Anti-racism advocates, in effect, are daring you to notice that some groups send their children to elite colleges and universities in outsized numbers compared to other groups due to the fact that their academic preparation is magnitudes higher and better and finer. They are daring you to declare such excellence to be an admirable achievement. One isn’t born knowing these things. One acquires such intellectual mastery through effort. Why are some youngsters acquiring these skills and others not? That is a very deep and interesting question, one which I am quite prepared to entertain. But the simple retort, “racism”, is laughable—as if such disparities have nothing to do with behavior, with cultural patterns, with what peer groups value, with how people spend their time, with what they identify as being critical to their own self-respect. Anyone actually believing such nonsense is a fool, I maintain.
Pretty much every paragraph in the essay is as powerful as that.
This essay needs to escape the confines of Quillette and find its way to readers of the NYT and into schools of education.
Or is that hopeless?
Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher. As such, our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it? How do we insulate people with good ideas from the influence of the Third Wave Antiracists’ liturgical concerns? How do we hold them off from influencing the education of our young people any more than they already have?
My interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matter. The question is “How can we can live graciously among them?” We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.
Of all the essays I have read about the new anti-racism, McWhorter’s is my current favorite.
These are two excellent articles, but they are both in the mode that average group differences are purely cultural. Yet as Charles Murray has shown in his recent book “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class”, differences in personality traits, abilities, and social behavior have a substantial genetic component and outside interventions are inherently constrained on the effects they can have on them. That does not mean that much can’t be gained by improving the culture, but it does mean that expecting that such differences could be altogether eliminated is wildly unrealistic.
It seems that at a minimum a significant portion of our elite will not accept disparities in racial outcomes, no matter their origin.
They also don’t wish to accept explanations for those disparities that are depressing, non-actionable, or which don’t seem to make measurable progress in a statistical sense over at lease the medium term (say a decade or two).
Nor do they seem to be willing to accept progress that is generalized to all races. Violence, for instance, is down greatly since the 1990s, but “gaps” between groups remain.
The desire to go back to a world where poor black performance can be explained by high bastardy rates and other dysfunctional behavior is probably over. Nobody wants to “blame the victim”, and even if you could solve some of those problems (how you would do it is never offered) its probably not going to get rid of racial gaps. If every single black father stuck around for every single black baby, would it change the number of blacks with high enough IQ to get into Harvard legitimately? Getting away from race, if every single family in Fishtown avoided divorce, would they “Learn to Code”?
It is of course a worthy cause to try and improve behavior in the ghetto or Fishtown on achievable goals like “get and stay married, don’t shoot each other”. But there doesn’t appear to be a serious actionable plan to do so on the table nor would doing so necessarily solve the problem The Elect are worried about. The “problem” they are trying to solve is reality itself.
So yes, White Fragility is “laughable”. But aren’t alternative explanations we had in the decades before the Great Awokening that ignore Murray are also “laughable”. So if you won’t grasp reality all one is left with is picking amongst a series of laughable alternatives. If you’re doing that, why not pick the warmest and fuzziest one that makes you the hero and the solution direct and obvious.
Spot on. Also believing these fairy tales about racism allow them to have a shibboleth to which all elites must pay lip service. If you don’t buy into this attitude, you can be dismissed as a nut or a plebe. Since the immediate consequences of bad decisions with regard to race aren’t felt by the elite but by the lower and the middle classes, the cultural elite can simultaneously claim leadership on behalf of the poor and NAMs while also destroying their proximate enemy — the traditional bourgeois of middle America. And of course, the cynical upper elite business leaders can be as racist or sexist as they wish while claiming virtue a la Harvey Weinstein.
I think McWhorter is missing something important here.
I’d need to look it up, but I have the sense that religious fervor comes and goes from people pretty frequently, especially at the extremes. People try it on like the latest fashion, proclaim their coolness, and then quietly let their mid-80s zipper covered jacket die slowly in their closet.
It’s true that rational argument isn’t going to sway many religious fundamentalists, but they do get swayed by other things. This runs the gamut from Televangelist scandals through the Catholic Church quietly abetting pedophiles for decades to even pretty “fundamentalist” muslims being aghast at ISIS adherents systematically raping people and burning them alive.
In the big picture, these guys are bad, and we don’t need to actually argue very hard about it. We just need to expose their bad actions, over and over, until eventually reasonable people tire of excusing them away.
On top of that, many religious people have generations of religious culture behind them and have their individual and familial identities tied up in that culture. Woke culture hasn’t been around long enough for most of its adherents to have been born in it and steeped in it all their lives. It may be easier for them to imagine shedding it without losing their identity. Or, on the other hand, they may be more like religious coverts who hold onto their new religion with more zeal than those who were born into it.
