Commentary on Political Economy

Saturday 22 January 2022

 How woke whites hurt black communities

In August 2020, a business professor from the University of Southern California gave a Zoom lecture in which he counselled his students against the overuse of filler words such as “um” or “you know”. The professor was teaching American and international Chinese students management communication skills, so he explained that in Mandarin, “the common (filler) word is ‘that, that that … In China, it might be na-ge, na-ge, na-ge.”


Anonymous black students accused the academic of racism and harming their mental health by using a Chinese word that sounded like the n-word. They called for him to be sacked.


Astoundingly, the professor was suspended while the university launched an investigation into his past student evaluations, checking for signs of cultural or racial insensitivity. None were found and he eventually resumed his job – though not the communications course he had been delivering for years. Meanwhile, news of the American students’ complaint reached China, where social media commenters said that punishing an academic for using a common Chinese word amounted to discrimination against Mandarin speakers.


American academic and author John McWhorter refers to this incident in his latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. As its provocative title suggests, McWhorter’s book is a scorching denunciation of the politically correct excesses that masquerade as anti-racism across many university campuses and public and private institutions in the 21st century.


“The ideology in question,’’ McWhorter writes, “is one under which white people calling themselves our saviours make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species and teach black people to revel in that status.’’ Picture: Getty

“The ideology in question,’’ McWhorter writes, “is one under which white people calling themselves our saviours make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species and teach black people to revel in that status.’’ Picture: Getty

He clearly supports that unfairly targeted USC professor. He quips that a black student who feels a Mandarin word that “sounds kind of like the N-word deprives him of his ‘peace and mental well-being’ urgently needs psychiatric counselling”.


McWhorter – who is African-American – does not merely expose the perverted logic and evangelical fervour of woke ideology; he also argues that white activists are endorsing reforms – such as moves to “defund the police” in high-crime African-American neighbourhoods – that can only harm those communities.


“The ideology in question,’’ he writes, “is one under which white people calling themselves our saviours make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species and teach black people to revel in that status.’’


This quote gives you some idea of McWhorter’s take-no-prisoners rhetorical style.


As a black intellectual, he expects to be dismissed as “traitorous” and “self-hating” by a “certain crowd” for writing his scathing polemic. But he reasons that white and black readers who have bought into “unempirical virtue signalling about race” will be more likely to accept a critique of the new ideology if it’s written by an African-American. “I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book,” he says.


In Woke Racism, he argues that a well-meaning but insidious form of anti-racism has hardened into a dogmatic religion that sees white privilege as the “original sin”, and weaponises cancel culture to end careers and undermine reputations. This religion, often policed by smug activists whom he calls the “Elect”, has anointed particular writers and thinkers – whose views are treated as sacrosanct – as their clergy.


“I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book,” McWhorter says.

“I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book,” McWhorter says.

Those authors include Robin DiAngelo – the white woman who penned the runaway bestseller White Fragility – and black writer Ibram Kendi, who has said it is impossible to be “not racist”. McWhorter argues DiAngelo’s book engages in “Orwellian poppycock” and he dismisses its central argument about white people being too “fragile” to admit their racial privilege: “ ‘You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t it just proves that you are’– is the logic of the sandbox.”


He does not deny the existence of white privilege “in terms of one’s sense of belonging”. After all, whites are the default category in western societies and see themselves reflected in authority figures. Nonetheless, he accuses the Elect of pushing “a catalogue of contradictions” and imposing an “ideological reign of terror” under which white people are meant to feel permanently tainted by their privilege, even if they are poor, while black people are meant to believe that “the essence of your life is oppression”.


He calls the new religion Third Wave Anti-Racism. While first wave anti-racism activists fought slavery and segregation, and second-wavers battled racist attitudes in the 1970s and 80s, third wave reformers insist that “racism is baked into the structure of society, white ‘complicity’ in living with it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them’’.


John McWhorter, author of Woke Racism. Picture: Holly McWhorter

John McWhorter, author of Woke Racism. Picture: Holly McWhorter

McWhorter is no card-carrying conservative. He is a respected linguist who teaches at Columbia University and has published more than 20 books including The Power of Babel – an account of how different languages evolved – and Losing the Race, in which he argued that racism’s most poisonous legacy was the defeatism that had infected black America.


