that the people in question are largely unreachable by arguments of that kind.

Rather, this book is a call for the rest of us to understand that people of a certain ideology are attempting to transform this country on the basis of racism. They do not know it and, when apprised of it, cannot admit it. But the rest of us must.

My main aims will be:

1. To argue that this new ideology is actually a religion in all but name, and that this explains why something so destructive and incoherent is so attractive to so many good people.

2. To explain why so many black people are attracted to a religion that treats us as simpletons.

3. To show that this religion is actively harmful to black people despite being intended as unprecedentedly “antiracist.”

4. To show that a pragmatic, effective, liberal, and even Democratic-friendly agenda for rescuing black America need not be founded on the tenets of this new religion.

5. To suggest ways to lessen the grip of this new religion on our public culture.

I hope my observations will serve as one of many contributions to our debate over what constitutes “social justice.” My aim is not to merely pen a screed to stoke the flames among people who already agree with me. I want to reach those on the fence, guilted into attention by these ideologues’ passion and rhetoric but unable to disregard their true inner compass. I want them to commit with confidence to what I seek: helping make things better for real people.

What this book is not.

We need not wonder what the basic objections to this book will be. I mischaracterize and/or disrespect religion. I am oversimplifying. The real problem is the militarized right wing. I’m not black enough to write this book. I’m not nice, and so on. I will get all of that out of the way as we go on, and then offer some genuine solutions. But first, what this book is not:

1. This book is not an argument against protest. I am not arguing against the basic premises of Black Lives Matter, although I have had my differences with some of its offshoot developments. I am not arguing that the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s would have been better off sticking to quiet negotiations. I am not arguing against the left. I am arguing against a particular strain of the left that has come to exert a grievous amount of influence over American institutions, to the point that we are beginning to accept as normal the kinds of language, policies, and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction.

2. I am not writing this book thinking of right-wing America as my audience. People of that world are welcome to listen in. But I write this book to two segments of the American populace. Both are what I consider to be my people, which is what worries me so much about what is going on.

One is New York Times–reading, National Public Radio–listening people who have innocently fallen under the impression that pious, unempirical virtue signaling about race is a form of moral enlightenment and political activism, and ever teeter upon becoming card-carrying unintentional racists themselves. In this book I will often refer to these people as “white,” but they can be of any color, including mine. I am of this world. I read TheNew Yorker, I have two children, I saw Sideways. I loved both The Wire and Parks and Recreation.

The other is black people who have innocently fallen under the misimpression that for us only, cries of weakness constitute a kind of strength, and that for us only, what makes us interesting, what makes us matter, is a curated persona as eternally victimized souls, ever carrying and defined by the memories and injuries of our people across the four centuries behind us, ever “unrecognized,” ever “misunderstood,” ever in assorted senses unpaid.

3. This is not merely a book of complaint. My goal is not to venture a misty statement that today’s hyper-wokesters need to understand that a diversity of opinions is crucial to a healthy society. Citing John Stuart Mill at them serves no purpose; our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy by missing the futility of “dialogue” with them. Of one hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of this religion should be any higher.

As such, our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it? How do we insulate people with good ideas from the influence of liturgical concerns? How do we hold them off from influencing the education of our young people any more than they already have? How do we conduct socially gracious existences amid the necessity of engaging with their religious doctrine, presented with Cotton Mather’s earnestness and impregnable insistence, when almost none of them will actually understand that they are making religious rather than secular arguments?

That is, my interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matter. The question is “How can we live graciously among them?” We seek genuine change in the real world, but for the duration we will have to do so while ever encountering bearers of a gospel itching to smoke out heretics and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.

I write this viscerally driven by the fact that the ideology in question is one under which white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special. I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination infecting my daughters’ sense of self. I can’t always be with them, and this anti-humanist ideology may seep into their school curriculum. I shudder at the thought: teachers with eyes shining at the prospect of showing their antiracism by filling my daughters’ heads with performance art instructing them that they are poster children rather than individuals. TaNehisi Coates, in Between the World and Me, wanted to teach his son that America is set against him; I want to teach my kids the reality of their lives in the twenty-first, rather than the early to mid-twentieth, century. Lord forbid my daughters internalize a pathetic—yes, absolutely pathetic in all of the resonances of that word—sense that what makes them interesting is what other people think of them, or don’t.

