Has Anti-Racism Become A New Religion? with John McWhorter (Ep.2)

hi everyone and welcome to another episode of conversations with Coleman before we get started today I just wanted to say thank you for the support that I got for the first episode it was really overwhelming and I'm humbled by by the level of support I'm receiving a lot of people were wondering how they can support the podcast and now I have an answer for you all that answer is patreon go to the description and click on the link donate at the $5 level and you'll get a special episode each month audio-only where I talk about a different topic that might be in the news or not in the news and that will only be available to people who support the show but I'm never gonna put any of the main interviews behind a paywall because I want as many people that have access to the work I'm doing as possibly can so with that said my guest today is John McWhorter who is a professor of linguistics also teaches a bit of philosophy in music at Columbia University one of my favorite commentators on the issue of race in America also just a really observant person and amazing critic of American culture writes for the Atlantic he's written probably over 10 books and we talk about a lot of different topics including how he came to have the views he did on race which are a sort of quote unquote heterodox or contrarian and we talked about the relationship between the decline of religion and race we talked about his thesis that anti racism in America has taken on the character of the religion and much more so without further ado John McWhorter welcome to the first conversations with Coleman my guest today is John McWhorter linguistics professor at Columbia University contributor to the Atlantic author of many many many great books and one of my personal favorite people in the world I think it's fitting that you're my first guest because you were also the first person I read that made me challenge many default assumptions about race and being black in America and the first book I read of yours was called authentically black it was an essay collection you read that one first that was the first one I read and I don't know how I became aware of you but I just went to the Columbia library typed in your name and picked out the first thing and as I was halfway through that book I don't you probably don't remember this but I was a freshman and I was in class I had been reading your book for a few weeks and I took a bathroom break in quotation marks from class from from class and who do I run into in the bathroom but John McWhorter I do remember this but I have not remembered it was you yes I do remember yes yeah so there I am urinating next to you very intimidated and I probably just said your name to you like a like a crazy person Hamilton third floor though yes that's right that's right and you you were very kind you spoke to me for a few minutes and it was it was quite an experience in that little bathroom that's right yeah yeah and later I in privately we've talked about how similar to what what you did for me Shelby Steele did for you when when you were younger so what my first question is what did Shelby Steele do to you what were your default assumptions before you read him that's an interesting question and especially from you given the the sequence that you're talking about I grew up being taught what I now refer to as the usual gospel some of which is true my mother was a teacher of Social Work she taught a course at Temple University that I think was actually called racism 101 outside of quotation marks where she was teaching the first generation of young educated white people that racism is more than cross burnings and that was valuable but I could always tell and I guess this was just partly because I'm strange and I think that's true of all of us you know blackhead ever talks people I'm just individually odd I could tell that a lot of what I was being told didn't quite seem to square with reality but there seemed to be an extent to which systemic racism wasn't the only explanation for a lot of black problems but that there was something which one is not supposed to call culture that there was something going on with what people thought being black meant that interfered with success and I learned pretty quickly to keep those sorts of views to myself and because I had a much blacker upbringing than I think a lot of people would understandably think I just thought I must be wrong somehow there must be some things that I'm missing so even as late as when I started teaching at Berkeley in the late 90s and I'm listening to the whole debate over the elimination of racial preferences and supposedly the reason that most black people have to be admitted with lesser dossiers is because of poverty and people kept talking about certain neighborhoods in Oakland and I thought to myself but most of the black kids here at UC Berkeley are not poor they didn't grow up in those neighborhoods or ones anything like them and the issue with the grades and things is something a little deeper then you know what you know census tracks they come from and for a couple years I tried so hard to turn my brain away from that assuming that there was sociology I just didn't know and so Shelby Steele's book and actually I read him before all of this happened it's a gradual evolution of mine in the 90s but Shelby's first book his best book content of our character made me realize wait a minute this is a black person who grew up in the United States is committed to the black cause or at least had been previously it's not that he's some strange outsider and he thinks exactly the way I do he clarified a lot of my thoughts and I thought to myself wow he's right and he must be right in that he gets this National Book Award from people who don't even want to hear it I thought I must not be completely crazy but even back then I would try to discuss some of his ideas with educated smart black well who just you know dismissed him out of hand but it got to the point where I started thinking I get the feeling that even though these people outnumber me and even though you know I can't say that I'm better than them in any way I was beginning to think I'm right and Shelby's right and these people are misled and so to me every time I think of the content of our character I think of this sort of weight off of my chest and it remains one of the 10 best books I've ever read and I'm not fishing for a compliment from you about mine but the idea was I thought this more of this book should be written and when I started writing mine you're gonna think I'm just saying this I thought part of the reason I'm writing this given that I'm gonna take so much for it is I thought I want there to be young black people who read this and realize that they're not alone and for a long time I got the feeling that wasn't happening and I had just kind of given up you are a beautiful example of why I needed to just sit tight no it really does matter to you know that you had a book that was in the library you were a real person at my university that everyone who takes your classes tends to speak highly of them you're like a real human being good you know so it did have the character for me of reading thoughts that I had had my whole life but didn't know that you were allowed to say exactly so like when you don't know when you've never heard someone respectable say something you assume that there must be some reason you don't know exactly why for exact altar is unsayable right like there must be something you don't get mm-hmm but then you hear somebody say it somebody who clearly has good