I think this analysis misses something by attempting to view the Church of Woke as an entirely new, distinct religion which has grown up independent of the old religions.
It may be true that this specific variety of “woke culture” in the precise forms we recognize today hasn’t been around long enough for most of its adherents to have been born in and steeped in it all their lives (although, given that the year is already 2021, I think this is already less true than we’d like to imagine, and is only becoming even less true every day), but the religious patterns we see playing out within present-day “woke culture” are certainly much, much older, and our culture at-large has been steeped in them since long before any of us here were around.
Even if most/all of the adherents to the Church of Woke might outwardly reject Christianity and/or religion in general, I think it is a mistake not to view it as yet another denomination of Puritanical Protestantism, just one that has fully embraced a secular, scientistic-materialist aesthetic.
>—” …the religious patterns we see playing out within present-day “woke culture” are certainly much, much older, and our culture at-large has been steeped in them since long before any of us here were around.”
Exactly right. The idea that we are all racists who need to confess and repent our racism is so obviously a modern variant of the Christian idea of original sin.
> I think it is a mistake not to view it as yet another denomination of Puritanical Protestantism
I don’t see how that’s helpful. Even for Puritans who believed in original sin, actually going out and burning witches at the stake ended up being pretty unpopular. Within a few years the state of Massachusetts was sufficiently embarrassed to provide monetary compensation to the witch trial victims. More generally, these witch hunts did what which hunts usually do, which is burn themselves out and destroy the credibility of those who lead them
It ended up as such, but it certainly didn’t start that way, and I believe subsequent experience shows that witch trials were the anomaly. Have there apologies and been monetary compensations to victims of the Prohibition? To defeated Southerners? I suspect that the situation with witch trials is anomalous because they happened at the very tail end of the period when educated people could accept witchcraft as real and not look ridiculous. Subsequent changes in the mental climate happened fast enough that victims and their relatives were still around to press claims, and the judges and divines were still around to feel foolish. Newton’s Principia was published in 1687, the trials were in 169x, and the exonerations and reversals occurred around 1710. By 1735, the prestige of witchcraft had fallen so low that the British Parliament passed an act making it a crime for a person to claim that any human being had magical powers or was guilty of practising witchcraft. Nothing similar seems to have happened with the other great Puritan causes.
“This essay needs to escape the confines of Quillette and find its way to readers of the NYT and into schools of education.”
I cannot tell if Arnold is being overly optimistic here or naive. It’s never going to happen…ever. (Yes, I very much appreciate Arnold’s optimism and that’s the story I’m going with).
The far left is 100% puritanical in their certainty and moral outrage. They don’t want debate, bargain or work towards reconciliation, particularly when they’ve got unlimited scarlet letters to dole out to the non-believers in conjunction with the mainstream media outlets, large corporations and academia.
The latest example: Woka Cola
https://twitter.com/drkarlynb/status/1362774562769879044?s=21
If you’ve seen their ads recently its not Portland vegans or Brooklyn hipsters they are marketing to.
We’ve got members of Congress trying to get Fox News canceled and all you can say is “moo!”
https://twitter.com/mtracey/status/1363961518421868548?s=21
Even CPAC practices cancel culture. Poor Mr Pharoh. Cancelled by haters!
Even Bill Gates practices cancel cultural. He wants you and your bovine flatulence gone by 2050. Just saw him yesterday on Fox News Sunday. Moo!
Pointing out that anti-racism is silly or hypocritical or false isn’t going to do anything. “Anti-racism” just is a justification for grabbing stuff from people and ensuring they can’t do anything to fight back. If you were, say, a Jew in medieval Russia, you were in some danger. The ruling ideology could be and had been used to justify grabbing your stuff (and killing you if you resist). But Orthodox Christianity wasn’t actually created in order to oppress the Jews and take their stuff, even if it could work in a pinch.
It’s more like having the Tatars attack your village. “Aha! You have ridden down and slaughtered our men, and yet you’d never do the same thing to a fellow steppe warrior. And you don’t even build impressive stone cathedrals, you sleep in yurts!” The horseman laughs at your babbling as he cuts your throat. Perhaps the word cope pops into his mind, if he’s the philosophical sort.
I dont get it.
What Loury and McWhorter inveigh against is exactly what Biden proudly and loudly ran on, promised, and is delivering. If the purported election results can be be believed, the USA had a choice between populist individualism and anti-populist race-hate apartheid. The people of the USA opted, or are at least willing to submit to, the latter and therefore deserve to get it good and hard and to reap the resulting whirlwind. You bought it, now take it home and live with it.