Many will nevertheless see me as traitorous in writing this book as a black person. They will not understand that I see myself as serving my race by writing it. One of the grimmest tragedies of how this perversion of sociopolitics makes us think (or not think) is that it will bar more than a few black readers from understanding that this book is calling for them to be treated with true dignity. However, they and everyone else should also know: I know quite well that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when they are written by a black person, and I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book.

A version of this book written by a white writer would be blithely dismissed as racist. I will be dismissed instead as self-hating by a certain crowd. But frankly, they won’t really mean it, and anyone who gets through the book will see that whatever traits I harbor, hating myself or being ashamed of being black is not one of them. And we shall move on.

Woke Racism

‌1

What Kind of People?

As I write this in the summer of 2020, Alison Roman, a food writer for The New York Times, is on suspension. You might wonder just what a food writer could do to end up temporarily dismissed by her employer. Roman’s sin: In an interview, she passingly criticized two people for commercialism, model and food writer Chrissy Teigen and lifestyle coach Marie Kondo. Roman was Twitter-mobbed for having the nerve, as a white woman, to criticize two women of color.

Teigen is half white and half Thai. Kondo is a Japanese citizen. Neither of them are what we typically think of as people of color in the sense of historically conditioned and structurally preserved disadvantage. However, in 2020, the mere fact of a white person criticizing not just one but two (apparently the plurality tipped the scales) non-white persons justified being shamed on social media and disallowed from doing her work. Roman, as a white person, was supposedly punching down—i.e., “down” at two people very wealthy, very successful, and vastly better known than her. Her whiteness trumped all, we were told.

Roman, now typical of such cases, ate crow with an apologetic statement about how she had reflected and realized her error. Teigen even said that she did not think Roman deserved to be sanctioned. But no matter—a kind of fury, passed off as being “antiracist,” now has a supreme power in our public moral evaluations, and this required that Roman be pilloried in the town square. Her Wikipedia entry will forever include a notice that she was deemed a racist, billboard style, despite that most Americans likely see that she did nothing that remotely deserved such treatment, and despite that she would not have been treated that way as recently as a few years ago. She later left the Times permanently.

What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?

The same year, Leslie Neal-Boylan lasted only a few months as dean of nursing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. The problem was that in the wake of statements nationwide after the murder by police officers of George Floyd, Dean Neal-Boylan had the audacity to pen this blinkered, bigoted screed to her colleagues and staff:

I am writing to express my concern and condemnation of the recent (and past) acts of violence against people of color. Recent events recall a tragic history of racism and bias that continue to thrive in this country. I despair for our future as a nation if we do not stand up against violence against anyone. BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS. No one should have to live in fear that they will be targeted for how they look or what they believe.

A certain crowd decided to read Neal-Boylan as chiming in with those who resist the slogan “Black Lives Matter” by answering that “All Lives Matter,” as if BLM is somehow claiming that black lives matter more. However, one could read Neal-Boylan as meaning this only via not reading well. She started out by lamenting “a tragic history of racism and bias,” and no, she didn’t mean that it existed only in the past and that black people need to get over it, because she also wrote that the racism and bias “continue to thrive in this country.”

However, because her composition included the three words “everyone’s life matters,” she was reported to her superiors and quickly out of a job without even being allowed to defend herself. Why was Leslie Neal-Boylan’s email deemed a missive from someone unfit to supervise people dedicated to healing and giving comfort? A child would wonder why—as would a time traveler from as recently as 2015. But Neal-Boylan’s detractors were deemed authoritative.

What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?

