Sam Harris speaks with John McWhorter about his new book “Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America.” They discuss how the “social justice” narrative of the Left has become a religion, how this new faith has taken over institutions, and what to do about it. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
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Today I'm speaking with John McWhorter.
John teaches linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University, and he's also a new contributor at the New York Times, and he's also a contributing editor at the Atlantic, and the host of the language podcast Lexicon Valley.
His writing has appeared everywhere.
And he's the author of over 20 books, but most importantly, he has written a new book titled Woke Racism, How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
This was a book he was just beginning to work on last time we spoke, and in today's episode, we get into his thesis.
We talk about how the social justice narrative on the left has become a new religion, and how this faith has taken over our institutions, and what to do about it.
Anyway, those of you who know him know that John is one of our most important voices on this topic, and those of you who don't yet know him are in for a treat.
And now I bring you John McWhorter.
I am back with John McWhorter.
John, thanks for joining me again.
My pleasure.
So a lot has happened since we last spoke.
I guess the first thing I just want to touch in passing is that you have been hired as a columnist for the New York Times, which I'm sure it was not a surprise to you, but it was a very pleasant surprise to many of us.
And it really is a measure of how highly esteemed you are that so many people viewed it as the single event that arrested the Grey Lady's slide into the abyss or postponed her suicide.
It's quite wonderful to see.
Is it a fig leaf for their unrepentant sinning on their part, or is it the sign of some kind of real course correction?
Well, you know, I actually was quite surprised because I am much less targeted and ambitious than I think a lot of people have reason to know.
And the last thing I expected when we spoke, or even 10 seconds before I got their email, was that the New York Times would ever want me on a regular basis.
And I haven't been, you know, I haven't been Blackball by them in any way i've had plenty of things to write for them but i never thought that anything would be regular as far as i can see.
The truth is that the more you dig into those hideous things that happen at times particularly in twenty twenty.
As with all of these things with what the people I call the elect, it's not the majority feeling at the times.
It's a certain cadre of people who exert a disproportionate effect because everybody's afraid of being called names.
Yeah.
And I think that that was going on a lot at the times and that then there was a kind of a A reckoning that's my sense of it and so i think that it's not just me i think other things will be happening and perhaps some of this is that we're coming out of the pandemic and that none of us saw the extremity that was coming.
But yeah i was quite surprised it isn't something that i cultivated and i did not walk around thinking of myself as times.
Material and it's been a it's been quite a challenge but you know better than being bored.
Yeah, well, it's great to see, and I just wish you the best of luck there.
Thank you.
We certainly need The Times, and we need you to have as prominent a platform as you can find, and that's certainly one of the best remaining in journalism.
And you know, also I want to inject very quickly that I have not felt at all muzzled by the time some people ask, nor when I say something leftish, am I trying to cater to them as people on social media seem to think I'm just saying the things that I really believe.
And so far I have no tales to tell.
It's all been working out very nicely.
Right.
Well, if your new book is any indication, you are as yet un-muzzled.
So, I should announce this book properly.
This is a book that I think we probably discussed in our last podcast because you were beginning to write it then.
Yeah.
And this is the book that the world has been waiting for.
This is the book that can be We're really taken in hand like a hammer and hurled at the increasingly grotesque edifice of moral confusion that is now looming over everything.
And that book is Woke Racism, How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.
And I must say, I just got the book and I read it over the last two days.
It's a book that can certainly be comfortably read in a day or two, which is really a strength.
I'm happy you did not write a 500-page book.
No tones, exactly.
I think you kept our friend Steven Pinker at some distance during this process because his books are famously doorstop-ish.
Let's start with this claim to be confronting a religion, which is a framing that some people will chafe at.
And I want to read something you say about midway through the book, which frames this nicely.
America's sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic.
What it is to educate a child.
What it is to foster justice.
What it is to express oneself properly.
And what it is to be a nation.
It's being refounded upon a religion, and I really don't think that overstates it.
I want us to deal at the outset with any concern that really you're strawmanning the situation or exaggerating it.
