John McWhorter - Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

Im not one for long introductions. However, before we begin I would like to give the reader a sense of the lay of the land.

This book is not a call for people of a certain ideology to open up to the value of an open market of ideas, to understand the value of robust discussion, and to see the folly of defenestrating people for disagreeing with them. My assumption is that the people in question are largely unreachable by arguments of that kind.

Rather, this book is a call for the rest of us to understand that people of a certain ideology are attempting to transform this country on the basis of racism. They do not know it and, when apprised of it, cannot admit it. But the rest of us must.

My main aims will be:

1. To argue that this new ideology is actually a religion in all but name, and that this explains why something so destructive and incoherent is so attractive to so many good people.

2. To explain why so many black people are attracted to a religion that treats us as simpletons.

3. To show that this religion is actively harmful to black people despite being intended as unprecedentedly antiracist.

4. To show that a pragmatic, effective, liberal, and even Democratic-friendly agenda for rescuing black America need not be founded on the tenets of this new religion.

5. To suggest ways to lessen the grip of this new religion on our public culture.

I hope my observations will serve as one of many contributions to our debate over what constitutes social justice. My aim is not to merely pen a screed to stoke the flames among people who already agree with me. I want to reach those on the fence, guilted into attention by these ideologues passion and rhetoric but unable to disregard their true inner compass. I want them to commit with confidence to what I seek: helping make things better for real people.

We need not wonder what the basic objections to this book will be. I mischaracterize and/or disrespect religion. I am oversimplifying. The real problem is the militarized right wing. Im not black enough to write this book. Im not nice, and so on. I will get all of that out of the way as we go on, and then offer some genuine solutions. But first, what this book is not:

1. This book is not an argument against protest. I am not arguing against the basic premises of Black Lives Matter, although I have had my differences with some of its offshoot developments. I am not arguing that the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s would have been better off sticking to quiet negotiations. I am not arguing against the left. I am arguing against a particular strain of the left that has come to exert a grievous amount of influence over American institutions, to the point that we are beginning to accept as normal the kinds of language, policies, and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction.

2. I am not writing this book thinking of right-wing America as my audience. People of that world are welcome to listen in. But I write this book to two segments of the American populace. Both are what I consider to be my people, which is what worries me so much about what is going on.

   One is New York Timesreading, National Public Radiolistening people who have innocently fallen under the impression that pious, unempirical virtue signaling about race is a form of moral enlightenment and political activism, and ever teeter upon becoming card-carrying unintentional racists themselves. In this book I will often refer to these people as white, but they can be of any color, including mine. I am of this world. I read The New Yorker, I have two children, I saw Sideways. I loved both The Wire and Parks and Recreation.

   The other is black people who have innocently fallen under the misimpression that for us only, cries of weakness constitute a kind of strength, and that for us only, what makes us interesting, what makes us matter, is a curated persona as eternally victimized souls, ever carrying and defined by the memories and injuries of our people across the four centuries behind us, ever unrecognized, ever misunderstood, ever in assorted senses unpaid.

3. This is not merely a book of complaint. My goal is not to venture a misty statement that todays hyper-wokesters need to understand that a diversity of opinions is crucial to a healthy society. Citing John Stuart Mill at them serves no purpose; our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy by missing the futility of dialogue with them. Of one 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 this religion should be 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 liturgical concerns? How do we hold them off from influencing the education of our young people any more than they already have? How do we conduct socially gracious existences amid the necessity of engaging with their religious doctrine, presented with Cotton Mathers earnestness and impregnable insistence, when almost none of them will actually understand that they are making religious rather than secular arguments?