The Victimized Blackman: A Curated Persona? with John McWhorter

so i want to read a quick quote from from the introduction where you describe who your audience for this book is you have a few different categories one is the the proverbial npr listening new york times reading crowd that is thought of as white but is really you know multiracial and you and i would be as much a part of as we are of the black community and then you have you have the second second category which was so beautifully phrased that it gave me goosebumps to read and this is this is to black people who have fallen under the misimpression that for us only cries of weakness constitute a kind of strength and that for us only what makes us interesting what makes us matter is a curated persona as eternally victimized souls ever carrying and defined by the memories and injuries of our people across the four centuries behind us ever unrecognized ever misunderstood ever in assorted senses unpaid so this is this is not bad at all not bad at all john i don't i don't read my own stuff but yeah that's it's interesting to hear that read back well it it struck a chord with me because you know this the curated persona the sense that for us only this kind of pose of appropriating the grievances of the the last seven generations of our heritage and curating that into a persona gives you this you know in certain subcultures and more and more in the culture gives you this enormous power it's a it's from the buffet of potential personalities you can be you're choosing from as a young person this has emerged as a really attractive option for people of color and it has has a very sketchy relationship to the truth of any individual's life and in an even sketchier relationship to sort of common sense wisdom about how to be a well-adjusted person which is you know i've i've often said that much of what third wave anti-racism or or intersectionality uh suggests much of the wisdom it suggests about how to live your life is as if you asked a therapist who deals who deals with trauma all the advice they would give to somebody and then you just flip it on its head just like dwell as much as possible on things you cannot control on on the pain experienced by your ancestors on the way in which no matter how small the world has been unfair to you magnify them as much as possible and uh you know be as suspicious as possible of other people's motives assume the worst in people it's just so i that that's that really struck a chord with me and um so maybe you can speak to that a little bit you know the best source on that as i'm sure you know is greg lucianov and jonathan heights book the coddling of the american mind where they make the invaluable point it's never gotten around as much as it should have i mean this book in a way really should get around as much as guns germs and steel as much as thinking fast thinking slow these are really crucial ideas and what they're basically saying is that what we're taught is the right way to be a black person it's partly this kind of college campus language but especially black people and maybe latino people too is exactly what you would not learn from somebody who's trained in what cognitive health is and somehow it's different when you're talking about descendants of african slaves and you know i'm always reluctant to say that black people who settle into this way of thinking are seeking power because i consider it the last resort to accuse people of shifty motives they usually don't have them usually you can come up with some way of seeing them where they think they're doing good their innocence but they're just falling into something about which we must ask some questions but there is a power depending on what you call power and so for example if you're going to adopt that view of your own blackness and that of your fellow black people it's pretty easy to do academic work to get an academic job to engage in intellection these days because there exists a huge number of people who are ready to lap it up so you have a certain power there it's very easy to get a lot of attention writing from that perspective and even socially i remember when i was a teenager going through the usual you know kind of acne festooned insecurities and especially being you know a middle-class black kid in mostly white private schools and everybody should remember it is this isn't 1942 it's say 1980 which is kind of poised between our time and the old time i didn't know the old time but 1980 wasn't quite now either and so i i used to sometimes overdo it that will surprise many people i remember accusing this one white woman of not wanting me she she had shushed me because she said my voice was too loud and was supposed to be quiet studying time and i do have a loud voice but i was embarrassed because she did it in front of a girl i liked and so i said you're just doing this because i'm black and it had a certain power thank god she didn't break down crying or anything but i could tell it hurt her yeah but there was a part of me not long after that that thought is this the way i want to be a big dude for the rest of my life is is that the way i'm going to be special because it struck me as one small and two fake i knew that woman wasn't a bigot for reasons that are actually quite specific that i won't share and so yeah it's just it was absurd but that's not the way an awful lot of black people feel but yeah it's not psychologically i'm not going to say sound because then people are going to say i'm saying that black people are crazy it is not a psychologically healthy way to be and yet you and i are up against a whole crowd of people disproportionately