#452 — Is Wokeness Finally Dead？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
194.61092
Summary
John McWhorter joins me to discuss his new book, Woke Racism, and why he thinks the culture war against white supremacy in academia is doomed to repeat itself. He also talks about why he doesn t think we should call it what it is: affirmative action.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
00:00:11.740
hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing
00:00:15.720
the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
00:00:20.060
Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore
00:00:26.240
it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're
00:00:30.200
doing here, please consider becoming one. I am here with John McWhorter. John, thanks for joining
00:00:39.200
me again. Of course. Good to be here. So it's been, I think it's been four years. I checked
00:00:43.380
my own website, and that's what it said to me. We spoke about your book, Woke Racism. Is that
00:00:49.020
when that came out? That would have been in 21. That's right. Or maybe early 22. Yeah.
00:00:53.880
And we first did it in 2020, didn't we? Yes. I think you've been on the podcast twice.
00:00:58.740
During the Troubles was our first one. Yeah. Well, how are the Troubles? Have the Troubles
00:01:03.120
continued? Where are we in your side of the culture war? Well, to tell you the truth, I
00:01:07.700
think that there was a peak Woke nationwide, which now looks blissfully quaint. Some of the
00:01:14.640
reasons for the defenestration, some of the double talk, what I wrote Woke Racism to be part
00:01:20.200
of the resistance against, that's another era. But from what I've seen, a lot of academia
00:01:26.140
and a lot of the arts are possibly ruined for the duration, because there's no way of uprooting
00:01:32.900
it from those places, especially since it emerged so much from there. And to tell you the truth,
00:01:38.140
that way of thinking... We got to double, hold on, we got to double click on that, or at least
00:01:42.080
make sure you get back to it. I want to know how the damage has been truly unrecoverable or
00:01:49.340
unrecoverable quickly, in your view. Oh, I would just say that especially if you are
00:01:54.320
an academic or a certain kind of journalist, and maybe an artist, you see yourself as having
00:01:59.040
a unique kind of insight for one thing. You think that you have discovered a truth rather than you
00:02:05.040
have an opinion, and you don't recognize yourself in that description. And you have authority to pass on
00:02:10.360
our way of thinking, not so much to undergrads, that gets exaggerated, but to graduate students
00:02:15.560
who then become professors themselves, as long as they aren't white men. And you have what you decide
00:02:22.100
a conference is going to be about. You have what you decide is going to be your cocktail party
00:02:26.480
conversation. And it gets passed along, and it's hard for me to see how that ideology won't continue
00:02:32.860
to affect hirings. And so already, there are people of that ideology with gray hair.
00:02:37.700
And I can't imagine what the pathway would be that would change it. Now, I also may lack imagination,
00:02:44.340
but being, frankly, around that culture, the sorts of things that I hear regularly said,
00:02:49.440
the sorts of assumptions, the assumptions about who gets hired and what kind of student is admitted
00:02:55.900
to a program, that's a tough one to see. I don't see how the toothpaste gets back into the tube.
00:03:00.980
So in society, in general, isn't DEI getting reamed out of all the institutions right now by
00:03:09.320
Officially, but from what I see, it's just going to go underground. The idea is not going to be that
00:03:14.220
we can't do these things. The idea is going to be, how can we do these sorts of things and keep up
00:03:18.440
the regime without calling it DEI, without being so overt about it? And if it really could be that,
00:03:25.720
you know, the Trump world, which I frankly have pitiless disregard for, but if it could be that
00:03:31.160
there's a socio-historical accident where their actions actually changed matters, that would make
00:03:36.680
sense to me. But I lack the imagination to see how it won't just make people change labels. Because
00:03:42.240
after all, DEI largely is a euphemism for affirmative action and racial preferences. That was a new way of
00:03:49.280
doing those sorts of things. So it'll just be the same stuff, old wine and new bottles. Maybe I am
00:03:54.660
pessimistic because it's a slate gray January day in Manhattan, but that's the way I've been
00:03:59.780
Well, what's your current vantage point on this? Are you still teaching at Columbia?
00:04:06.280
Are you part of the hiring machinery at all? Do you go to meetings where you make those decisions or...