Also in the same year, 2020, David Shor, a data analyst at a progressive consulting firm, lost his job. He had tweeted a study by a black Ivy League political science professor, Omar Wasow, showing that violent black protests during the long, hot summers of the late 1960s were more likely than nonviolent ones to make local voters vote Republican. Shor’s intent was not to praise this, but to disseminate the facts themselves as a glum announcement—one that had been covered eagerly by liberal media shortly before this.

Certain parties on Twitter, though, didn’t like a white man tweeting something that could be taken as criticizing black protest in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. The consulting firm took heed and expelled Shor.

What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?

What kind of people do these things?

All of these cases occurred because of the influence of a frame of mind we could term Third Wave Antiracism, a movement whose adherents are more often termed “social justice warriors” or “the woke mob.”

One can divide antiracism into three waves along the lines that feminism has been. First Wave Antiracism battled slavery and legalized segregation. Second Wave Antiracism, in the 1970s and ’80s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist is a moral flaw. Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.

Under this paradigm, all deemed insufficiently aware of this sense of existing while white as eternal culpability require bitter condemnation and ostracization, to an obsessive, abstract degree that leaves most observers working to make real sense of it, makes people left of center wonder just when and why they started being classified as backward, and leaves millions of innocent people scared to pieces of winding up in the sights of a zealous brand of inquisition that seems to hover over almost any statement, ambition, or achievement in modern society.

So one might ask why I seem to consider it such an issue that some food columnist, some nursing school dean, and some data analyst have had their lives derailed by this movement. But I write not of something happening to a few unlucky people, but operating within the warp and woof of society. No one can know just when or how Third Wave Antiracist proselytizing may blindside them while they are going about their business.

It is losing innocent people their jobs. It is coloring academic inquiry, detouring it, and sometimes strangling it like kudzu. It forces us to render a great deal of our public discussion of urgent issues in double-talk any ten-year-old can see through. It forces us to start teaching our actual ten-year-olds, in order to hold them off from spoiling the show in that way, to believe in sophistry in the name of enlightenment. On that note, Third Wave Antiracism guru Ibram X. Kendi has written a book on how to raise antiracist children, called Antiracist Baby. (You couldn’t write it better—are we in a Christopher Guest movie?) This and so much else is a sign that Third Wave Antiracism forces us to pretend that performance art is politics. It forces us to spend endless amounts of time listening to nonsense presented as wisdom, and pretend to like it.

Graduate students and professors write me and my podcast sparring partner, economist Glenn Loury, in droves, frightened that this new ideology will ruin their careers, departments, or fields, as they also do to other organizations, often on private email accounts to avoid being smoked out by anyone at the institutions they work for. People in positions of influence are regularly being chased from their posts because of claims and petitions that they are insufficiently antiracist. School boards across the country are forcing teachers and administrators to waste time on “antiracist” infusions into their curricula that make no more sense than anything proposed under China’s Cultural Revolution. Did you know that objectivity, being on time, and the written word are “white” things? Did you know that if that seems off to you, then you are one with George Wallace, Bull Connor, and David Duke?

As recently as 2008, Christian Lander wrote with wry humor in Stuff White PeopleLike of “being offended” as something a certain kind of “white” person enjoys doing, alongside their film festivals and vintage Tshirts. Just over a dozen years later, one reads that chapter with a shudder that the kind of person Lander was referring to will see it over your shoulder and launch into a hissing tirade about how there is nothing funny about people trying to dismantle the prevalence of white supremacy and all whites’ “complicitness” in it. If he were to write that book today, Lander would be unlikely to include that joke, which is an indication of the extent to which there is something in the air that we hadn’t seen until quite recently. A critical mass of the people he was referring to no longer just quietly pride themselves on their enlightenment in knowing to be offended about certain things, but now see it as a duty to excoriate and shun those (including black people) who don’t share their degree of offense.