intentions it's clearly intelligent and you know it it can open things up for you in a way so I think it is important that that you wrote that book and thank you thank you speaking of Columbia I wanted to ask you I guess this kind of ties into Shelby Steele because Shelby Steele was a radical in the 60s he paints in one of his books I'm not sure if it's white guilt or shame he tells a story of being a radical you know flicking a cigarette in the blowing smoke and in the in the voice of the university president in the late 60s and his transformation to to you know becoming a conservative conservative I feel like in the past few months at Columbia there's been a kind of recapitulation of of that kind of tension over one incident that happened that I'm sure you heard about it was with a young man named Alex McNab Barnard right yeah yeah so I wanted to ask you about that but just to bring people up to speed what happened is a kid named Alex McNabb who I go to school with went through the gates of Barnard College which is the all-women's wing of Columbia University past 11:00 p.m. at the point where you're you have to show your ID didn't show his ID and the security guards asked him over and over it kept refusing and then they ended up pinning him to a countertop for 20 seconds at which point he presented his ID this was caught on camera he was yelling in the library that it was racism people were very upset he ended up on Don Lemon and you know the the security guards in in question got suspended and essentially the whole campus security got accused of racism by the administrators of the school and I wrote a piece I read though yeah giving reasons why I didn't think this was a clear example of racism at all and it was an injustice to the security guards that they were labeled that way and we actually had me and Alex had a mutual friend who set up a debate between us I didn't know this berth yeah so there were flyers all over campus we organized it we met a few times he said he's a nice guy mm-hm and eventually it got cancelled because he's bringing a lawsuit against the school and his lawyers told him he could not talk about the the event publicly but interesting anyway did you observe this happening I camp on campus at all and did you pay attention did you have an opinion on it um I understand why he felt the way he did and I get the feeling that the proper view of it this is very much the sort of thing we're talking about where you end up having arguments with yourself but you learn after a while that you don't need to argue so hard the proper view of it is supposed to be that he was Rosa Parks that he shouldn't have been asked and he rebelled against that and then was you know metaphorically conked over the head and from what I gleaned from talking to a few students about it and I didn't canvas the campus the way you in a way could you're immersed in a way that I just couldn't be but from you know poking one of my classes that I had a representative group of people and I wanted to get a sense of what the campus thought and then a few other conversations I got the feeling that what you were supposed to think was that only a black man would have been asked to show ID and an awful lot of people sat and agreed with that even though I heard from other quarters such as you that an awful lot of people have been asked to show their ID who were not black men that it wasn't so unusual what happened to him and then there also seems to have been the issue that and this I don't completely understand because I haven't encountered this photographically I didn't see the video but the way he was dressed might have made somebody reasonably wonder exactly who this person was quite beyond what the color of his skin was so it sounds to me like with this episode and it doesn't always come out this way but an awful lot with these episodes it comes out to be much subtler than what people described did his being black had anything to do with why he was asked maybe but was it everything or close to everything I don't think so but you weren't supposed to say that and I can imagine that you took a great deal of criticism unless there's that certain Teflon quality you seem to have so far but I would imagine you would have taken a great deal of criticism for that op-ed from some cool did you for example surprisingly little I don't know how you do it what what happened it was very bizarre because what happened is I had all of these Barnard women coming up to because I live with two Barnard women both of whom agreed with my take both of whom told me they have never once gone through the gates past 11:00 p.m. and not gotten carded these are white women right and I had I must have had five women at different points coming up to me saying I agreed with your Facebook post on the on the Alex McNab incident but not a single one of them liked the post not only of course not right so it was this I felt a little bit like I was witnessing what must have happened in the Trump election more in the recent Australian election in microcosm where if you're just like I would talk to people you know like the perception from people who are just reading the campus newspaper is virtually everyone's on Alex aside Coleman is gonna certainly be the underdog in this debate but I was encountering totally normal people liberals just kind of default white liberals not super woke but not not woke mm-hm who were saying actually group actually agree with you there mmm-hmm and but but they just couldn't say it never and that is often the way these sorts of things are Ward Connerly of all people had something he wrote in one of his well I think it was in his autobiography way back that he would give speeches where people would be you know practically belligerent in the audience and then always afterward a certain person who's basically it's a you or a young me walks up and quietly says I agree with what you're saying but that person has to do it after everybody else is gone and I don't remember whether Ward said this but the truth is that an awful lot of people in that audience felt that way but what normal human being as opposed to say you or me wants to get mauled you know most students at Columbia and you know not only the radical ones but just the ones you talk about who are you know not not woke they don't want to get into these fights they have a statistics final to take care of they're breaking up with you know whoever they're with they've got lives to lead most people aren't terribly interested in race issues because race issues you're one of about 4,000 things that a human being might be concerned with and so yeah you're not going to get the truth I found what some people I tried to talk to you about it and by some I mean to white people that there was just no point in trying to have a conversation as far as they were concerned they had read the usual things and they just assumed that this was good old-fashioned racial profiling and it was clearly important to them and I can imagine how it feels cuz I would be doing the same thing if I were white they were getting a sense of validation out of acknowledging this supposed truth that this boy had been beat up because of the color of his skin and so then the episode passed but yeah that was the sort of thing where if I had been an undergraduate I would have watched it and thought to myself really does nobody ever get stopped was that really Rosa Parks except here it is several decades later but I wouldn't have said anything in college I knew the anger that you get I knew how you get hollered at I knew that you know would keep you from having certain friends and that many