John McWhorter has announced his forthcoming book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

John McWhorter will have a book coming out later this year called Woke Racism.  It will summarize or expand upon his arguments that third-wave antiracism is, in his estimation, a pernicious civic religion.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-will-be-published-as-a

I first discovered his work through his understandably glowing review of Edward A Berlin's second edition biography of Scott Joplin, which found a spot in Ragtime and Sonata Forms last year.  I respectfully differed with McWhorter on how incompatible ragtime is a style with large-scale form and extended musical argument.  I was considering grad school in music before money constraints mooted that path so I am confident that on music I can disagree with McWhorter and know exactly what I'm writing about.  I admit to being a bit less sure on other topics, and because my lineage is half Native American and half white I realize as I get older that Native American perspectives can be substantially different from African American perspectives on the legacy of racism.  Knowing that the American Indian Probate Reform Act of 2004, signed into law by W, only became effective in 2007 means I know that American Indians were not given the legally recognized option to have a probate process until literally this century.  

But whether I land everywhere he does McWhorter has proven reliably interesting to read.  I will probably pick up his book when it comes along.  I have his book on hip hop somewhere around and was thinking of reading that alongside Holy Hip Hop in the City of Angels.  If you want to read it on Kindle it's free at the moment, literally.

Other recent posts by McWhorter are on the Leysenkoism of "the elect" (i.e. antiracists)

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/todays-elect-left-is-as-anti-science

...

The mendacity, the numbness to truth, is especially appalling coming along with the denial of science in their positions on climate change and so much else. The Republicans embrace The Big Lie, and to many it’s symptomatic of their being America’s main civic problem.

However, future historians will not see it that way. We live in an era of flabbergasting, shameless lie-mongering on both sides of the political aisle. On the left, this is especially clear in how baldly antiscientific the Elect left is, which is part of why their penchant for labelling their opponents “racists” is so dire – they make the rest of us pretend not to value science along with them.

It isn’t always clear how antithetical to scientific reasoning this fashionable “antiracist” thinking is. Its adherents express themselves with a handy kit of 20 or so fancy words, often with very particular meanings (equity, social justice), often have PhDs, and are culturally associated with enclaves of the educated such as universities, college towns, and cafes.

However, in the grand scheme of things, The Elect reason like Trofim Lysenko and for analogous reasons. Lysenko perverted the scientific endeavor under Stalin, dismissing the tenets of Darwinism and Mendelian genetics because they allowed too much of a role to individual actors, contrary to the focus of Communist ideology on history being shaped by grand, impersonal currents. Scientific research of a great many kinds was shattered in the Soviet Union for decades, and crop yields went down because of Lysenko’s insistence on crackpot notions of agricultural science.

* * *

Take the idea that microaggressions are a grinding problem for black Americans, exerting significant psychological damage upon us, and motivating claims that black students ought be exempt from certain scholastic demands as well as that entire programs and schools should be transformed into Antiracism Academies. A prime motivation of this, reported endlessly, is to relieve black people of the eternal harm that microaggressions condition. 

...

He has also written a piece arguing that the term "systemic racism" should be dispensed with.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/can-we-please-ditch-the-term-systemic

...

Our racial “reckoning” could use a reckoning about the term systemic racism. It is often used with an implication, a resonance, a tacit assumption, that to question is unthinkable. Uttered by a certain kind of person, often with a hint of emphasis or an eyeroll, we are to assume that the argumentation behind it has been long accomplished; the heavy lifting was taken care of long ago and we can now just decide what we’re going to do about this “racism” so clearly in our faces.

 

The problem is that this heavy lifting has not occurred. This usage of systemic racism is more rhetorical bludgeon than a simple term of reference. For all of the pungent redolence of the word racism in general when uttered by a certain kind of person, complete with the inherent threat to whites that they are racists to have anything to say but Amen, we must learn to listen past this theatrical aspect of the word and think for ourselves.

 

When we do, we see that all discrepancies between white and black are not due to “racism” of any kind, and that in many cases it is therefore senseless, and likely anti-black, to seek to undo the discrepancy – i.e. force “equity” – by tearing down the tasks, rules, or expectations involved in whatever the inequality manifests itself in. We must get past the idea that where black Americans are concerned, sociology is applesauce-easy. Black history is as complex as any history, and not just in the complexities of racism. Black history has been just plain complex.

 

And as you might guess, I dwell here on but one example. I could go on – and have, and will.

at book-length come October 2021.