00:04:10.740
Actually, no. Like if for some reason somebody was going to make a movie about me,
00:04:15.660
one of the fictions would be that I would be serving on tenure committees, et cetera. I actually have
00:04:20.100
a very eccentric position at Columbia where the linguistics program is tiny. It's not a
00:04:25.220
department. It's only two full-time people. And the two of us are ensconced within Slavic and largely
00:04:30.760
left alone. And so I am in very few meetings. I serve on very few committees. I lead a double life
00:04:36.720
as Columbia professor. And as you know, now writing for the New York Times. So I don't see it, but I
00:04:41.060
certainly hear about it and I certainly read about it. And I do have certain things that I'm asked to do
00:04:47.420
where you can, you can see what the climate is. Now, of course, there are contrarians. It's not
00:04:52.360
that every professor on campus is of that kind, but that kind of professor does have quite an
00:04:57.560
influence over departments. I think undergraduates are often more skeptical than we think, but it's
00:05:03.080
everything else but them, which is what the school is. There was recently an article that,
00:05:07.500
was it in Compact Magazine? That there was a, I read it. I forgot the author's name. James Haskins,
00:05:12.440
I think his name. Haskins was his last name. He was detailing the pattern of hiring, hiring,
00:05:17.240
going back, I don't know how many years, maybe, you know, 20 years or so, but in academia and in
00:05:22.840
media and in Hollywood. And I don't know, I'm sure there's been an effort to debunk some of those
00:05:28.420
numbers, but the pattern was detailed there, at least in the article, it was pretty stark with respect
00:05:34.780
to just how relentlessly white men in particular had been filtered against in all of these high
00:05:43.260
status areas. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to step on any toes, but I want to also say something real.
00:05:50.880
For example, another way that I moonlight is that I teach music humanities at Columbia,
00:05:57.520
and that's the course where, what it really is, is the old school music appreciation course,
00:06:02.580
the idea being that unless you have a very weird ear or a very weird experience, Beethoven at first,
00:06:08.940
other than da-da-da-da, it's boring. You're sitting there, the symphony goes on and on,
00:06:13.620
it's not as easy. So our job... It's less boring than Clockwork Orange, but it...
00:06:18.720
Yeah. And our job is to teach kids how to at least halfway appreciate a music that isn't always easy
00:06:26.540
to enjoy. And let's face it, for reasons we all understand, 99% of it was written by white men.
00:06:32.580
Until about 10 minutes ago. So I've been doing that course, and I therefore follow the music
00:06:38.660
teaching and musicology world to an extent. And there is a guy who I am sure is a nice person
00:06:44.500
in real life. His name is Yule, Philip Yule. And he is a black musicologist who has taken the music
00:06:51.880
study world by storm ever since, you know, the troubles in 2020 with this idea that music theory
00:06:59.200
is inherently racist. And I'm going to avoid getting into the weeds of why that idea doesn't
00:07:07.100
make sense, but it doesn't make any more sense than it sounds. And I think anybody who was exposed
00:07:11.320
to the article and then the book that he wrote on its basis fully understands that whatever else
00:07:16.140
his accomplishments are, from what I know, he speaks Russian fluently, et cetera. But this idea that
00:07:20.380
music theory is racist. It's just, it's absurd. It's frankly absurd.
00:07:24.860
Well, there are also people who said that math is racist, right?
00:07:27.500
Math too, and, you know, learning classical languages. But he's also saying that Beethoven
00:07:31.600
was just, you know, just okay. He was just, he was maybe above average, but that he's lionized too
00:07:37.240
much, you know, because he's white. This man is being treated like Ibram Kendi was five years ago.
00:07:42.180
You know, he speaks in one department after another with a certain kind of person sitting there
00:07:45.860
pretending that it makes sense. I hate to say that about somebody, but I had to choose one person.
00:07:50.180
And that sort of thing, you know, where there's this impulse to pretend that something like that
00:07:54.820
is true, which then is also affecting certain curricular decisions. That's what I have a hard
00:07:59.120
time seeing going away, but I might lack optimism. How do you feel?
