John McWhorter

Acclaimed linguist and award-winning writer John McWhorter argues that an illiberal neoracism, disguised as antiracism, is hurting Black communities and weakening the American social fabric. Americans of good will on both the left and the right are secretly asking themselves the same question: how has the conversation on race in America gone so crazy? We're told read books and listen to music by people of color 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, labeled 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 fervor 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 Black America, and for all of us, it's not too late to push back against woke racism. McWhorter shares scripts and encouragement with those trying to deprogram friends and family. And most importantly, he offers a roadmap to justice that actually will help, not hurt, Black America.

How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

Woke Racism

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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.

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;

The people wielding this ideology and watching its influence spread ever more are under the genuine impression that they are forging progress, that reason and morality are in flower. However, society is changing not because of a burgeoning degree of consensus in moral sophistication. What is happening is much cruder. Society is changing not out of consensus, but out of fear […]. The statements of solidarity from seemingly every institutional entity, the social media selfies of people “doing the work” of reading White Fragility, anyone pretending to entertain notions that the hard sciences need to “open up” to “diverse” perspectives by pulling back from requiring close reasoning—all of this is a product of not enlightenment, but simple terror.

You get First Wave Antiracism and think of segregation as an ancient barbarity. You’re right. You get Second Wave Antiracism—i.e., roughly equivalent to what Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan did for feminism—and think we should all work to truly see black people as equal to whites and deserving of all that whites get. You’re right. You see Third Wave antiracism telling you that you are morally bound to conceive of ordinary statements that once were thought of as progressive, like “I don’t see color,” as racist. That if you are white you are to despise yourself as tainted permanently by “white privilege” in everything you do. That you must accept even claims of racism from black people that make no real sense, or, if you are black, must pretend that such claims are sacrosanct because the essence of your life is oppression. Whatever color you are, in the name of acknowledging “power,” you are to divide people into racial classes, in exactly the way that First and Second Wave antiracism taught you not to, including watching your kids and grandkids taught the same, despite that progress on racism has been so resplendent over the past fifty years that an old-school segregationist brought alive to walk through modern America even in the deepest South would find it hard not to turn to the side of the road and retch at what he saw. You don’t get it. You are right again.

if a brown person says they have encountered racism, then it is automatically indisputable that they did, and if you don’t agree it makes you “problematic.”

We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s “story” constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.

most Elect have never even heard of the theoretical work itself, any more than those who espouse “rights” of various kinds typically can recite their Locke. CRT ideals now come baked into the hard left.

Woke Racism quotes

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