How To Talk About Racism

Linguist John McWhorter on the ways social justice activists have betrayed black Americans

- NICK GILLESPIE

IN HIS BESTSELLING new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio), New York Times columnist and Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that the ideas of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and the Times’ 1619 Project sharpen racial divides while drawing attention away from actual obstacles to improving quality of life for black Americans.

McWhorter first explored his idea of anti-racism as “Our Flawed New Religion” in a 2015 piece for The Daily Beast and continued the theme in a series of articles for Reason in 2020. “I think something is really distracting people in my world lately into supposing that they’re supposed to fall for a kind of purposeless extremism in order to be good people,” McWhorter says.

Contrary to critics’ vituperative claims, Woke Racism is in no way a right-wing book; McWhorter notes that he’s never voted Republican in his life. “I consider my company to be left-leaning people who read The New York Times and The Atlantic,” he says. “If it were 1960, everybody would think of me as a normal liberal. I would be this Adlai Stevenson– voting, pointy-headed liberal person.” Since the late ’60s, though, the idea has taken hold that “on race, radicalism is default.” Though this attitude has ebbed and flowed over time, McWhorter argues that today’s anti-racist crusaders evince a quasi-religious fanaticism that ends up hurting, not helping, the plights of black Americans.

In November, McWhorter spoke with