To some, all of that may sound like mere matters of manner and texture. But Third Wave Antiracism also outright harms black people in the name of its guiding impulses. Third Wave Antiracism insists that it is “racist” for black boys to be overrepresented among those suspended or expelled from schools for violence, which, when translated into policy, is documented as having led to violence persisting in the schools and lowered students’ grades. Third Wave Antiracism insists that it is “racist” that black kids are underrepresented in New York City schools requiring high performance on a standardized test for admittance, and demands that we eliminate the test rather than direct black students to resources (many of them free) for practicing the test and reinstate gifted programs that shunted good numbers of black students into those very schools just a generation ago. That the result will be a lower quality of education in the schools, and black students who are less prepared for exercising the mind muscle required by the test taking they will encounter later, is considered beside the point.

Third Wave Antiracism, in its laser focus on an oversimplified sense of what racism is and what one does about it, is content to harm black people in the name of what we can only term dogma.

For example, the Third Wave Antiracist is deeply moved by a collection of tenets that, stated clearly and placed in simple oppositions, translate into nothing whatsoever:

1. When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt.

Don’t put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you. They have dealt with too much to be expected to.

2. Don’t assume that all, or even most, black people like hip-hop, are good dancers, and so on. Black people are a conglomeration of disparate individuals. “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.”

Don’t expect black people to assimilate to “white” social norms, because black people have a culture of their own.

3. Silence about racism is violence.

Elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.

4. You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people.

You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.

5. Show interest in multiculturalism.

Do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it.

6. Support black people in creating their own spaces and stay out of them.

Seek to have black friends. If you don’t have any, you’re a racist. And if you claim any, they’d better begoodfriends—albeit occupying their private spaces that you aren’t allowed in.

7. When whites move away from black neighborhoods, it’s white flight.

When whites move into black neighborhoods, it’s gentrification, even when they pay black residents generously for their houses.

8. If you’re white and date only white people, you’re a racist.

If you’re white and date a black person, you are, if only deep down, exotifying an “other.”

9. Black people cannot be held accountable for everything every black person does.

All whites must acknowledge their personal complicitness in the perfidy of “whiteness” throughout history.

10. Black students must be admitted to schools via adjusted grade and test-score standards to ensure a representative number of them and foster a diversity of views in classrooms.

It is racist to assume a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences, and racist to expect them to represent the “diverse” view in classroom discussions.

I suspect that, deep down, most know that none of this Catechism of Contradictions makes any sense. Less obvious is that it was not even composed with logic in mind.

The idea is to strike a happy medium between the poles? But there’s no way that the people promulgating this “race thing” litany would ever allow that anyone had. One way we know it is that over several decades the promulgators never have. Another way we know it is more straightforward: There simply is no logical “medium” to be found between these alternates. One could not perform any pair of them simultaneously.

Why do so many wise people elevate these tenets as wisdom? The reason simply cannot be logic, because there is none to be had. The reason is because these tenets serve a purpose other than the one they are purported to serve.

Namely, each component by itself serves to condemn whites as racist. To apologize shows your racism; to be refused the apology, too, shows your racism. To not be interested in black culture shows your racism; to get into black culture and decide that you, too, want to rap or wear dreadlocks also shows your racism. The revelation of racism is, itself and alone, the point, the intention, of this curriculum. As such, the fact that if you think a little, the tenets cancel one another out is considered trivial. That they serve their true purpose of revealing people as bigots is paramount—sacrosanct, as it were.

Or, as it is. Specifically, these tenets serve the purpose of expressing the central pole, the guiding watchcry, of Third Wave Antiracist religion. It is rarely stated explicitly, but decisively steers its adherents’ perspective on existence and morality. Third Wave Antiracism’s needlepoint homily par excellence would be the following:

Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.

It can seem an oddly particular perspective, this rigid focus on battling differentials in power. Power is rampantly abused and creates endless suffering, to be sure. An enlightened society must be always addressing this and trying to change it. However, given the millions of other things that constitute human life and endeavor, to impose that undoing power differentials must center all possible endeavor in what we call life is a radical proposition.

