Making Sense - Sam Harris - #452 — Is Wokeness Finally Dead？

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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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

00:03:07.400 Trumpist minions?

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

00:03:58.840 feeling lately.

00:03:59.780 Well, what's your current vantage point on this? Are you still teaching at Columbia?

00:04:03.900 Oh yeah, definitely. And, um...

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. 0.67

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 0.76

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 0.52

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 0.82

00:12:18.780 an idea that that was the right thing to do because Israel is quote-unquote white and imposed upon the 0.99

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 0.78

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.

00:14:00.740 Sometimes it feels that way to me.

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,

00:14:16.180 but you know, it's, um,

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?

00:15:51.680 You mean America or people like you and me?

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 0.69

00:16:14.960 tension is affected by their inner racism to pull the trigger. And that is an item of faith among a 0.59

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 0.93

00:19:21.560 somebody like Alton Blake was an angel. When in fact, he turned out to be a thug and Kamala Harris 0.95

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 0.94

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 1.00

00:19:59.840 of power and especially white power. So we have that. Of late, one thing that has opened up between him 0.89

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

00:20:48.800 about it. Glenn finds trouble.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - January 07, 2026

#452 — Is Wokeness Finally Dead？

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