There's one more thing you say a few paragraphs down.
The problem is, is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherence of this religion, true to the very nature of religion, cannot be reasoned with.
They are, in this sense, medievals with lattes.
So, um, which is certainly amusing.
So there's two claims here.
There's the claim that we're dealing with a religion with all of the invidious irrationality implied.
I mean, so one problem with this framing possibly is that so many people think religion is a good thing and a necessary thing, and so what's wrong with having a religion?
And so this is not really the sense in which you're using it.
It's all of the unreasoning, dogmatic, intolerant, and the fake meaning derived of living in that way that you're targeting here.
But you're also saying that because it has gotten to this point, because it is in fact so uncoupled from real processes of reasoning, These people can't be argued with, and we just simply have to figure out how to get around them.
And so that's kind of a twin claim that I want you to address at the outset, because it's going to bump some people.
Yeah, it's a really interesting thing, because I think a lot of people are under the impression that the question we're supposed to be asking is, how can we reason with the kind of person who comes from the hyper-woke left and is asking us to do things that don't make any sense and even possibly hurt people?
How can we make them open to diversities of opinion?
How can we make them see that their ideas aren't the only legitimate ones?
In terms of our general discourse, and my claim really is, and this is not me beating my chest, this is not me speaking from frustration, it's me thinking very calmly.
People cannot be reasoned with on, for example, race, when it comes to issues like that, and I mean white people as much as black people, and the truth is, woke racism is written Mainly to white people.
This is one where I'm gonna make white people mad as opposed to black people.
Because they are the ones who are falling for this sort of thing and thinking of it as good.
But you can't reason with people on race with these issues any more than you can convince somebody that Jesus doesn't love them if they've come to believe that.
I think we waste energy supposing that quoting John Stuart Mill at these people and hoping we can have Some sort of situation where we meet them halfway.
It's simply not possible.
And I've tried to speak to enough of these people.
I've observed them.
There's nothing to be done.
And so the issue is, how do we exist gracefully among them?
How do we keep them from making us dance to their tune?
They won't change.
The world is going to be imperfect in that regard, as in so very many others.
The religious point It's gonna irritate a lot of people and I can understand that because for one, I am an atheist and that seems to have gotten around.
And I do have a certain impatience with religious belief and that seems to have gotten around and I think people can smell it on me.
But the truth is, it is more than ideology or it's very usefully referred to as something other than ideology.
This is something different from people who wouldn't let go of revering Stalin in Upper West Side living rooms in the 1930s.
And it's partly because of just the almost eerie formal parallels between the way these people think and fundamentalist Christianity, right down to the original sin and the white privilege being so similar.
And also, there is the fervency of it.
There's the sense that if you don't agree, it's not that you're gonna argue with somebody over your martini.
That was, you know, the Stalinists back in the 30s and 40s.
Lillian Hellman yelling up into your face.
That was one thing.
It's another thing, though, for people to treat people who don't think like them on these issues as heretics and feel that they can't be in the same room with them, that they need to lose their jobs, that people need to be defenestrated for not going along with the ideology.
That Is what we associate with one of the seamiest and saddest aspects of religion.
I actually think, okay, maybe if it were a religion that really were uplifting black people and people were doing this for reasons that didn't always follow logic from A to B to C but it worked, okay, that'd be fine.
The problem is that this is a shitty religion.
It's a really unfortunate religion that we're seeing emerge and the people in question genuinely don't know it.
We have to know it.
Yeah, yeah.
I've been using the term cult to convey all of the denigration of this style of thinking and organizing without confusing anyone for whom the term religion would be positively valenced.
But the one thing that cult loses, because cult is just for virtually everyone is intrinsically pejorative, What it loses that religion captures is, one, the fact that this is now so widespread that it really is, though it is a minority of true believers, we're talking about a lot of people.
It's a very large cult or a small religion.
There is something, we'll talk about the various flavors of insincerity that can be found here, but there is something sincere and pure about the psychological effect of being galvanized in this way.
I mean, people are really finding purpose in just throwing over everything in subservience to this new catechism.