The two principles of the reigning anti-populist hegemony are (1) there is a pure elite that knows what is best for the country, and (2) nothing must prevent or restrain the elites from imposing their vision on the world. Race-hate and apartheid are just another guise of anti-populism. Until the USA can mature into a credible democracy this will be what we are stuck with.
The sad thing is – Loury and McWhorter probably voted for Biden, or at least did not vote for the opposing candidate.
No one is going to discuss the hilarious development that Number One Pick’s views on HBD are closer to asdf’s than to the handwaving dismissal of the rest of the commentariat?
John McWhorter’s incisive essay has many insights about psychology of the new anti-racism, but errs, substantively and rhetorically, in labelling the new anti-racism a religion, and its adherents The Elect.
The substantive error: The new anti-racism has features of religion, but also differs in crucial ways. A feature in common is irrefutability. Racial differences in social outcomes = irrefutable proof of racism. Any criticism of the new anti-racism = privilege acting out. Another feature in common is iconoclasm. However, a crucial difference is worldliness. The new anti-racism requires commitment to eliminate racial differences in social outcomes; and other worldly changes.
The rhetorical error: Labelling the new anti-racism “religion” will alienate secular adherents and adherents who happen also to be members of a formal religion. Why write off people by calling them as unpersuadable? Why alienate people by altercasting them as religious in a pejorative sense?
Patiently explain, by argument, evidence, good will — and by acknowledging good will wherever it be!
He just means ‘incorrigibly dogmatic’, and he thinks the audience will understand that negative slant on “religious”. The same zealous and fanatical social psychology and general mindset of adherents is immediately recognizable. Look up “mango cult” from China’s Cultural Revolution – totally insane, the worst were full of passionate intensity, and no deity needed. Really the more apt word is “Bolshevik”, but he doesn’t want to be mean.
That seems too charitable here. He says elsewhere: “The self-contradiction of these tenets is crucial, in revealing that Third Wave Antiracism is not a philosophy but a religion.”
If he views self-contradiction as a necessary component of any religion, then I think John Alcorn’s assessment is closer to the mark.
Sorry to say this, but, yes, it is hopeless.
Is it sociology or economics?
Sociology would say that there is a subculture that has “anti-racism” as its primary cultural attribute, the way that Mormons have a subculture or some sexual minorities. They exist as an alternative way of living.
I would add that bullying and mistreating and dominating (“cancelling”) people is great fun to many people, the way that bike gangs, soccer hooligans, drug cartels, Vandal invaders, or Klansmen have a grand time with murder, rape, and pillage. Anti-racists are just a new gang having fun. When Rome was sacked, I wonder if the Romans thought they deserved it.
Economics looks at incentives. How many “anti-racists” are making hard cold cash with their ideology? Good money to be made being a diversity officer in a corporation, being in HR departments running DEI programs, having diversity appointments on faculties, having special “studies” departments at schools. Until you take the money away, it will never change.
I wonder if the only effective recourse is to fight fire with fire. As indicated in the title to JW’s piece, we need to label this new dogmatism as “neoracism”. It is the next level of racism where we again judge people based upon the color of their skin.
Intellectual arguments will only work on the fringe. To fight the day-to-day, we need to call racism racism, or in this case neoracism. We need people to feel empowered to reject CRT for what it is.
The “Liberals/Democrats are the real racists” meme is at least 10 years old, if not more (further back it becomes difficult to search). It never sticks.
Agreed. But there is a problem with converting the complex pattern of reverse racism making up affirmative action, critical race theory, the myth of the oppressor and such. Our simple minds realize there is something different about the two.
The term racism just doesn’t translate well to these actions. Thus the need for a new but equally despised term which we can rally around. Those not on the woke side need to rally around an absolute refusal to participate in any way with neoracist policies or to neoracist individuals. Racism is the new ultimate sin in society. I suggest extending this sin to neoracism as well.
Otherwise, our society will crumble around an illogical idea being used to master control everyone in the eternal struggle of getting absolutely identical outcomes to widely diverse sets of behaviors and cultural norms.
Anyone actually believing such nonsense is a fool, I maintain.
Why does everyone (except John McWhorter) have to add adversarial insults to otherwise sound arguments nowadays? You don’t win a man over by calling him a fool for believing what he does. To accept your opinion, he now not only has to admit that you’re right, but that he’s a fool.