people don't let go of that sort of thing they'll hate on you for years so I just would have kept quiet kept it to myself and then maybe wrote about it years later in losing the reason authentically black but this stuff is hard because there is this religion as I've written about which is that if you're white you validate yourself by showing that you know racism exists and if you're black part of what gives you a sense of being interesting part of what gives you a sense of validation a sense of purpose a sense of belonging is too frankly exaggerated about racism and cutting through that is a very delicate thing and so you have to you have to choose your battles I would not have written that up at at your age I simply did not have that kind of bravery but I'm glad you wrote it because as we're seeing and I wouldn't have known this when I was in my 20s an awful lot of people agreed with it who just would never say so in public and so part of our battle is to get people more comfortable with being themselves in public well part of why I wrote it was precisely because I'm also black on the same campus and I know the general vibe I go through those same gates all the time I know what the security guards are like and you know if I had had more distance from the situation I probably wouldn't have been as civilized about it and exercise right right yeah and also I had a white friend Jeremy who sent me an email saying that sometimes he went through those same gates with his headphones on forgot to show his ID and they chase him and hound him right so if anything it seems more likely that it was due to his being a male on an all-women's campus at night then then to being black but you know anyway I want to get back to the religion point because this is you know a point you've been making for years now and there's one piece in The Daily Beast one in the Atlantic that anti-racism takes on the character of a religion and it's interesting to me that with your conversations with Glenn Lowry blogging heads which you're now known it's kind of its own space for someone yeah yeah that's an interesting point of tension between you and Glenn because whenever you talk about anti racism as a religion that certainly rings true to me and I like that framing because there are so many so many similarities with how you're not supposed to ask pesky questions there's a symmetry between original sin and white privilege there's a kind of reverence for history religion as well as in a mysterious future where everything is going to be resolved right right there's reparations will be a reawakening begins to sound someone like the rapture but Glenn comes from more of a perspective that's more sympathetic to religion so the analogy doesn't seem to quite do it do the same job in his mind that it does for your rub him the wrong way right but I was on a podcast few months ago with my friend Yasha monk and we were talking about this and he asked me a question that I thought was a very good one he asked good questions he does which is so you know assuming that there is a kind of religious impulse intrinsic to human beings and given that Christianity is somewhat in decline at least in the circles you and I would run in the circles that are being overtaken by anti-racism you know it's one thing to critique anti-racism as a religion but it's another thing to say what would replace it given that there is a whole a religion shaped hole that needs to be filled with something and I found that I I came up with some answer but I didn't have a great answer that's a tough one you know it almost certainly is from and I've thought about this quite a bit actually it's partly something that a secular person might almost viscerally crave you almost seek the mysticism you'll almost seek wanting to believe in something larger certainly you seek belonging and whether you're white or black all of those you know high-fives that people do when they you know basically mention some anti-racist Tennant or some analysis you know you know that Alex McNab was all about racism right and then the you know you'll watch people do it and all of that is about connection yes human beings need that and I don't think it's an accident that rather you know secular and Pagan mostly over educated affluent whites are so Mormon style religious about race but to be honest I'll give you a very chilly answer I think that that is and I say this as an atheist I don't like to talk about this too much but that doesn't mean I don't talk about it at all I do not believe in God at all I am NOT agnostic I am an atheist and I don't feel bereft about it and as far as I'm concerned the anti-racist thing to the extent that it's religious and yes I mean this and I'm not gonna walk it back is a slide backwards you know I think that humanity would be better off it won't happen in my lifetime humanity would be better off without religious thought of that kind because that kind of thought is anti empirical I think we should be as comfortable as we can with empiricism and dealing with fact I will be writing a book arguing the point but to the extent that people find anti-racism so attractive it's because there's a part of us that reaches back to what were founded upon which is that we are social beings that some people would argue that evolutionarily we almost need to believe in something beyond the mundane it probably helps knit people together socially which would have gotten passed down in genes but if we're gonna do what human beings do well and do it better we've got to let go of anything that involves carefully turning a blind eye to facts in the quest for a warm but inchoate sense of belonging that as often as not impedes rather than Foster's social justice and so as far as I'm concerned no nothing should replace it because there are great many people who really aren't religious in any way who I wouldn't say are miserable or if they are it's not because they need to find Jesus nor is it that they need to find you know the priests on hot seat coats or anything else we just need to learn how to deal with reality that's tough but that is what I believe I think I have a bit of a disagreement with that in the sense that I am also an atheist I you know I'm someone who certainly always wants to be committed to viewing the world empirically - not saying things because they feel good but because they're true on the other hand I'm also someone who goes on meditation retreats I'm kind of a Sam Harris style atheist a quasi Buddhist right you know like I I see the value of spirituality shorn of irrational beliefs and one thing I think one reason I think we so to speak our are are perhaps losing if I I don't want to frame it as a but is a battle but in the marketplace of ideas mm-hmm you know the idea is you and I tend to push which are fairly similar are not winning the day I think that's that's clear to say right but I think one reason no but can you don't you don't think so no I know what you mean but anyway okay there's one one way in which the narrative I my narrative could feel much stronger and more viscerally true to people hmm is if it had some kind of religious bent eeeh yeah so for example when I think of why it's the case that Martin Luther King was so successful in talking about Brotherhood and the content of our character a message that is really Universal but people pushing the same message today just get mocked I think well he he stood on this religious perch from which he could view the divisive nough sub lack power movement and white racists as petty and terrestrial relative to the the unity then he could say is true of our world in virtue of his being