It feels good.
You can see that it's giving them endorphins.
It's giving them a sense of purpose.
It gives them a sense of being ahead of the curve.
Don't we all like that?
It gives them a sense of belonging.
You have a crowd of people who think in this way.
It's a minority of people, but that means that you have a sense of being special.
And there's a glow about these people in many cases.
The religious part captures that.
Cult sounds menacing.
Cult, and you're thinking of something that went on in Guyana.
Where's with this you see people who are truly glowing with the idea that they understand that racism exists and they're gonna show that they understand that racism exists and they're also a little afraid of somebody who would accuse them of not knowing that racism exists and so there's just this warm shining glow in the meantime they're throwing black people under the bus in countless ways but it doesn't matter to them because
The point of this religion is very specifically to question power differentials, never mind doing anything about them, you question power differentials, and specifically when it comes to race, you show that you know that racism didn't end in 1966.
Period.
Stop.
And that's just not enough.
That is not worthy of the legacy of the civil rights movements that actually created change in lives for real people.
Yeah, this is one of the paradoxes here.
It's not enough.
It's in some ways completely ineffectual.
In fact, it doesn't even pretend to try to achieve anything and trying to be pragmatic is denigrated as, I think the term is solutionism.
White!
That's right, exactly.
But on the other hand, it is altogether too much in every other respect.
I mean, it's exaggerating the problem wherever it, in fact, finds it and pretends to find it in places where it doesn't exist and is making scapegoats of people who really are guilty of nothing, but just nothing beyond, in many cases, being slightly but just nothing beyond, in many cases, being slightly tone deaf or just out of step with these new norms of thought crime.
It is a dismaying thing because I get the feeling it's partly a symptom of modernity, where things were really, truly horrible for black people.
Nobody could afford to massage their sense of victimhood the way black people are encouraged to, the way white people are now encouraging us to do.
It would have felt inhuman for white people to do it, and it would have felt truly, you discouraging and dehumanizing for black people to do it.
You didn't exaggerate about what was already so bad.
Only when things get to the point that they're not perfect, but people are doing pretty darn well.
And that is certainly the case on race for just about everybody in this country over the past five decades.
Only then can you develop a recreational victimization complex where you exaggerate to the degree that we, all of us now, this is not just black people, this is America.
Educated America is taught to exaggerate.
That can only happen when things are pretty good, which means that there's an awful lot of mendacity going on.
And what bothers me is that part of this mendacity is due to how easy it is to be part of this religion.
And I know partly because when I was a teenager, Back in the seventies and you have insecurities when you're a teenager you're trying to get a sense of yourself you're trying to show off for my case showing off for girls etc.
You you you reach for things and it will surprise many people to know that i had a little spell where i was calling people and things racist just because it felt good because it would get a jump out of people.
Because I felt like I was kind of ahead of the curve, because I'd been told by other people that's what I was supposed to do.
It made me feel like I belonged.
It gave me a way of dismissing things that I sometimes found challenging.
If I hadn't done something well enough to get the top spot, it was very easy for me to say it was because of racism, rather than just that, you know, maybe I just wasn't as good at it as that white guy down there.
That was easy, and it was something that I was doing because I wasn't quite sure of myself.
I see grown-ups doing this, and I think to myself, what I was doing was rather recreational, it was therapeutic, it wasn't real.
I grew out of it, and I think a lot of people grow out of it, but we're being encouraged now to think of that State that larval state in one's psychology as something that you're supposed to stop at or return to as if to be an adult about such things specifically race and specifically after about 1966 is somehow a regression or a mistake or something that needs to be undone.
I don't think so.
I don't like being told that we're supposed to be immature and that's what a lot of this is.
Okay, so what would you say is the core tenet or tenets of this new religion?
The core tenet, and of course, as with, you know, many group movements, it's not that everybody could recite this chapter and verse, but the core tenet is, battling power differentials must be the core of all intellectual, artistic, and moral endeavor And those who are not committed to that being the core focus must be barred from public presence.
That is the basic idea.