00:08:03.200
Well, I really don't have a point of view or a practical, you know, insight into any of this. I just
00:08:10.160
have a lot of hope that we reached a tipping point some, you know, a couple of years ago. And
00:08:15.480
I remember probably the abject failure of Kamala Harris's attempt to become president with its
00:08:21.860
apotheosis being her inability to disavow her former support for taxpayer-funded gender reassignment
00:08:30.260
surgery for incarcerated illegal immigrants. That was the moment where I felt that the political
00:08:35.980
liability of these far-left shibboleths and the inability to just reason from some common sense
00:08:43.000
principles, I just felt that it became so excruciating and so unpragmatic politically that I
00:08:49.800
just have to hope that that was the high watermark and things are quickly recalibrating in millions of
00:08:57.220
brains and have been ever since. But I really don't have any direct, I certainly don't have any direct
00:09:02.120
insight within the ivory tower about this. I have a daughter who will be going to college,
00:09:06.580
you know, hopefully in a year, but I'm in the strange situation of not even knowing where I
00:09:13.640
would hope she would get in, given the noises I've just heard you make. So what's your view of that
00:09:20.140
moment for, I don't know how old your kids are, but where would you hope they go to get a proper
00:09:25.680
education in the liberal arts or anything at this moment? Well, it's coming. One of mine is 13.
00:09:32.980
I think certainly high woke has been shown that it can't get a significant amount of votes,
00:09:39.820
certainly that. But in terms of the culture, what I see, honestly, Sam, is that in 2020,
00:09:45.960
and it had been a few years before that, but peaks in 2020 and 2021, there is this ideology that is
00:09:51.040
based on resisting reason in place of this eternal battle against essentially whiteness and the idea
00:09:59.580
that it's okay to be punitive in order to make sure that everybody stands in line. No longer is
00:10:04.600
that happening on the basis of, say, black men and the police. But frankly, and what I did see up
00:10:10.440
close, unfortunately, because of what happened to Colombia and then spread, is that the way a certain
00:10:15.260
kind of person is given to talking about what Hamas did, and also the way a certain kind of person
00:10:20.460
is given to talking about trans issues when it comes especially to issues of surgery and sports.
00:10:26.180
There's that same fury, that same tribal punitive idea, the same absolute resistance to any facts
00:10:33.480
that someone tries to bring up. And so to me, it's kind of like I'm a little under the weather,
00:10:37.940
and so I'm grasping for the analogy that the thing with gophers, you keep on, you get rid of the
00:10:42.920
gopher in one hole, and then it comes up another hole. I don't know whether they actually do that,
00:10:46.340
but I feel like that same woke ideology is just now being applied to different issues,
00:10:51.280
and it will keep being applied to certain issues. It's just this flame that never quite goes out.
00:10:57.060
Well, what can we do? I mean, is there something for us to do that we haven't tried at this point?
00:11:02.720
I mean, you and in our various orbits, I mean, there are some dozens of people I could name,
00:11:08.420
I think, who, at least to my eye, have their heads screwed on straight in precisely the way
00:11:13.180
I think we do, and are outdoor cats sufficiently so as to resist the pressures of conformity
00:11:21.600
within media when talking about this kind of stuff. And we're in a position to badger our podcast
00:11:27.660
guests and write opinion pieces, and you're over there at the New York Times, you really are within
00:11:32.820
the castle in at least two respects, being at Columbia too. Is there anything you're not doing
00:11:41.540
in the dead of night you think maybe you should be doing, or if you had more allies you could be
00:11:48.280
doing? I consider it my duty to just repeat over and over that what all of these dust-ups have in
00:11:56.180
common is this rather peculiar idea that battling power differentials must be the central goal of any
00:12:05.380
kind of academic or artistic or judicial endeavor. It's that rather mundane-seeming thing that can take
00:12:12.180
you from the George Floyd protests to, you know, the kids all but supporting what Hamas did out of
00:12:18.780
an idea that that was the right thing to do because Israel is quote-unquote white and imposed upon the
00:12:24.380
region by whiteness. It's that again and again. And, you know, it has to be like Madison Avenue. You can't
00:12:29.300
say something once and expect there to be any kind of effect. You have to just keep at it for years and
00:12:33.520
years and years. I think my job is just to keep at that because the idea is to understand what the
00:12:38.540
general pattern is, not to shake your fist at the particulars of each one. I just see the same thing
00:12:43.000
happening over and over. And so there's that. And do I feel that I haven't done something? Maybe
00:12:47.380
in that. You even saw, if we're going to talk about how the sausage is made to an extent.