a Christian he had a meta-narrative that kind of dissolved all of the divisive narratives below and I find as an atheist entering this conversation that has a very religious character I lack a meta-narrative you lack a meta-narrative so we I think that's a liability for us and I don't know exactly that that's kind of what Yahshua's question exposed to me and I don't know exactly whether that's fixable mm-hmm but it's something I noticed that is I completely get you but this is their their two answers first of all and here's where I'm gonna have to strike that well you know we're only talking about 20 miles an amazing Looney Tunes old man voice but back in the day as in 1999 to have the kind of message that you and I have I was it's interesting the way these days Twitter is discussed by regular people on Twitter and people talk about the flaming in the vitriol etc my thought has always been people have been treating me that way since the Clinton administration is not new to me because if you were a black apostate boy did you hear it and the people in the middle that we're talking about generally you didn't really hear from much they might write you a physical letter they might write you a quiet email but people like that felt genuinely silenced and I think the mood in the country was different so when I was you I got praised mostly from white conservatives and you know that's great but as far as black people went there were a few self-identified black conservatives but for the most part there was an awful lot of hate these days I think that part of the reason you don't get as much of that as I do part of the reason that I don't feel as hated as I do now is because there's a middle group or even a completely persuadable group who have more of a sense of being a body who have less of a sense that they're one of only 17 people and I think social media encourages that and I find you know what I'm gonna next time I open up Twitter I'm gonna find all this eight mail but I find that for the stuff that I do now I don't get nearly as much of that Shi T as I used to there are people who will say I don't agree with everything but I respect what you're saying that group of people is bigger and or louder now than it was 20 years ago so that I don't feel like we're losing I feel like we're smoking people out and feel more comfortable than they used to in saying yeah for black people racism is there but it isn't everything and I'm not a bad person if I think this and more and more black people who do not need to say they're card-carrying Republicans or my parents are immigrants to say yeah this message that we're being given makes us seem like children so that's one answer second answer religion people need something larger yeah that's true you and I sound chilly but you know what I think something could replace the religion and I think that that is something which is gonna seem very shallow we need there to be somebody who does what we do who sounds better and what I mean is somebody who probably grew up differently than either you or I did and who has a much richer more identifiable black English cadence and sense of humor than either one of us do if we could get somebody who had that vocal presence somebody like Stanley Crouch it was very useful for that but he seems to have receded somewhat lately that would fill in an awful lot of this religious aspect because what we're talking about is the viscera we're talking about warmth we're talking about sense of belonging and there'll always be a limit to I know from my own self I generally I genuinely feel talking about race I'm only ever gonna be so effective because I sound like this you know I do it for someone like you I'd do it with Glenn but I just don't sound right but if it was somebody like Jelani Cobb not that he would ever express the views that we do healed sound right doing it and so if this keeps going if there could be a couple of people and I'm not saying that you or me or Camille or Thomas or Glen don't sound good but we need different notes we need some female notes you know really sounds almost as if it's basically we five or six guys and then somebody like Candace Owens there need there needs to be five or six you know black pliable heterodox people who don't walk around offending people and frankly who are a little more careful than Cantus Owens I think that we could get somewhere and I think it could happen within you know people are gonna play this back and I'm gonna sound stupid but in about five years I think we could see some change I don't feel as pessimistic as I did say ten years ago ten years ago unblocking hits and that long I would say to Glenn you know we will ever cut through this nonsense I feel better about I mean know wasn't Barack Obama almost to that yes could have been but social media screwed it up social media made it easier to see cop brutality against black people which is real and more people ended up knowing about every one of those episodes add that and somebody as good as tanomoshii Coates was at writing about it and then his career and next thing you know Barack Obama's symbolism got washed away if there had been no social media coming in right as that man starts occupying the White House I think we'd be in a different place already but social history is funny yeah one one opinion floating around the until intelligentsia that I think makes very little sense is that Barack Obama set race relations back I think it's a classic correlation without causation fallacy mm-hm and I've I once had a very protracted argument with someone about whether social media was the cause of what has been called the Great Awakening by I forget who wrote the Box piece it may have been and I suggested that it was clearly a consequence of social media and what I told them - yeah I'm and there are there are studies that correlate that find correlations between people who go online more often are more likely to view race relations as negative versus people who don't which at least suggests that people are getting the perception of what's happening from 30-second now this clips which don't count as data and when you look at all the data it presents a far less pessimistic picture but I you know some people I think people attribute far too much to the president and that's one thing general about you know political pundits how much power could that one person have yes I want to loop back though to to my concern about the lack of muscularity and kind of our narrative so to speak muscularity is a good word um I I think that when we talk about the conflict between race consciousness the idea that your race is a deep part of who you are and colorblindness the idea that your race is a trivial part of your identity there is race consciousness enjoys a perpetual advantage because it draws your circle the circle that circumscribes your tribe smaller mm-hm and there's always kind of an inertia leading or or favoring arguments that make your circle of concerns smaller we'll meet that hug yes definitely and there's always something militating against expanding the circle yes and that's why it it astounds me that Martin Luther King was as successful as he was which in with a message that was so expansive and I can't help but think that having a doctrine of universal humanity something that was tied to tradition and a specific text and a long history is largely what enabled him to do that mhm and I can't I can't help but feel somewhat pessimistic that in the absence of that kind of thing mm-hmm I'm gonna be kind of I'm gonna be having the same conversation about this when I'm your age and little will have changed I think