And many people, if confronted with that, who are part of this religion, would be perplexed that anybody would question it.
They would think, oh yeah, of course, we're going to battle the perniciousness of disproportionate power.
But the problem is that is one of maybe about 200 things that a human being can be concerned with in this world we do need to watch out for power if i weren't speaking colorfully i'd say it's maybe one of about 10 things the idea that it should be at the very center of an entire academic career or the entire curriculum of a private school.
Or basically everything that Blue America has talked about since roughly June 2020.
That's a very fragile conceit, and frankly, it's not advanced.
I think a lot of its perpetrators think that this is advanced thinking, that we're taking things to a new level, when really what this is, is dumbing us all down.
It's turning our eyes away from things that are equally urgent, not to mention just equally interesting.
I really worry about younger people today growing up within this atmosphere where true curiosity is discouraged in favor of this religious pursuit disguised by the use of words like intersectionality and hegemony and social justice.
It's really returning us to roughly 1250 in France.
You know, what an intellectual was then.
There were only certain things you could intellect about.
You feel almost sorry for Thomas Aquinas, for example, because you wish that he could open up more with all of that brilliance.
We're now back to that.
Except because it's called intersectionality, it's supposed to be sophisticated.
Yeah, and there's so many contradictions at the heart of this.
So, for instance, let me just take this claim about power.
There's so many contexts now where power has effectively been flipped.
So to be a cisgendered white guy is not to have the power of status and the leverage of persuasion.
I was recently at a conference and was speaking to someone who worked for a very prominent media tech property that I won't name, but she was high up at the organization and she said to me, actually confided in me under the brackets of confidentiality, that her son was graduating college and
The idea of hiring him or anyone like him at this company now was unthinkable.
I mean, the kid would have to be the next Claude Shannon to be considered, right?
Exactly.
She openly said this to you privately.
She openly said this to me privately and openly said that this could not be divulged in any way that could reveal who or what I'm talking about.
And I would allege, I'm sure I've said something similar in previous podcasts, that there's probably not, this will sound like hyperbole, but I would bet a fair amount of money that it isn't, there's probably not a single desirable organization in this country now.
You know, company, educational institution, non-profit, where a black applicant, to be a student or to be an employee, would be at a disadvantage now.
Given equivalent qualifications, a black applicant would be positively advantaged in the top 10% of every organization, and extend this to media, journalism... That's safe to say.
Yeah, I can't think of any exception to that, definitely.
And the thing is, it's funny, I don't consider myself a conservative, but I find myself yearning for roughly 2010 these days.
It's not as if this new version of equity, where a white male is truly disadvantaged, it's not a matter of the controversy over affirmative action 25 and 30 years ago, where you can prove that white people weren't really disadvantaged But it really is the case that a white boy is going to be severely disadvantaged on the job market just because he is not a pretty color and hiring him is not anti-racist.
That is something new.
And I think really we had gotten to the point before, say, June 2020, where any civilized person, any civilized organization had its eye out for people who were not white men.
That message seemed to have gotten through to a major point, to the point that some white men were already complaining.
But what we're doing now is going back to what in 1966 was called tokenism.
That was considered one of the nastiest things you could say about a hiring policy, that it was tokenism.
Now suddenly that's archaic, and if you ask people what the difference is between now and the tokenism that they talked about on All in the Family and the Jeffersons, well, they look over your shoulder and they tell you it's complicated, but it's not.
We're going back to tokenism.
If there aren't enough black people, for example, qualified for a certain activity or a certain endeavor, then the idea is to qualify more black people for it, which will involve waiting a generation Until they exist and are ready to get jobs.
It also requires acknowledging, as I don't think any multicultural group of humans ever have until now, that there are different cultural predilections.
That it might be that there just aren't that many Black people who want to play the bassoon.
I would suspect that there aren't.
That doesn't mean that there aren't some, but probably there are very few Black people who grow up thinking, I'm going to take up This peculiar, heavy, expensive instrument that nobody seems to want to hear anyway.
I actually like the bassoon very much.