represented in academia in the media who sincerely think that that staged pessimism is somehow a progressive way to be and perhaps the most interesting way to be a black person it doesn't work it doesn't work it needs to be called out yeah so this staged pessimism it was brought to my mind recently i was talking to my grandparents two weeks ago and they were just telling stories it was one of those priceless nights where they just tell all these stories that give a picture of a totally different world that was this world pretty recently in the 1950s and he was telling a story about you know being being in the army and being at it at an at a base in the south and going to this kind of party in town on the weekends they would go into town and they would dance with girls and and stuff probably to a jazz band and he was the he was the only black person at this particular base and he didn't want to be the only one not dancing with a girl but he knew he was there was just a zero percent chance of him being able to cross the color line and ask a white girl to dance so he had to he had to get his friends to bring my grandmother from dc out to virgin out to virginia so that he wouldn't be alone to dance and it was just a you know it was um my point in bringing up this particular story and it could be any story is it's so clear that so much has changed in this country you know i just think of what it's like for my grand my grand my grandfather to watch to come to one of my shows and watch me effortlessly have friends of all races and have no just have no hesitation to go up to a white girl and say hi and just how how different things are and this is you know this is this was one of my entry points to being fascinated by what the hell is going on with the race conversation particularly when i when i got to college which is why are people pretending that there hasn't been enormous progress what is the source of the false pretense that things are the same or even similar to how they were 30 years ago and certainly 60 years ago and you're asking the same question that led me to start pitching in on these things because i had the same experience and was just thinking all of these people many of them smarter than me are clearly looking at life as a black person in 1990 as if it was 30 years ago and they're wrong and yet they're clearly not crazy and they're not seeking any kind of power i thought what is it you know why is it that we see these things so differently and what i found was and this is still the case a lot of people would tell you that what you're referring to is clearly real but that we have to talk about here comes systemic racism and so they would say well look at the fact that in a school that requires a tough standardized test there are practically no black kids in it why is that especially when the school building is often in a brown neighborhood or they would say george floyd they would say it's the cops what i found in my i think it would surprise many people to know that before i wrote losing the race i did an informal but diligent kind of research really wanting to know why do you think that you know asking somebody who was very much in favor of pretending that o.j simpson was innocent saying what leads you to think kwame that was his name that the cops would have framed him in that particular way given the you know like really and listening and just listening to conversations and i found that it's the cause the main thing is the sense that the cops are black people's enemy if you got rid of that then a lot of these staged pessimistic attitudes would melt away within a generation or even half and so that's why i've tried to write as much as i can lately about the fact that what happened to george floyd was hideous but that there is also a major problem with the cops murdering white people and that if we talk about the fact that black men are murdered by cops disproportionately i think you favor and i understand this the explanation that for reasons we can talk about black men commit more crimes i tend to say that but also black men are disproportionately poor and poverty brings anybody into contact with the cops but the story that george floyd is it that that happens to him but with a white guy they would have just pushed the same person up against the wall and said some sharp words it's not true as we know from the fact that the very white tony timpa died under conditions very similar to george floyd's four years before and nobody ever heard about tony tempo beyond a few local news reports in texas at the time until last year when some people and i would venture to say i'm one of them started calling attention to that case but it was hardly hardly unusual but yeah a lot of it is is the cops but then the cops and abel's in the definition two of that word the whole temptation of the professional victim complex and that's where you get the idea that even people like you and me are walking around in eternal danger of being roughed up by the cops for no particular reason you know we're supposed to say that and i'm sure you have encountered i know you've encountered at columbia black men who claim that and acted out and i certainly have heard it and we both also know that that claim is vastly exaggerated but it's why it's so attractive the victim complex is attractive to any kind of human being it's very easy to fall into it in our current climate if you are a black person that current climate began in roughly 1966 and here we are still mired in it [Music] you

Channel: Coleman Hughes

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Id: F7qMxj8hGEY

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021