you might be very interested to see what it's like in 20 years you might lack imagination I think we need to think about you know nonzero and Robert right and what's being called cultural appropriation but as just cultures coming together and I think that as I've often said I think that the main driver of the gospel narrative that we're talking about now like not the skip king king accomplished something he accomplished something in a time when to be black concretely was a burden no matter what kind of black person you were and I think actually though that we think of King as a winner now but King works better for many people as a historical figure than he did as a living figure in his time in the 60s the 60s that I was not in as a mature person it was Malcolm X and then more to the point Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers who ended up taking over the narrative and it was a different kind of tribalism so Martin Luther King is talking about the universal but also he has the religious element and you're talking about God you're talking about Jesus you're talking about prayer there's an air of mysticism and music the Black Power movement got it into it's going to be just us brothers and sisters dealing with this oppression which really brings you together what black panther gives you a nice sense Spike Lee's latest movie gives you a nice sense of how all of that must have felt all of these there in Colorado this is a place they're very few black people in Colorado but these people are bonding together Panthers they hate the cops and that one thing that you get out of Black Panther is a sense of warmth that the lead character is tapping into by getting into this network but I think that actually we have to go towards a more pan human idea that is not festooned with anything that is anti empirical and I think really to get back to what I was saying it's about the cops it's about perceptions of the cops and if one generation of black boys in particular could grow up without any sense of the cops as their enemy without any sense that being attacked by the cops in some way is kind of like losing your cherry and that's exactly the expression that Andrew Young and Martin Luther King used about being beaten up by southern cops you lose it that way that was real today I think people don't use that terminology but the idea is that part of coming of age as a black man is having some episode like that and being able to share it with one another in to air it to the rest of the world if that were not there I think that I'd be interested to see what that generation of black people was like in terms of dealing with that need for fellowship which you'll even use oppression for if you have nothing else to use it for maybe it'll turn out that they will resist thinking of themselves as just people because even without the cop narrative they just can't stand to walk along but there's a generation of people growing up who even you are not in the heads of and I'm imagining twenty years from now imagine people growing up in this particular world and if the cop issue were solved and of course that cannot happen in any clean way but to the extent that we change that conversation I get the feeling they might be more open to something other than this visceral sense of belonging we see that ends up being more counterproductive than productive I'm open to being proven wrong because yeah just thinking of ourselves as people that's different it might even be hard it might be that you and I are odd and being relatively comfortable with it and I have church you know for me it's theater for me I don't know why I can't explain it it's like Aristotle it's just you know good for the sake of being good it's the ultimate end for me that gives me a sense of belonging with people who like theater I enjoy that but it's not based on feeling bad it's not based on oppression it's not based on people who don't like me music to me is important I sometimes have trouble relating to people who don't get music and frankly music beyond musics just about rhythm in any real way and that to me is kind of religious that people might always have but the idea that your religion has to involve suspending your disbelief about obvious things I want humanity to get past it and I try to exercise my imagination in such a way as to imagine it I could be wrong though yeah I want to go back to something you said about the 60s and what happened in the 60s and early 70s in black America I came across a rather alarming study by Roland fryer I don't know if you've seen this about the divergence in black and white baby names at the end of the 60s and early 70s in California I don't think I know this study know it it is almost unbelievable there there's there was a seven-year period during which the likelihood that any given name so like the average name being twice as likely for a black baby than a white baby right that it went from being twice as likely to 20 times as likely which is to say the measure of divergence increased by tenfold in a period of seven years yep and that doesn't surprise me in a study they attributed this many of these names were African names right Kwame this was in the era where everyone was renaming themselves you know when Stokely Carmichael became the Kilometre Array and whatnot but it's really you know just the degree of the transformation in the culture is alarming and the stickiness of it is alarming so if I think of the great jazz musicians the celebrities that I loved from the 40s and 50s they're named Lanier named Charlie Parker oh man John Coltrane right like that you couldn't tell what their race was by their name or their first names no but starting in the 70s we have what has at this point become a stereotype or a cliche of black people having very unique and lavish names and to me I see that as an example of the dynamic I mentioned before which is that muscular narratives have an advantage over cohesive Universal narratives and the degree to which cultural change could happen rapidly but not happen in Reverse mmm-hmm you know it's funny you bring that up because I am just old enough to have felt that happening like I'm in a way of the last cohort who would have been named something like John 1965 whereas by the early 70s when I was a little kid growing up there were little girls named Makeba there were girls named ole Martin boys named Omar and collied and that was normal I didn't get the feeling that most of the people who had those names had been named out of hostility it was out of a kind of pride a new pride in blackness that in a way it was sad there had not been before and then after that start the quote/unquote ghetto name so the idea is that black people have different names I think that kind of thing can coexist with a sense of white people as not the enemy or if they are not enough to matter so the fact that all of the old jazz musicians had fats Waller's name was Thomas that almost seems odd now why wasn't his name Daquan well if today you know that person's name would be take one that could be fine it would be nice if he were a Fats Waller who played his piano and did what he did without any sense of the white man as prescribing his entire existence and of course the white man did prescribe fats Waller's entire existence but his great-grandson if he had one which I don't think he did that would not be true and would be a shame if his great-grandson were walking around thinking of it that way so yeah that that change happened you know there's something else that I want to get on the record because I don't think I have any other reason to put it on the record but