He is that rarest of intellectuals – a bravely outspoken academic who cannot be easily classified as left or right-leaning. He is not against the “basic premise” of Black Lives Matter, sensible police reform or the left per se. “What happened to George Floyd was revolting,” he writes. Rather, he is “arguing against a particular strain of the left that has come to exert a grievous amount of influence over American institutions, to the point that we are beginning to accept as normal the kinds of language, policies and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction”.


Take The New York Times food writer who was suspended in 2020 for “passingly” criticising world-famous Asian celebrities Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo. The Anglo food writer was accused of “punching down” on non-white women. Yet as McWhorter points out, Kondo and Teigen have far more power and influence than the humble hack who was temporarily exiled from her workplace.


The new anti-racism, argues McWhorter, reaches well beyond those individuals whose careers are damaged by saying something the gatekeepers object to. He says it is costing “innocent people their jobs. It is colouring academic inquiry … and sometimes strangling it like kudzu.” In the US, the ideology has infiltrated school-parent meetings, American school and university curriculums and progressive media outlets such as National Public Radio.


The new-wave ideologues do not “genuinely care about the welfare of black people”, he argues, as they insist, for example, that Americans should turn a blind eye to “black kids getting jumped by other ones in school”. Here, he documents how, over the past decade, US teachers have been accused of racial bias because black male public school students from impoverished backgrounds were over-represented in suspension and expulsion statistics.


After the suspensions were labelled racist, under-reporting of violent incidents in schools grew. This led to higher tolerance of classroom disruption and compromised learning in public schools often dominated by non-white students. McWhorter concludes: “The Elect(’s) … religious commitment numbs them to the harm their view does to real children living their lives in the real world.’’


Meanwhile, he claims an ideology that characterises objectivity, command of the written word and punctuality as “white things” is being “foisted on” school districts across America. This is an unsettling development that deserves more attention than McWhorter gives it. It has parallels with how, in some remote Australian Aboriginal communities, western education has at times, been painted as a threat to traditional Indigenous culture, rather than as a tool of empowerment.


McWhorter also proposes practical solutions to entrenched African-American disadvantage, including ending the war on drugs that sees many black men jailed, thus rendering them permanently unemployable and leaving their children without father figures.

McWhorter also proposes practical solutions to entrenched African-American disadvantage, including ending the war on drugs that sees many black men jailed, thus rendering them permanently unemployable and leaving their children without father figures.

McWhorter is a contributor to The New York Times. Even so, he calls out the double standards inherent in the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize to black NYT journalist-turned-academic Nikole Hannah-Jones, despite her widely-attacked claim in the 1619 project that one of the “primary reasons” for the American War of Independence was the preservation of slavery.


He argues, as have prominent historians, that Hannah-Jones’s claim is “quite simply false” (It was later modified by the NYT). Nonetheless, says McWhorter, “our current cultural etiquette” requires that it be “broadcast” in educational materials. Among white woke folk, such reluctance to point out Hannah-Jones’s contentious interpretation of historical documents may “feel like a kind of courtesy, but it is actually patronisation”, he writes.


Interestingly, McWhorter is not the only writer of colour to have resonated strongly with readers by criticising woke posturing, double standards and hypocrisy. Woke Racism made The New York Times bestseller list when it was published late last year and an earlier 2021 release, Woke Inc by American-Indian entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, also surged to the top of the sales charts. Ramaswamy’s book offers an insider’s account of corporate America’s woke “scam”, including aggressively-marketed social justice measures which camouflage business practices that undermine human rights and employees’ rights.


Importantly, Woke Racism is not just a blistering takedown of the Elect’s soft bigotry. McWhorter also proposes practical solutions to entrenched African-American disadvantage, including ending the war on drugs that sees many black men jailed, thus rendering them permanently unemployable and leaving their children without father figures.


He also recommends teaching phonics rather than the whole-word method, as the former is more effective at turning children from impoverished homes into accomplished readers. Thirdly, he wants vocational training for African-Americans to be “as easy to obtain as a college education”. For many poor Americans, black and white, “attending four years of college is a tough, expensive and even unappealing proposition”, yet the debate about educational advancement often focuses solely on university admissions.


While McWhorter asserts that racism remains a real problem, he also contends that “most Americans’ racial attitudes have progressed massively beyond what they were a few decades ago”. Woke activists deny or “talk around” this reality. This should not surprise us, because as McWhorter points out in his courageous, illuminating and beautifully-written book, “with progress, the Elect lose their sense of purpose”.


Rosemary Neill is a senior writer for Review and the author of White Out: How Politics is Killing Black Australia


Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America


By John McWhorter

Portfolio books

201pp; $55.95

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