00:12:52.920
It took a while before I came on your show in 2020 because I always said I want to read my books. I have
00:12:57.720
other stuff to do. I don't feel like, you know, being on podcasts. And then I realized I'm becoming an
00:13:01.900
antique. It wasn't you personally. It was just I'm becoming an antique not to speak as well as to
00:13:06.720
write. There's a part of me that thinks that I should be the sort of person who, after woke racism,
00:13:11.980
you know, I had to stop the podcasting after a certain point. I told my publisher I cannot do
00:13:16.740
it again after about a hundred. Maybe I was supposed to do like 500 shows. Maybe I should have decided
00:13:22.240
that for the next few years, or maybe the next 20, I'm just going to do that message as much as I can
00:13:27.240
instead of side projects that I do. And instead of at least pretending that I'm still a linguist,
00:13:33.660
et cetera, sometimes I think that I'm not doing the job. But the problem, Sam, is that I crave
00:13:39.580
variety and I wrote woke racism in a fury. I continue to stand behind it, but I'm not the kind of person
00:13:46.420
who could just keep doing woke racism again and again and again for 20 years. And maybe that's,
00:13:51.800
I'm a little guilty about it, but not that guilty.
00:13:53.640
Yeah. I mean, I find it depressing that you even have to talk about race, frankly. I mean,
00:13:58.000
it just, it seems like a massive opportunity cost.
00:14:02.460
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that, that is a bit of a, an impediment. I mean, we, I know exactly what
00:14:07.000
you're talking about. There's something about having to cut through your own boredom with a topic
00:14:10.880
when it seems necessary to touch it again, and you can't even find anything new to say about it,
00:14:17.800
and life is short. And so, I mean, luckily I always think now with modern technology,
00:14:22.860
anything that you did is out there, it's accessible, but let's face it, after a while,
00:14:27.040
it starts falling to the bottom of the pile. So yeah, yeah. I, you know, I was happy that, um,
00:14:32.640
woke racism did its job. It's sold. And I don't sit down and write a book thinking,
00:14:37.900
I want this to make me lots of money and sell. I did that with one book on my book on profanity,
00:14:43.460
nine nasty words. I thought at the time, I want to have one hit. I'm going to keep writing books,
00:14:48.400
but I'm weird. There's only one thing I have to say where over a hundred thousand people are going
00:14:52.360
to read it. And it's going to be about cussing that word. I didn't know while I was writing that,
00:14:56.480
that 2020 was going to happen, but I wrote woke racism because I thought someone needs to say this.
00:15:01.680
It was one black, two middle-aged and three writes fast. That happened to be me. And I thought this
00:15:08.760
needs to be out there to say something. And to the extent, and I'm not bragging,
00:15:12.280
this will never happen to me again, but it went over a hundred, which is much more than I've ever
00:15:16.600
sold of a book. That means that people read it. And I think that I feel like that was part of doing
00:15:21.700
the job. And the book then just sits there and maybe gets lent. And I did the audio version,
00:15:26.060
but I know that technically I could have kept going and doing more.
00:15:29.860
Yeah. Yeah. Well, at the risk of boring you, but edifying our audience, what do you think we got
00:15:35.300
wrong in 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd's death? I mean, as a country, what, what, if there
00:15:42.400
were some massive error, we could have sidestepped culturally, how would you describe that error?
00:15:47.580
And what, what, what a sane dialogue have looked and sounded like at that point?
00:15:54.680
No, no, America. I mean, like, like, you know, the democratic party, the, you know, left of center,
00:15:59.300
intelligentsia, the elites, you know, the New York times.