there was another change that happened in the wake of that time it's 1977 I have moved to a very upper-middle class / affluent and all-black neighborhood called Laura kills and Lawnside New Jersey and it's this occurred to me yesterday that I had never written it down or mentioned it to Glenn Lowry and I'm gonna mention it now this is something that happened in 1977 which I think would have been different in 1967 there was a kid in the neighborhood and I'm not gonna disguise it the way I have with the Clarins who I've talked about with Glenn Lowry name was Vernon Vernon was handsome and muscular and all the girls in the hood liked Vernon and okay that's great but I remember how Vernon was always talked about he had like an epithet it was like the wine dark sea Vernon's fine and he has a B+ average always that B+ average he has a B+ average not a - not an a average B+ average everybody thought of that is just astonishing about Vernon that was a real indication of black people and the scholarly after the late 60s because imagine a group of say chinese-american kids saying whatever is really great and you know he has a B+ that it needs unimaginable or if those are immigrants kids imagine American Jews long past the Lower East Side imagine them saying well um let's give him a name Ethan Ethan is really handsome and you know what he's got a B+ it sounds like another planet these kids well he's got a B+ average they had already settled in and they're not reading any Tom soul they're not reading white conservatives they're just going around on their bikes they have already internalized the sense that to be black means that you're only so scholastic so to be black is not to fail but Vernon's great because he has a B+ average so he does pretty darn good in school but not so good that it would make him unattractive so not so well as the weird guys like you know John McWhorter and his friends Chris and Vince where they're just too smart and therefore not effective and this is not to imply that we looked like Vernon but still it was considered a big plus and Vernon that he had a B+ average that was something that started only in the late 1960s that's the sort of thing that's worrisome and it shows that we're not talking about people walking around manufacturing a sense of hatred of the white person all this stuff is baked in this is people who would never consider thinking any other way and they didn't drink it in from listening to somebody on the radio you had this among little kids who were running around in the most beautiful black neighborhood on earth there wasn't a white person for a two-mile radius and so this had nothing to do with racism and had nothing to do with discrimination there were no cops around it was just a new sense of what black identity was so that's a bit of a divergence but I wanted to get that down in case I got hit by today it reminds me of so my my grandparents on my dad side went to Dunbar High School oh they went yes my grandmother actually my grandmother went to Dunbar my grandfather went to Armstrong across the street I've never known anybody who could actually attest to yes yeah and my great-aunt as well went to Dunbar Dunbar for people who don't know is a famous high school in Washington DC it was an all-black high school before it was integrated in the 60s and it occasionally outscored the white high schools in DC it's famous for the early 20th Sunday yeah it famous for churning out many famous and highly acclaimed black people whose names I am blanking on now but it it was it kind of seemed like an anomaly in a sense because you had middle class and often poor black kids getting an education during Jim Crow that wasn't as good or better than the education they were the white kids in the same city we're getting and it's an interesting case study in what makes school good but the reason I thought of it when you told your story about Vernon is when I talked to my grandparents or migrated on about the kind of education they got at Dunbar obviously I I don't know what it exactly was like firsthand and there's so much first-person data that is missed in the telling of stories but I don't get the sense that there was that this I don't get the sense that anyone was teased for acting white if they did - well I get the sense that people took a lot of pride in getting good grades and that getting good grades made you popular in a way that was not the case among black kids I grew up with and it seems to me that was a consequence of changes in the culture in the 60s and 70s as well as a consequence of integration as well I know you Stuart bucks book masking white which all story yeah yeah and of course nobody reads it right yeah it is one of the best books I've ever read so thorough and I could not urge it to be read you know I urge you to read this book but one thing he points out is when you put black kids and white kids together for the first time you force busing in this way and white kids have all kinds of head starts for reasons that are too obvious to go into then the human mind he doesn't say it this way but the way I would put it is that the human mind is a pattern finding machine and it's a politically incorrect pattern finding machine so if you notice patterns that are racial in nature you will helplessly form a stereotype and apply it to yourself even perhaps and that that's one thing that I find is very difficult for people to swallow when you ask what is the source of stereotypes about black people because they exist whether they're implicit or explicit their racial bias is real and by the way it's not only white people that have it it's also black people with everyone mm-hmm and I often find the the the most blatant episodes of racism sometimes come from immigrants who aren't white who have no white guilt whatsoever but aren't but nevertheless form racial biases and stereotypes utterly unfiltered right right and you know so but there's a competing view which is that it's coming from the culture the the signal sent by society the people we hold up in Hollywood movies if only we could get culture to be more equitable we could rid ourselves of racial bias the stereotypes are being programmed from the outside and this is a view that I don't think is I think it used to be more true than it is I think it perhaps accounts for a small amount of of the variance in stereotypes I think the primary effect at this point is pattern recognition and that leads me to a rather depressing view that anti-black stereotypes and bias are not likely to significantly decline until those patterns themselves are not there or are mitigated what how do you view that did you see those two competing visions as where do you fall yes either the problem is that a certain kind of person will respond to you by saying that withdraw the racism and those patterns would disappear and so if we can teach America not to discriminate against people not to have these stereotypes then suddenly people's behavior would change because the reason that they behave that way is because society doesn't like them and has biases against them and so if somebody sees that in a school as so often there are no black kids in the advanced placement classes then anti racism teaches us that it must be because white teachers are biased against the black kids or it's that society is so biased against black people that there's no way those kids could ever have come in with anything like the preparation to ever get into an AP class so the idea is that if we change society then we will see black kids in those classes because the reason has nothing to do with for example a culture among the black teens