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