00:16:01.740
You know, the thing that, you know, if I could wave a magic wand and change things, the hardest
00:16:06.540
thing is the idea that black men live in danger of being iced by a white cop who in a moment of
00:16:14.960
tension is affected by their inner racism to pull the trigger. And that is an item of faith among a
00:16:21.860
great many people of all levels of education. And it's an absolute third rail. And I have found that
00:16:27.780
again and again, in terms of where I could even publish what I just said in writing,
00:16:31.600
where anybody would read it, et cetera. And that's not a knock on the times because they have
00:16:36.080
let me politely say that now and then, but I write for them every week, but it was much harder before
00:16:41.820
that. And still it's, it's just that an orthodoxy that if George Floyd had been white, he would still
00:16:47.440
be alive despite the fact that a very similar thing had happened four years before to a very white guy
00:16:52.600
named Tony Timpa. And we never heard anything about it. That one is so hard to cut through no matter how
00:16:58.120
carefully you make the argument. And so George Floyd was a matter of people really thinking that
00:17:03.460
say me, maybe I'm getting a little old for it at 60, but that I walk around in a danger that you
00:17:09.280
don't because the cops are more likely to kill me. That's a myth. And you know, the numbers don't
00:17:14.760
support it. It really doesn't work in 2026. That certainly probably was true in 1950, but it's been a
00:17:21.580
while. We couldn't get past that in 2020 and 2021. And it created an awful lot of what I couldn't help
00:17:27.560
seeing as Kabuki, but I know a lot of people really did believe they were fighting against something
00:17:32.100
real. That was the worst thing. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think you can lay a lot of the blame
00:17:36.480
on social media and the algorithm and the ability to just amplify, you know, five, 10 awful videos that
00:17:44.940
get burned into people's minds indelibly and seem far more informative of reality than any statistics
00:17:54.100
you can throw at people for context. Right. So I think if you ask most people left of center,
00:18:01.320
how many innocent black men, how many unarmed black men were gunned down each year by cops in America,
00:18:09.720
you know, they'd be off by one or two orders of magnitude in their estimation. I mean, the few people
00:18:13.980
I've tried this on, it's always worked. I mean, the truth is around 10 or so, 10, 15, uh, I've heard
00:18:19.720
some of them think it's a thousand. Yeah. People think it's a thousand. I've heard people estimate
00:18:23.420
10,000, you know, I mean, it's three orders of magnitude. It's not funny. And yeah. So anyway,
00:18:29.620
this is a longer discussion that, that I've had several times, both with myself, uh, on my podcast
00:18:35.000
at great length and with other guests, um, I'm sure you and I ran around this track last time,
00:18:40.180
four years ago. You have a very long running discussion with your, your friend, Glenn Lowry,
00:18:45.480
who's been on the podcast here several times. Is there any daylight between you guys on, on, uh,
00:18:50.820
this or any kind of adjacent topic? How does your conversation with Glenn, uh, evolve here?
00:18:56.960
Glenn and I felt the exact same way about 20 and 21. Although Glenn gets madder at people who are
00:19:04.760
caught up in things like that than I do. I think one of my major themes is that you learn the language
00:19:10.020
you grow up hearing. And a lot of the people who were breaking windows, a lot of the people who
00:19:14.880
were, you know, refusing to give into sense about black men and the cops or so ready to believe that
00:19:21.560
somebody like Alton Blake was an angel. When in fact, he turned out to be a thug and Kamala Harris
00:19:26.000
is right at his bedside and things like that. And thug as in what he did. Was it Blake? Yes. And what
00:19:32.220
he did was, um, absolutely egregious and violent. And yet everybody believed the original story.
00:19:37.760
Glenn gets mad. Whereas I think I would think that way too, if I were caught up in their situation,
00:19:43.880
including even educated people who think that, you know, a thousand black men are gunned out
00:19:48.060
because that feels good. You're thinking if I believe that and refuse to squint and think about
00:19:53.900
how unlikely that is, then I am a good person because I am sticking up for battling differentials
00:19:59.840
of power and especially white power. So we have that. Of late, one thing that has opened up between him
00:20:06.500
and me is that he is much more, I hate to call it pro-Palestinian, but he condemns Israel more than
00:20:14.860
I found myself able to. And the one time that we had a discussion where at the end of it, you know,
00:20:19.240
after we went off, we were saying, are we okay? Was because of that. And it was Ta-Nehisi Coates' book
00:20:24.800
and us discussing it. And Glenn loved the book. And it used to be that he was the one that would
00:20:30.320
be cussing about Ta-Nehisi Coates. I missed that episode. We're going to have to see that.
00:20:33.700
You can't help it. It was a good one. But Glenn liked the book and frankly, I thought it was the
00:20:38.080
devil's spawn. And so we have kind of stopped talking about that. And also, and this is something
00:20:43.600
where I genuinely, I don't get it. And I would say that if Glenn went right here and we laughed
00:20:51.500
If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at
00:20:57.380
samharris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense
00:21:02.660
podcast. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can