Welcome to the making cents podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed. And we'll only be here in the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of The Making Sense podcast. You'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot-org there. You'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcast track along with other subscriber, only content.
Don't we don't run ads on the podcast and therefore, it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one today. I'm speaking with John McWhorter, John teaches Linguistics, American studies and music history at Columbia University. And he is also a new contributor at the New York Times. And he
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 the 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, you're in for a treat.
And 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 and 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 they say.
Angle event that arrested. The gray ladies slide into the abyss or postponed her suicide. It's quite wonderful to see is it a fig leaf for further unrepentant, sinning on their part? Or do you 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 blackballed by them in any way. I've had, you know, plenty of things to write for them, but I never thought that anything would be regular. And as far as I can see, the truth is that the more you dig, into those hideous, things that happen to the times, particularly in 2020, as with all of these things with what the people like all the elect. It's not the majority.
Looking at the times. It's a certain Cadre of people who exert an integer 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 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 want.
Walk around thinking of myself as X 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. Thank you, wait, 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
I say something leftish. Am I trying to cater to them? As real 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 unmuzzled, so so I should announce this book properly. This is a book that that I think we probably discussed in our last podcast because you were beginning to write them in. Yeah. And this
Is the book that the world has been waiting for. This is the book that can be really taken in hand, like a hammer and hurled at the increasingly grotesque edifice of moral confusion. There's no looming over everything and the that book is woke racism, how a new religion has betrayed Black America. And I must say, I really 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 good, which is really a strength. I I'm happy. You did not write a 500 page opens. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you. Hey, you, I think you kept our, our friend Steven Pinker at some distance during this process because his books are with his 500-foot famously door. Stop it, but let's start with this claim to be confronting a religion, which is it's 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, 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 is being re founded upon a religion and I really don't think that overstates it as I want us to deal at the outset with any concern that really your, your, this is your
Strawman in the situation or exaggerated? There's one more thing. You say a few paragraphs down. The problem is, is that on matters of societal procedure and priorities, the adherents of this religion, true to the very nature of religion cannot be reasoned with, they are in this sense, mid evils with lattes, so which I certainly am using. So, this two claims here. There's the claim that we're dealing with a religion.
With all of the the invidious irrationality implied. I mean, so that one problem with this framing possibly is it 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, the unreasoning dogmatic intolerant and the fake meaning. Derived of living in that way that you that you're targeting here.
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 that it 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 it's a really interesting thing because I think a lot of people are under the impression that the question were supposed to
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
Reasoned with on, for example, race when it comes to issues like that. And I mean, white people as much as black people in the truth is woke, racism is written mainly to white people. This is one where I'm going to 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 his good. But you can't reason with people on race with these issues anymore 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 quota.
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 that's 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 they won't change the world is going to be imperfect in that regard as in. So very many others. The religious point is going to 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 ideologies or it's very usefully referred to as something other than ideology. This is something different from people who wouldn't let go over, veering Stalin in Upper West Side, living rooms in the 1930s and 40s, and it's partly because of just the almost Eerie formal parallels, between
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 going to argue with somebody over your Martini. That was the stalinist. 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 see MIA, stand 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. Here, I've been using the term cult to convey all of the denigration of this style of thinking and organizing without confusing anyone who For Whom the term religion would be positively valence, but the one thing that cult loses, because of the occult is just for virtually everyone is intrinsically.
Pejorative what it loses that religion captures, is that the one the fact that this isn't this is now so widespread that it really is, though. It isn't a minority of True Believers. We're talking about a lot of people. That's a very large cult or a small religion. And 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 welcoming 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 and orphans. 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 Colton. 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 that they're going to 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. And in the meantime there.
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, and this is the one of the paradoxes here. It's
I don't know if it's in some ways, completely ineffectual. In fact, it doesn't even pretend to try to achieve anything and and trying to be pragmatic is denigrated. As I think, I think the term is solution isn't quite right. 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 that and pretends to find it in places where it doesn't exist and is making
In scapegoats of people who really are guilty of nothing, but just nothing Beyond, in many cases, being slightly tone, deaf, or just out of step with these new Norms of thoughtcrime.
Yeah. It's 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 in encouraging us to do. It would have felt inhuman for white people to do it and it would have felt truly in a 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?