I began encountering this worldview early in my academic career, and it took me a long time to perceive that various conflicts I have encountered in my work on linguistics (as well as race) have been variations on the same problem. The humanities and social sciences in academia have long harbored many people who see their discipline’s goal as to Fight the Power. I recall my first taste of it, when a graduate student gave a guest lecture on My Fair Lady, in which she noted that Higgins talks more than Eliza and therefore wields power over the narrative. Who’s talking? she taught us to ask. This perspective is certainly correct, but a part of me couldn’t quite wrap my head around her general implication that to savor My Fair Lady’s music or wit is to be taken in, that an enlightened person looks down on the piece as the story of a lower-class female’s self-expression brutally suppressed by a bullying oldish man of letters.

But back then, this kind of analysis was a minority view. Alarmist journalism depicted college campuses as being overrun by “tenured radicals,” but this was a cartoon. At the time, that kind of ideology was one of many dishes one sampled at the university buffet. The problem is that today, this reductive, prosecutorial, and ultimately joyless kind of thinking actually is taking over not just university culture but American culture at large.

In any case, one of the main power differentials in our society is the one conditioned by racism. It is this Salem-style religious commitment to “battling” it that made the excommunications of Alison Roman, Leslie Neal-Boylan, and David Shor make sense to so many perfectly sane people.

Of course, the “race thing” Catechism of Contradictions makes no sense, but then neither does the Bible. To the Third Wave Antiracist, the sense our society must make above all other kinds is tarring whites as racist and showing that you know that they are racist. Any cognitive dissonance this occasions is “not what we need to be talking about,” because antiracism is everything—regardless of logic.

Why do they get away with it?

Third Wave Antiracism’s claims and demands, from a distance, seem like an eccentric performance from people wishing they hadn’t missed the late 1960s, dismayed that so much of the basic work is done already. Seeking the same righteous fury and heartwarming sense of purpose and belonging, their exaggerations and even mendacities become inevitable, because actual circumstances simply do not justify the attitudes and strategies of 1967.

In an alternate universe, these people would be about as important as the Yippies were back in the day, with marijuana on their “flag,” applying to levitate the Pentagon and smacking pies in people’s faces. They were a fringe movement good for a peek, and occasionally heightened awareness a tad. But they were unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and justifiably so. What makes the difference is that today’s Third Wave Antiracists have a particular weapon in their arsenal that lends them outsized power, much more impactful than a cream pie.

Ironically, the weapon is so lethal because of the genuine and invaluable change that has occurred in our sociopolitical fabric over the past decades. That change is that to the modern American, being called a racist is all but equivalent to being called a pedophile. A lot of very important people fought to make it that way, and few of us would wish they had not. But the problem is that the Third Wave Antiracists now piggyback on it. A key part of their tool kit is that they call those who disagree with them racists, or the more potent term of art of our moment, “white supremacists.” That kind of charge has a way of sticking. To deny it is to confirm it, we are taught; once the charge is hurled, it’s like you’re caught in a giant squid’s tentacles. At least you can wash a cream pie off.

We need not suppose Third Wave Antiracists do this cynically to amass power. Take a look at, or listen to, that family member, neighbor, or coworker you know who thinks this way and ask yourself whether they really give any indication of being a power seeker. The Third Wave Antiracist genuinely reviles racism, as do most of us. They also seek a great deal else in the name of this that seems hopelessly impractical, idealist, or just plain mean. But under our current conditions, the shakiness of their platform does not get in their way. This is because they can at any time shout out that you are a racist—and they do.

And to all but a very few, being called a racist is so intolerable today that one would rather tolerate some cognitive dissonance and fold up. This wouldn’t have worked as well in, say, 1967. In that America, many white people called racists by this kind of person, for better or for worse, would have just taken a sip of their cocktail and said, “I don’t think so at all.” Or even just “Fuck you!” Today—because of progress, ironically—things are different. Now most cringe hopelessly at the prospect of being outed as a bigot, and thus: In being ever ready to call you a racist in the public square, the Third Wave Antiracist outguns you on the basis of this one weapon alone. Even if their overall philosophy is hardly the scriptural perfection they insist it is, that one thing they can and will do in its defense leaves us quivering wrecks. And thus they win.