that says that if you're in one of those classes you're disloyal that if you really work hard at school you're not a proper black person and bucks book is absolutely key I wish it had been done with a larger publisher because what he shows also is that black kids in integration often were treated quite badly by old-school bigotry from the white teachers the white teachers didn't like them often and so it was a nasty situation that that cohort of black kids wound up in it set them against school made them think of it as something that wasn't for them but then a cultural trait can be passed on regardless of external circumstances and not just for five minutes and so that is when it was really about in 1966 the whole do you think you're white for liking school ideas in and it's been passed on ever since encouraged by other aspects of the mood those dumb bar style schools thomas sol shows that you found them across the nation and the closest connection i have to them is that in Atlanta and now I'm doing a blank it was named after I think it's either Frederick Douglass or Booker T Washington I forget which one my mother went to that one and how she grew up in was near that school and that school was quite excellent it then wasn't and the neighborhoods completely changed but my mother remembered being called a walking encyclopedia and that hurt but she wasn't told that she thought she was white and that was because she was being called those things in the 40s whereas in the 60s starting in about 1966 people would have said you think you're white that's why you're so good at school and so that changed at a time when nobody would deny that racism as nasty as it is was receding there's a certain kind of person who says racism has gotten worse since the late 60s and frankly very few people listen to that we know it was certainly worse in 1950 than it's been since and when it was receding is when black teens started setting themselves against school in that way and that's not to say that they're bad people but it means that the idea that racism is always the cause of any kind of disparity is at least vastly oversimplified because in this case those kids saying Vernon is fine and he has a B+ average was it racism that made them set the bar so low well maybe in that there had been racist teachers a generation before who had set Vernon's older cousins and his parents to think of school as something that was for white people but it had nothing to do with how those kids at that time were feeling about Vernon so next thing you know you have what's called racism without racists as Richard Taunton Ford put it I wish that it caught on more but it's certainly not as high five simple as a lot of people like to say yeah another thing that that Stuart buck demonstrates in that book is the heroic attempts and successful attempts that recently freed slaves made to become literate it's a really I think there's a chapter in the book that just documents the the lengths to which people went to learn how hungry black people were to develop their minds now that they could yeah and it really it's a goose bumps inducing chapter to read and michonne how again how cultures can change in a critical period of transition and then kind of become set in a holding pattern back back to the stereotype point though one thing I I I don't know why more people don't observe is or ask themselves is why is it the case that for example Asian Americans are stereotyped as smart was it a that immigrants arrived from China and Japan in the late 19th and early 20th century and white people randomly decided to stereotype them as smart which then caused them to do better at school that is a very not implausible story but that's the logical consequence of believing that stereotypes are only the cause rather than the result of disparities that we see right clearly I think what happened is people picked up on vaguely picked up on the fact that Asians tended to do very well in school and then formed a stereotype which crudely painted with a broad brush as stereotypes always do and misfired in many cases but nevertheless picked up on a correlation sure well let me push back a little bit on that because say it's 1935 and there are black kids doing so well at Dunbar and various high schools across the country and not that the media knew anything about them but black people were thought of as stupid even then and so despite what had gone on at all the black schools like Tuskegee despite the Rosenwald schools despite the existence of w EBD boys black people were thought of is stupid no matter what black people did now presumably that stereotype began partly because of European views of Africans and then what I think we can imagine the untutored person would think of slaves and it certainly wasn't slaves fault that they weren't educated but a person who isn't trained to think about all of humanity a person who is existing in about seventeen forty six when this discourse is not as advanced might naturally suppose as Thomas Jefferson did that black people must just be kind of stupid and so it starts there but today I think that we are at a point where let's say that a white teacher sees a black kid in their class and thinks okay I have to worry about this one and people say well you're thinking that for no reason at all you were quite correct that person is dealing with pattern recognition they are seeing something that has gone on with black students in their own classes they're not internalizing the stereotypes of 200 years ago and so you have to ask a different set of questions with the Chinese I don't know how bright the Chinese were thought of as being in say 1915 the quote-unquote pigtailed Chinese person but once you had immigrants after 1965 coming here with the values that they carry in terms of education and achievement very quickly it sets in that all Asian people are brilliant because you see so many of them working so hard in class and excelling and so it's not random but it's certainly not random that people end up wondering about black people these days and so a test comes up that firemen have to take that's your typical you know cognitive assessment test and black people don't do as well on the test because black people tend not to be as used to those sorts of deaths for various reasons and the underbelly P starts arguing that the test needs to be eliminated because it's discriminatory against black people well the idea might be that you teach black people how to do better on the test but instead even our modern-day equivalents of Thurgood Marshall have internalized the sense that it's not a black thing to take a challenging written and irrelevant to race test that's rather alarming because it only ends up basically confirming everybody although they won't say it out loud in an ocean that in certain ways black people just aren't as bright upon which then we have everybody wondering why people think black people are as bright when the reason is that so many smart people insists that we're not supposed to have to take tests Stuyvesant and other schools in New York City are the same thing you have one line that I'm gonna misquote right now it's something like you do not love someone whom you shield from obstacles yes this in one of your books that's losing the race somewhere I need to admit that I almost remember it and it's something like the person who you pity is someone who you don't genuinely respect isn't that line not that one it's not that okay so some other line I may have forgotten it but yeah well that's what it reminds me yeah well that's what this is John McWhorter thank you very much thank you [Music]