The greatest tragedy of the anti-racism movement is the removing of agency from Black Americans. The second greatest tragedy is that its ridiculousness emboldens the actual racists. Furthermore, it engenders anger and defensiveness in many White Americans. I believe that fomenting racial hostility is an unspoken goal of the new “anti-racists”. After all, they can point to this as evidence that they have been right all along.
In my opinion, the best way to combat the “anti-racists” is the same way the we combat the traditional racists, through leading our lives in a manner of mutual respect, community, and brotherhood.
And doing so makes us despicable racists. Thus the neoracists win and society crumbles.
We must simply wear our racist label with honor. Yes , Europeans and their descendants ,sorta, kinda , you know, invented the modern world. White supremacy works, Woka Cola should be promoting “ be less black”. 6% of the population is responsible for over 50% of violent crime. Do you want the best black brain surgeon, or the best brain surgeon ? The best Latina structural engineer, or the best structural engineer ?
Oh yes, but please don’t tell my multiracial grandchildren.
As a follower of Professor McWhorter for about many years, his writing on this topic has been consistent, yet he manages to wade his way through various moral entanglements in ever more precise ways. It is people like him and Professor Loury who make me feel that maybe I am sane after all. Many have come before them, but as a person who may have different political views than JM, it makes me appreciate him even more.
And in five years they will be incapable of finding a job and everyone finding wisdom in their views will be banned.
John McWhorter is among the most thoughtful and honest “Liberals” available today, if not the most. [ I’d be happy to hear about others.]
He has an almost religious hatred against Trump, but otherwise says many wise things and most often with far less Trump focus than most. He has long been talking with Glenn Loury on BloggingHeadsTV – which I seldom watch or listen to because I prefer transcripts.
John’s now also on substack:
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/coming-soon
And so far all of his stuff is free, tho he’s asking for subscriptions.
His book on The Elect will include lots of feedback, he’s already getting rid of “neoracism” and instead it will be THE THREAT TO A PROGRESSIVE AMERICA FROM ANTI-BLACK ANTIRACISTS
Serial excerpt No. 3: We can only move on in full awareness that this is a religion. Not “like” one — but an actual one.
His excerpts 1 & 2 are impressive, too.
His two main audiences are “his people”:
a) NY Times readers / NPR listeners, and
b) Blacks
Very important note on dumping “neoracist” by John:
I do not think of black people being racist against whites and white people being racist against blacks as equally reprehensible.
That hasn’t been my opinion, but he has a few arguments in favor of that, and more importantly that attitude avoids him being cancelled. So far. Glenn is in a far more vulnerable intellectual place, closer to my own views and anti- anti-Trump.
If Glenn does get into the NYT or NPR, it will likely be with John’s support. More likely, John will accept and paraphrase-echo some of Glenn’s ideas and those ideas will get into NYT thru John.
Glenn’s note is so true about racial differences, yet so anti-Politically Correct.
as if such disparities have nothing to do with behavior, with cultural patterns, with what peer groups value, with how people spend their time, with what they identify as being critical to their own self-respect.
We must all judge all individuals on their behavior, with expectations of good behavior for all. And equal punishments for equal violations of behavior norms.
The unequal political treatment by elite intellectuals, especially The Elect, is likely to show many working Blacks who got more improvement in their lives in the last 4 years as compared to the 8 years before, that The Elect are more interested in shaming other Whites than in actually helping real Blacks.
Universal Basic Income will be a disaster for many low wage worker’s self-respect.
It’s tragic in a way but I don’t think McWhorter’s protestations that Brahmins’ anti-racism hurts blacks will do them any good. Just as with some conservatives’ “liberals are the real racists” line, it doesn’t stick. It doesn’t stick because it misses the two core raison d’etres of Brahmin anti-racism: first, as a weapon against disloyal or potentially disloyal Vaisyas, and second, as a signaling mechanism that functions within the Brahmin society to prove loyalty and supply motivation and morale. There being no iron wall between Bs and Vs, these two purposes are also not cleanly distinguishable.
Here’s about 7 minutes where Arnold and I discussed Glenn Loury, Race, and BLM this past December when I interviewed him. It was really interesting to hear Arnold open up on this topic.
https://youtu.be/kc5zUdAVWtU?t=1943
I just published I short blog post echoing Loury’s sentiment. It includes some nice excerpts worth reading from Orlando Patterson, Loury and Walter Willieams, plus a short comparison of Canadian vs US Black experiences as an interesting lens for this audience.
https://joethinks.home.blog/2021/02/24/racial-inequality-in-societal-outcomes-culture-complex-causality/