A podcast: Loury and McWhorter discuss race

Here’s a 51-minute podcast that first aired in July and has been reissued on Bari Weiss’s site (click screenshot below to listen).  It’s John McWhorter and Glen Loury discussing race in America, with good moderation by Kmele Foster. First, the podcast’s introductory statement:

Today’s episode is borrowed from the feed of the great podcast The Fifth Column. Usually hosted by Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch, this episode, which aired in July of 2022, features Kmele and two guests who have become elder statesmen around the persistent issue of race in America: John McWhorter and Glenn Loury.

Over the past few years McWhorter, Loury and Foster each have written, discussed and lectured exhaustively on anti-racism, the role race plays in America, and the changing meaning of the word “racism” itself. In this episode, they talk about the inadequacies of regarding people solely by their racial category, the dignity of the individual and what a future might look like if we were to abolish race all together. While all three men bring a contrarian streak to this discussion, you’ll find that they have disagreements when it comes to questions of race abolition and the so-called “Racial Reckoning” of 2020.

Loury is an economist and professor of social science at Brown University. You can listen to his interview with Bari here. McWhorter is the author of numerous books, including Talking Black and Woke Racism. He’s also professor of Linguistics, Philosophy and Music at Columbia University, and a columnist at The New York Times.

Since 2015 Kmele Foster has been a prominent voice in a number of discussions about race in America, including his reporting challenging the mainstream media’s verdict on Amy Cooper, better known as the Central Park Karen.

There’s a lot of ground covered here, including the Zeitgeist, how John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism came to be, McWhorter’s take on the pair being seen as pawns of the Right, the nature of DEI, whether it’s an ideological position, how, according to both, it patronizes and dehumanizes minorities, and the question of whether racial identity is of any use—much less being necessary—or does it merely confer a kind of soothing tribalism on people. (This is one reason McWhorter calls Wokeism a “religion”.)

This is a good take on their views, and I love to listen to these guys. Like Pinker or Sam Harris, they speak in complete paragraphs, without even an “uh” or an “umm”. But of course it’s what they have to say that we you should pay attention to.