As I say repeatedly, I find it very difficult to listen to long videos (and long podcasts without visuals are even worse). But I happened to click on the one below, part of the biweekly Glenn Show dialogue between Glenn Loury and John McWhorter, and found it quite worthwhile, even though it’s a bit more than an hour long (Loury gives an advertisement between 11:12 and 13:14). It’s interesting because of the topics: wokeness, race, and their intersection, and McWhorter (with whom I’m on a panel in three weeks) is particularly interesting.
The first thing we learn is that Loury has left (actually been fired from) the rightish-wing Manhattan Institute. He explains why in his website post “I was fired by the Manhattan Institute. Here’s why.”:
In short, I think they disapproved of my opposition to the Gaza War, my criticisms of Israel’s prosecution of that war, and my praise of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s meditations on the West Bank settlements.
Well, I knew that Loury was a stringent critic of Israel, but praising Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “meditations” on the West Bank, meditations that followed just 10 days visit in the Middle East and did not even mention Palestinian terrorism, isn’t something to praise. At any rate, since Loury retired from Brown, he’s contemplating his next move, and hints that the University of Austin (UATX) has been courting him.
That leads to a brief discussion of whether schools like UATX are the wave of the future: schools that can teach humanities courses without them being polluted by extreme “social justice” mentality. Both men ponder whether universities like that are the wave of the future, and whether regular universities will devolve into “STEM academies”. That, in turn, leads to a discussion, mostly by McWhorter, about music theory and how that, one of his areas of expertise, has been polluted by wokeness.
The biggest segment of the discussion involves McWhorter’s recent visit to Washington’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, and his thoughts about it (read his long NYT op-ed piece, which is very good, here). McWhorter characterizes it as not a dolorous place but a “happy place,” and one that gives a balanced view of black history—a view in which black people are more than simple oppressed people who serve to remind the rest of us of their guilt. It portrays as well, he avers, the dignity and positive accomplishment of African Americans. (McWhorter compares the dolorous view of black history with the narrative pushed by Nikole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project.) His description makes me want to visit that museum more than ever (I haven’t yet been but will, and I must also visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).
Finally, they discuss the question of whether they were wrong to be so hard on DEI, given that some aspects of it (e.g., a call for equality) are positive. Here McWhorter is at his most eloquent, saying that, given the overreach of DEI, it was imperative for both of them to have criticized it. As McWhorter notes, the extreme construal of DEI did not “fight for the dignity of black people” and, he says, in the face of that extremist ideology, their silence would not have been appropriate. Loury agrees. At this point McWhorter brings up Claudine Gay, ex-President of Harvard, claiming that she was hired simply because she was a black woman, which was “wrong and objectifying.” (Only McWhorter could get away from saying something like that.) The elevation of Gay, says McWhorter, was the sort of thing they were pushing back against when they opposed DEI.
This is worth a listen, and I’ve put the video below.
What is it with McWhorter and 3 toy okapis in the background?!
I have penguins; he has okapis.
Sounds like I should iron the shirts that are awaiting attention. Neither the listening nor the ironing gets done if I try to do only one.
Alan Garber has 242 research works. Claudine Gay has 6.
And she has credible accusations of plagiarism for some of those!
“Lightweight” does not come close to a good descriptor for her…she is practically a helium balloon.
I cannot comment on the accuracy of the numbers, but Alvin Tillery posted a comparison of publication records of Harvard presidents since Pusey in 1953. Claudine Gay had more publications at the time of her appointment than notable Harvard presidents Pusey, Derek Bok, and Neil Rudenstein.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/putting-racist-crusade-against-harvards-dr-claudine-gay-alvin-tillery-ewwec
Setting aside the charges of plagiarism, Gay appeared to be on an administrative track at Harvard rather than a research track — her tenure as Dean of Social Sciences and then Dean of the Faculty or Arts and Sciences was successful, and she brought more administrative experience to the role of president than Larry Summers did, for example.
I think her choice as president of Harvard was wrong-headed, but I suspect that she would have managed it successfully had it not been for the withdrawal of board support for her over the plagiarism charges. Hindsight, in this case, is pretty good.
Here’s an archived link to McWhorter’s interesting NYT piece about the National Museum of African American History and Culture: https://archive.is/23GYl
Very enlightening. Thank you very much.
Glenn seemed “down” to me.
I also thought that, Rom.
I appreciate that Jerry posted this. It’s been a long time since I’ve listened to these two go at it. I’ve always loved how honest they both are. It took me awhile to slow down a bit and settle in with their laid back pace. I’ve missed them.
A very good video overall. Thanks for bringing it to our attention. I often get confused by Loury. Maybe in this video, because as he said toward the end, he was playing devil’s advocate. McWhorter never confuses me and I thought his description of the museum was excellent and will certainly get me on the train to DC soon to visit it. Also the final twenty minutes or so on dei were nice and clear (I agree with Jerry’s very well stated assessment of that section). I Need to watch their recent jason riley interview. I cannot digest the simple audio of podcasts anymore, but find videos very appealing and for some reason the combined audio and video superior to reading a transcript in recent years.
Loury was once very religious, much more conservative, and a bad boy (drug use and philandering) as a younger man. This is not disparagement, as I think he has a lot to say, and some of his behavior can be explained by his rough upbringing.
But there is a chaos to him that does not exist in McWhorter, who is cut from a similar cloth temperamentally and intellectually as people like Sam Harris or Coleman Hughes. It should be mentioned that, unlike Loury, McWhorter came from a much better socioeconomic background.