But no, now we're supposed to say that if there are very few black bassoonists, then it's because there's racism and that people don't like black people or black people don't have the resources to become bassoonists.
It might be that if black people had all the resources in the world, they might not choose that instrument.
Or, to avoid the cartoonishness of that example, they might not be as interested in classical music as, for example, many East Asian immigrants' kids are.
They might not be as interested.
Yes, there will be some black oboists, but maybe not very many.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
There's no room for acknowledging different cultural predilections, i.e.
diversity, in our current discussion.
And all of this is dumb, dumb logic.
It's a person coming along with a 10-year-old's vision of how things are supposed to go, but because they'll call you a racist on Twitter if you don't agree with them, you just bow down to their biddings.
This is not the way a mature society is supposed to operate.
We're going backwards.
It's frightening, isn't it?
Okay, well let's push into even more fraught territory than classical music, because obviously the disparities that people will ascribe to racism, systemic and otherwise, There are so many contradictions and sources of confusion here to untangle.
First, the caveat that perhaps I should have issued at the beginning, although You know, it truly should be superfluous.
The caveat is, obviously, we are coming from a history of truly odious racism that cannot be denied, and it is not in the lifetime of any person listening to this podcast where that has been effectively denied by sane, educated people, right?
I mean, we're climbing out of the darkness.
But we have climbed quite a ways.
And there's a source of confusion here that you point out in the book in various places, which is really worth highlighting, which is to say that even if it's quite clear that a current problem is due to racism in the past, you can draw a straight line between whatever it is, redlining and disparities in wealth between the white and black community, say.
It doesn't mean that the persistence of that problem, in this case wealth inequality, is due to racism in the present, right?
So it's kind of the origin story and the current conditions of maintenance that are easily confused.
And this relates to crime, it relates to disparities in education, disparities in health care or attitudes, you know, toward receiving health care.
Right?
So you can draw a line from the Tuskegee experiments to a certain attitude toward doctors and the medical establishment, which, you know, in the aftermath of Tuskegee would be quite understandable, which persists to this day.
But it doesn't mean that current attitudes that one can find in the black community, let's say toward vaccination, is due to actual racist policies or people in the medical establishment today.
That part is worth sorting out, but what would you say to someone that, and this is also something you address in the book, what would you say to someone that at this point in the conversation would want to pull the brakes and say, listen, This is a tempest in a teacup.
This is something that's happening on college campuses.
This is something that concerns over-educated people like yourselves.
You know, a white guy like me just doesn't like to be inconvenienced in having to pick his words carefully in conversations like this or in any other context.
In some sense, this is all a species of white privilege or elitism, and what should really be addressed is the looming problem on the other side of the circus here, which is real racism, a real burgeoning movement of something like white supremacy, you know, in the aftermath of Trump.
We've got QAnon and we've got people storming the Capitol, but we don't have our priorities straight.
Yeah, that's an interesting thing that I've heard from many people.
And the answer to that is, what institutions are those people taking over?
And I've noticed that there is a debate team trick where people then pretend that the question is, what institutions are people of conservative politics taking over?
And of course, you could talk about a little thing called the Supreme Court, etc.
But the issue is, what about these people, you know, with their fists bared and their Confederate flags, you know, running up the steps?
What institutions are they taking over there are more such people than there were ten minutes ago yes social media has a way of taking care of that but what are they spreading their tendrils into because what's going on.
On the left is that entire institutions of learning and thinking and justice and art.
are being turned completely upside down, and the idea that that doesn't matter, that that's just a bunch of white men complaining, is anti-intellectual, it's know-nothing, and it, frankly, is a symptom of the traditional anti-intellectualism of America, I think.
Nobody in France, at least publicly, would ask that question if institutions were being threatened in that way, and then there was also, say, you know, Le Pen and his friends on the right.
These things do matter.
And as far as the whole systemic racism argument, the idea that if you see a disparity, it's due to racism, that you apply the sentence, it's racism, is extremely elementary.
And until about 10 minutes ago, it was something that you heard from a kind of fringe left professor or community activist.
