The new anti-racism is a danger to us all

John McWhorter, a black, Democrat-voting liberal intellectual, is sending shockwaves through America’s ‘woke’ left with his attack on the post-George Floyd racial awakening.

John McWhorter and his controversial new book.

John McWhorter might be the most interesting man in America right now, sitting as he does at the fulcrum of America’s swirling racial debate. McWhorter is a black, Democrat-voting, liberal intellectual with a column in The New York Times and a fierce admiration for the heroes of the civil-rights movement. But he is also a withering critic of the post-George Floyd racial awakening, loathes “wokeism” and has become a public enemy of the radical left. Some view him as a smug traitor; others as a rare voice of sanity and moderation in a tempest of excess.

As the fightback against wokeness, hyper-awareness to inequalities of race, sex and other forms of prejudice, gathers pace in America, McWhorter, 56, has become perhaps the most compelling counter-revolutionary voice.

He is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University in New York. He’s also a prolific author, broadcaster, public intellectual and, in his spare time, cabaret impresario: McWhorter enjoys taking his two daughters to musicals on Broadway and met his wife at a singalong piano bar. He speaks with imperious erudition and writes with admirable clarity.

Whatever you think of his views, and they’re certainly contentious, McWhorter has become essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of the race debate in America and, because of the way our cultural conversation takes its cues from across the Atlantic, Britain too.

His latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, is a slender volume but his argument is challenging. McWhorter views America’s new ideology of race, which he terms “third-wave anti-racism”, as something more akin to a religion than a practical movement.

Oregon Police wearing anti-riot gear march towards protesters through tear gas smoke in Portland in 2020. Picture: AFP

First-wave anti-racism fought slavery and segregation. Second-wave anti-racism, in the 1970s and 1980s, taught America that being racist is a moral flaw. The third wave teaches that racism is baked into the structure of society, making all whites who aren’t actively fighting it complicit in its persistence.

This latest generation of anti-racism represents a dangerous wrong turn in McWhorter’s view. It has given us cancel culture, microaggressions and a culture of easy offence. It patronises black people, he argues, by treating them as eternal victims. Most importantly, it hinders progress for black America through its impractical demands and the distractions of religious fervour.

“There’s been a detour into striking a pose, showing that you are aware of an injustice as opposed to being sincerely interested in helping real black people,” he says.

McWhorter has plenty of examples of this harm at his fingertips when he Zooms in from his book-lined study. An obvious one is the call to “defund the police”, which he argues is not supported by most people living in areas with high crime rates. “And yet a certain kind of person insists on calling to defund the police,” he says. “Because when you’re saying that you’re showing that you know racism exists. We’re operating on the basis of what I think is a religion, rather than engaging with reality on the ground.”

A protester wearing a Black Panther jacket and holding a Black Lives Matter flag faces off with riot police in Rochester, New York, in 2020. Picture: AFP

When McWhorter uses the word religion, this is more than just an analogy. “An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of anti-racism,” he writes. The new religion has its “elect”, he argues, those enlightened enough to see this fallen world as it truly is. It has a clergy: racial theorists like Ibram X Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates and the (white) author of White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo. And it has an “original sin”, in this case white privilege.

This ideology is like “smallpox”, he says, arguing that wokeism has “much less distance to the Nazis, Mao and Stalin than many of us think”. It is a “fungus”, promoted by people with a “very thin, nasty idea of how society should be run”.

Kendi, perhaps the most prominent anti-racism advocate in America, has excoriated McWhorter on Twitter, attacking his writing for “degrading black people” and claiming that racism is “no longer a serious problem”.

McWhorter, for his part, has no problem with concepts such as white privilege or structural racism. He acknowledges them but just isn’t very interested in dwelling on them. “It’s not that racism doesn’t exist, but it is hardly the impediment that it once was,” he says.

Similarly, he sees Black Lives Matter as a naive but well-meaning organisation that has suffered from “mission creep” and “drifted into certain financial irregularities”.

Because of his views, McWhorter has been called an Uncle Tom, and worse. Do the slurs bother him? “They definitely don’t hurt because they have so little to do with who I am,” he says. “It’s a cartoon.”

A statue of Christopher Columbus, toppled to the ground by protesters, is loaded onto a truck on the grounds of the State Capitol in St Paul, Minnesota. Picture: AFP

He attributes his counter-consensual views to a lawyerly desire for coherence and not being “a joiner”. He also thinks growing up in a racially integrated area of Philadelphia helped.

“White people don’t scare me,” he says. “For a lot of black people, either white people do scare them or they pretend that they do.”

McWhorter merrily applies his critique of wokeism to the daily culture war news cycle. He was irked by the campaign waged against the podcast host Joe Rogan for using the n-word, which he argues deliberately misunderstood the fact that Rogan was referring to and describing, not actually using, the word. He also objected to Whoopi Goldberg’s suspension from an American television talk show because of remarks she made about the Holocaust not being a racist crime.

“Her suspension was an example of a prosecutorial strain in today’s woke culture that has gone way, way too far,” he says. “She made a mistake, she apologised. What happened wasn’t a crime. She should have been smacked on the hand. We’re in Galileo territory: this is pursuing heretics, not having mature discussions in society.”

(Woke Racism is published by Forum)

The Times