Recently posted: John McWhorter talk on “Understanding the new politics of race”

Below you can (and should) see John McWhorter‘s 20-minute keynote talk in a January panel called “Towards the Common Good: Rethinking Race in the 21st Century” hosted by The Equiano Project at Emmanuel College and King’s College, Cambridge. The panel included Kenan Malik, columnist for The Observer, Munira Mirza, political advisor and Chief Executive of Civic Future, Dr Alka Seghal Cuthbertand (chair) and Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China, University of Oxford.

I couldn’t find a video of the entire panel, but there’s another 75-minute discussion, featuring McWhorter, Sir Trevor Phillips, Alka Seghal, and Samir Shah, that you can watch here.

Here’s the theme of the discussion from which the video below was taken:

Despite the success of the civil rights movement in the 1960s in transforming the lives of black people, race politics in the US at the start of this century seems more polarised than ever. Racial inequality persists but there are fierce debates over the causes and solutions. Rather than seeking to realise the liberal ideal of a ‘colour-blind’ society, a new anti-racism politics wants to raise consciousness about race and the ‘problem’ of whiteness. Is this leading to more equality and progress or not? How should liberals approach this question? Crucially, how is the US experience influencing what happens in the UK and what can we learn from it?

McWhorter’s keynote deals with a topic he discusses often: the takeover of public discourse by a Social Justice crowd who flaunt their vindictive, authoritarian, and quasi-religious brand of antiracism, whose object is often to destroy the careers and credibility of their opponents. The talk is largely a precis of McWhorter’s book on Woke Antiracism, but has new stuff in it, too.

McWhorter exemplifies the Zeitgeist by describing several incidents. One is the suspension of USC business communication professor Greg Patton for using the Chinese filler pharse “negah. . negah. . negah” (equivalent to “that. . .that. . . that”) to show how people in different cultures use verbal marks of hesitation. But the fact that this Chinese word sounds like the American “n-word” slur was enough to offend students and then get Patton suspended and removed from the course. Intent, in this case, was irrelevant, for “offended” feelings, regardless of a speaker’s intent, are often sufficient to hurt someone’s career or get them fired.  The idea that “intent doesn’t matter” was also what got NYT reporter Donald McNeil Jr. fired for using the n-word in a didactic discussion with a student. As Reason reported:

“We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joe Kahn said in a memo to staffers.

But the newspaper backed off on that (too late for McNeil!) when letting McWhorter himself spell the n-word out in full in his own column. Clearly didactic intent did matter, so long as it was the intent of a black man.

The other issue is a course in the history of Western classical music (including two weeks on jazz) that McWhorter taught for several years at Columbia. The last time, however, there was a new “antiracist” syllabus that omitted Brahms, Chopin, Wagner and replaced them with singer Nina Simone, who, McWhorter says, was a great artist but wasn’t involved in Western classical music. The reason for the change, says McWhorter, was because “two and a half people said so and everybody else was afraid of them.”

Here are two excerpts from his talk that I’ve transcribed that give you the tenor his feelings. But do listen to the whole thing; it’s eloquent and pretty short. Most of us will agree with McWhorter, but we can all use a dose of support from time to time.

He first describes the efforts of woke antiracists as:

. . . a reign of terror enforced by a small number of earnest but misguided people, and the reason that they get their way is because of how much progress we’ve made. Specifically, we in America are a society where the enlightened view is that to be a racist is almost equivalent to being a pedophile—it’s the worst thing you can be called that you’re actually likely to be. That is an accomplishment: that wasn’t true in 1960; that wasn’t really true even in 1980. That is a mark of advance in a society that, frankly, most human societies have not made. If people are a little oversensitive about it, that’s human nature. The fact is something great has happened. But the negative byproduct is that if someone says we have to have Nina Simone instead of Brahms, Chopin, or Wagner, then although almost nobody in the room agrees , they will do it because they know that if that person doesn’t get their way, they’re going to call the Music Department at Columbia “racist” on Twitter where the whole world could see it. . .

I find it ironic that the very success of the civil rights movement is instantiated in the pervasive fear of Americans of being called “racist”.  As McWhorter shows, that is a sign of success, and it’s good. His beef is with the fact that that movement has morphed into an authoritarian “reign of terror.” So what can we do?  As he argues in his book, just say “no” to these people.

. . . We can’t hope to change this by talking to people like that and saying, “Open up to new ideas.” They won’t. And that may sound cynical, but I’m basing it partly on my having experienced these people as an academic for the past 25 years, and especially over the past three. They’re impregnable; they’re thoroughly unreasonable. The issue is getting to most of us—all of the rest of us who are having our lives destroyed or affected negatively, or watching people having their lives destroyed or interfered with because of the actions of a vocal and frightening minority of people who themselves can’t be changed. There’s a bravery that’s necessary at this point. The only way we can keep society from being turned upside down by this religion. . . . we have to have the bravery to tell people like this “no” and to endure that there’s a certain kind of noice they’re going to make. But if we don’t have that bravery, if we don’t realize that being called a “racist” in the public square might not always destroy a life—sometimes, and in many cases, people are just scared— really, if we don’t do it, we’re going to lose what we have thought of as an enlightened society because of certain contingent things that happened during a pandemic and a particularly grisly murder of an innocent man. Just because of chance; just because of Zoom, Slack, boredom, habit, and fear. That is not the way that a mature society should operate.

The ending is quite eloquent, with McWhorter calling us to be “mensches” and stand up to the “misguided and recreational self-focused kind of manipulation” that goes under the name of “antiracism as social justice.” (I think the word “recreational” is quite appropriate.)

Anyway, ye who have ears, listen up