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 233,259

Keywords: race, religion, politics, america, USA, atheism, anti racism

Id: UPiNiTwf5bM

Length: 61min 10sec (3670 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Pretty interesting that McWhorter says that they need someone charismatic and funny like Obama to sell a universal message but social media screwed it up for Obama by making black people more aware of things like cop brutality and so they went more to the anti-racist side.

There were other things that happened that might have made blacks feel like racism was still around:e.g. birtherism or Obama being hounded and mocked for a "terrorist fist jab". A lot of this wasn't on social media but was on traditional news media like cable or talk radio right?

Moreover, when someone like Obama did touch on racial issues (something that a universalist would do) it was still controversial because the issue was.

Then there's just partisanship in general which prevents someone like that from being a unifying figure.

I don't really get why McWhorter would be any more optimistic now (as he seems to be) given that a) the problem went beyond his scapegoat and b) social media is around and kicking today too.

It would surely get "worse" right?

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As for the idea that racism would change if black's average SES was better- putting aside the argument that it may need to change to allow that- Hughes is pushing...I assume yes? It wouldn't stop racism per se - there are still racist Asian stereotypes- but it would come in a different, arguably less cutting form.

I have this discussion a lot around say...Africa and how the Western media portrays it.

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I also didn't know that it was the "intelligentsia" that pushes the idea that Obama made race relations worse. I always took that to be a popular-level belief

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As for the whole "religion" thing...you could just as easily use the term "ethos". The only benefit adding religion does is to add a sort of pejorative element. Which is not incoherent I guess but it leads to this whole thing being tied up together in this idea of anti-racism as a substitute for religious feeling (i.e. if we were more religious we wouldn't need the religious certainty of this allegedly destructive anti-racism*) rather than just being an ethos (that some people think they have good reasons to dislike) that motivates a lot of people.

Less secular, more religious times were not less animated by their own political and social ideologies. Quite the opposite.

* This also plays into Petersonian style arguments that our issues are that we've replaced an ancient, tested religion for destructive modern alternatives. Now, McWhorter fortunately doesn't believe this as an atheist (he makes sure to distinguish himself from an agnostic so kudos) but I think the above argument accepts a lot of the same premises.

[u/bush-]

Maybe because anti-black racism in the U.S. has traditionally had a superstitious and religious character to it? When southern whites viewed blacks as basically impure, it does remind one of religion. It wasn't long ago where it was illegal for blacks and whites to play checkers together, that people had separate cutlery for blacks and whites to use, that black drivers couldn't overtake a white driver on the road, or that there were separate staircases for white and black people in buildings. It sounds like something out of the Old Testament, or Shia perceptions of non-believers being "najis."

Since anti-black racism has been the most prevalent form of racism in the U.S. for generations, it obviously has an effect on how racism is viewed, and its opposition might seem overly zealous. I'm skeptical that anti-racism has become a "religion" though, but I'm sympathetic to the idea "diversity" has become like a religion.

[u/seawilly]

Anti racism is a good thing and one does not need a religion to be anti racist

[u/andyforever7]

I'm actually really proud to be a part of this sub. The comments for the most part are addressing historical facts and data. Haven't watched the podcast yet but knowing that like minded people (Harris fans/Coleman fans/ McWhorter fans who disagree with them on certain fundamental issues and have the education to back it up) exist is really great.

[u/dblackdrake]

Has asking "Has (social trend involving pasionate young people) become (thing that is BAD and WRONG)?" become a new religion?

​

I ked, I kid, I kud, but seriously fuck off with this formulation.

The title almost poisoned the entire video for me.

[u/andyforever7]

So I watched this. I am sort of disappointed. I really like the cadence of John and Coleman. They're like me, smart black guy who was at or near the top of his class, got called white all the time because of my mannerisms, had divergent tastes in media and subcultures, etc. I empathize with their plight.

However, they keep referring to anti racism as a religion They also claim to be empiricists. I take those claims seriously so I'm going to take them to task here. Where was the evidence based argumentation in this conversation?

It's one thing to spitball ideas and anecdotes at one another. It's totally appropriate for the podcast format. However, when one claims to base their opinions on empirical evidence, you would think that they would at least have some statistics or data off the top of their head. Anti racists always present figures and data when I run into their public talks or forums. They also have relevant, documented historical reasoning and direct causes for much of their material. I didn't get any of that with John or Coleman.

The prevalence of academics in anti racist advocacy ties nicely to the "religious overtones" Coleman and John seem to detect. I would prefer to call this reverential spirit an ethos of justice. It's not motivated by any particular unfounded claims or concrete faith/Creed, just a common goal of an equal society. I assume John and Coleman share some sort of predilection for a society that is as fair as possible. Racism is a force that hinders progress toward our shared end. Anti racism simply seeks to see this force leave our society and lives. We can reach a society rapidly or asymptotically but anti racism would be the vehicle to do so.

Some anti racists want to dismantle race as a whole, others want color to be seen but just want everyone to have a level playing field. The particulars of the correct approach can be had but there's a common antagonist: racism and racists.

Until I see empirical evidence showing some sort of detrimental consequence to anti racist activism or ideology, I fail to see how this movement is

[u/ima_thankin_ya]

Some aspects of the trans community has also become somewhat religious in their behavior and beliefs aswell. Dogmas a bitch.

For those downvoting me I'll elaborate. Their views on sex and gender are dogmatic beliefs. If you dont hold these beliefs, such that a trans women is actually a women or that sex and gender different, you are considered a transphobe, regardless whether you discriminate or hold prejudice against them or not, which is basically a heretic, which is different than just a non believer. If I didnt believe in God, or the Torah, I dont automatically become anti-semitic, I'm just a non believer, but If I disagree with some trans people about their beliefs, I'm transphibic.

If I were to state the opinion that trans men arent actually men, and god forbid not call them by the pronoun of the opposite sex, then not only am I transphobic but and saying something blasphemous, and some of them want to use the law to punish that as discrimination. So its basically their own version of blasphemy laws.

Does that actually make them a religion, obviously not, but it makes them similar to religious dogmatists who want to force their arbitrary religious beliefs on others.

Edit: dont you guys not see the irony of me being downvoted and called bigoted because I dont rhink believing you are the opposite gender actually makes you that gender? They want me to accept their arbitrary belief about how they feel about themselves or I'm a bad person. It goes a long way in proving my point that some trans activists act like religious dogmatists who try to force others to accept their beliefs about god.

[u/MicahBlue]

It was a decent discussion. Not exactly stunning but decent. It was slightly better than Maher and Joe Rogan.

[u/ChadworthPuffington]

Yes, "Anti-racism/Wokeism" is definitely a new religion, and it's holy dogma is "white privilege".

Here is an excellent Prager U. video by Brandon Tatum, a black man, explaining why this religious dogma is bullshit - very appropriate for MLK day, I might add.

One of his points is that when white wokeists virtue-signal about having "white privilege" - that this does nothing to help him and his fellow blacks. All it does is make the white wokeist feel superior to his fellow whites - plus it makes black people feel angrier and impotent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18IVjGz9Gvk