And you always knew that it was a little bit It was kind of a bloviation.
You didn't take it completely seriously.
And I think this was true of a great many people, black and white, including people left of center.
Everybody has always known what a grievous oversimplification that is of the way a society works.
And yet, when it comes to race, we're encouraged, especially today, to pretend that that makes sense and to anoint the people who put it forth as brilliant.
I remember Back in way back in 2010, for example, I remember talking to a black reporter.
This person was not and is not especially famous.
If I said the person's name, it wouldn't help, and I'm not going to give the name.
But we were talking about racism, and she was not a fan of mine.
She had been assigned to interview me, but I could tell that she thought of me as this Reactionary right-winger, as a lot of people like her tended to think back then more than they do now.
But we're keeping everything civil.
And at one point I asked her, so what is your evidence that racism is this hideous scar running through our society right now, to the extent that you're implying?
Yes, racism exists, but I want you to really tell me what you're talking about and what she said.
How calmly she said it was what really struck me.
She said, well, I live in a disadvantaged black neighborhood, and there's a school in it where almost every kid who goes there is white or South Asian.
And it's one of these elite public schools where you have to take a test to get in, etc.
And because of historical circumstances, it happens to be in what is now, surroundingly, a mostly brown neighborhood, mostly black neighborhoods.
She said, All the white kids, I see the white kids going in there every day, and I just say, that's racism.
You know it's racism.
Okay, but the sentence, it is racism, implies that she thinks that the reason is some sort of racism going on now, and I guess if you pumped her, which I didn't bother to because it makes people too angry, she would say that there's some sort of subtle racism on the part of white teachers that keeps black kids from doing well, but never mind that those black kids have had mostly black and Latino teachers for generations, and even if they didn't, What exactly is this subtle racism that would keep somebody from being able to take a test well?
And if you ask that question, people's eyes just roll.
Now, the reason that so many white kids are going to that school and the surrounding black kids are going to crummy public schools elsewhere in the neighborhood can be traced to aspects of racism that trace all the way back to the Civil War, certainly.
But those are things that happened almost all in the past, and therefore you can't stamp out that racism.
Now, many of the people who talk this way, if I say this, We'll say, oh yeah, we know.
But they don't act like they know, because they say, it's racism, pretending that English is a language that doesn't have tense.
You're supposed to look at that school and say, it's racism that caused that, which creates a whole different set of responses that one might have, other than standing there with a baleful expression and saying, that is racism, as if there's some racism that we need to battle right now.
The only reason that you allow that kind of lapse In logic that you would otherwise apply these are people who are quite capable of thinking from a to b to c is because it feels good.
To adopt that view of things and therefore fashion yourself as having a certain insight but it's not inside nothing.
Is that elementary that we actually value that actually gives you a challenge why in the world.
Are we accepting this notion that when it comes to black social history and only that topic, everything is as easy as ABC?
It's really infantilizing, and yet we're supposed to think of it as fierceness and sophistication.
It's a tragedy that's going on right now.
So, what are we to think about affirmative action?
There's really two forms of affirmative action.
Only one goes by that name, but there's a lowering of standards that you point out with respect to what passes as intellectual product at this moment.
If your skin is of the right color or if you're from the right victimized identity group, right?
So you can be flagrantly irrational and really contemptuous of reason, explicitly so, and get applauded for it if you're someone like Ibram Kendi.
I don't know if you ever saw Kendi asked to define racism I think it was at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
Sam, I tweeted that out because I consider that to be an emblematic minute of our times.
Yes.
I can only imagine what would have happened to me had I been on that stage, asked to define anything, having performed in that way.
You would have been eviscerated.
It's just unthinkable.
And yet, in that crowd, it's almost a spiritual accomplishment to be able to be satisfied with that kind of... Literally.
It's not even pablum.
It's not even tautology.
It really is just a fuck you to the standards of argumentation that would be applied to anyone else.
So it should be infuriating to people that it has this much...
...leverage in our culture now.
It's impossible to exaggerate.
Certainly in cities...
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