In complex where you exaggerate to the degree that we all of us. Now, this is not just black people. This is America educated. America has 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 70s and you know, you have insecurities, when you're a teenager, you're trying to get a sense if
If you're trying to show off for my case, you know showing off for girls Etc. 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've been told by other people. That's what I was supposed to do. It felt my it made me feel like I belong. It gave me a way of dismissing things that I sometimes found challenging.
Aging 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 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 courage now to think of that state.
That larval state in ones. So 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. It's 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 tenant or tenets of this new
religion, the core tenant and of course, as with, you know, many group movements, it's not that everybody could recite this chapter and verse, but the core tenant is battling power differentials must be the core of all intellectual artistic and moral and ever and those who are not committed to that being.
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. Yeah, we're going to battle the pernicious. NE some of this proportionate 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
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 and 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 twelve, fifty in France. You know, what, an intellectual was. Then there are 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. He had there and there's so many contradictions at the heart of this. So for instance, we just just take this claim about power. There's so many contexts. Now we're 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 and what it would and wouldn't, you know, I was recently at a conference and was speaking to a someone who worked for a very prominent media attack property that I won't name, but she was high up in the organization and she said to me, you know actually confided in me under the brackets of confidentiality that you know sure her son was graduating college and the idea of hiring.
In him or anyone like him at this company? Now was Unthinkable. I mean, just the the kid would have to be the next. Claude, Shannon to be considered, right?
She opened, 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, nonprofit wear a black applicant to be a student or to be an employee would be at a disadvantage. Now, give an equivalent qualifications.
Black applicant would be positively advantage in, in, in the top 10% of every organization. And this is this extend this to Media
journalism. That's safe to say everywhere. Yeah. I can't think of any exception to the 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
Dentist. 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 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 tune 2020 where any civilized person any civilized organization.
I 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, you know, 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, in The Jeffersons, while they look over your shoulder, and they
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 than 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 at also requires acknowledging his, I don't think any Multicultural group of humans ever have until now that they're different cultural predilections that it might be.
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 a 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 they're very few black bassoonists, then it's because it's there's racism and that people don't like black people or black people don't have the resources to become bassoonist. It might be that if
People that all the resources in the world, they might not choose that instrument or to avoid the cartoonists 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 oboist, but maybe not very many and that there's nothing wrong with that. There's no room for acknowledging different. Cultural predilections IE diversity in our current discussion and all of this is dumb dumb lat.
Logic, it's a person coming along with a 10 year olds 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? Mmm?
Okay. Well, let's push into even more fraught territory than the classical music because obviously the disparities that people will ascribe to racism.
I systemic and otherwise exist, more or less everywhere in our society and its again. There are so many contradictions and sources of confusion here to untangle. You know, first the caveat that perhaps I should have issued at the beginning. Although, you know, truly should be Superfluous. The caveat is obviously, we are coming from a history of truly.
Odious racism, that it cannot be denied and it is not in the lifetime of any person listening to this podcast where that has been effectively denied by saying educated people, right? And 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 it current problem is due to racism in the past. You can draw a straight line between whatever it is redlining and you know, disparities in wealth between the white and black community. Say, it doesn't mean that the Persistence of that problem, in this case, wealth and equality is due to racism in the present, right? So, this is the kind of the origin story and the, and the current condition.
Ins of Maintenance that are easily confused and this relates to Crime. It relates to disparities in Education, Health disparities in healthcare or attitudes, you know toward receiving Healthcare, right? So you can you can draw a line from the Tuskegee experiments to a certain attitude toward doctors, and the medical establishment, which, you know, in the 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 addressed 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 is something that concerns over educated people like yourselves, you know, white guy like me just doesn't like to be inconvenienced and having to pick his words carefully in conversations like this or or in any other context. It's 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 queuing on and we've got people storming. The capital. 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 Baird 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 Arc are being turned completely upside down in the idea that that doesn't matter. That, that's just a bunch of
White men complaining is anti-intellectual. It's no 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, look pain 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 blow, VA ssion. 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
Everybody has always known what a grievous over simplification 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 are
Talking about racism and she was not a fan of mind. 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 what I want you to really tell me what you're talking about.
What she said and how calmly she said it was what really struck me. She said, well, I live in 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 at cetera and because for historical circumstances, that happens to be in what is now surrounding Lee a mostly Brown neighborhood? Mostly black neighborhoods. She said all the white kids you 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
Are you 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 will 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 tents. 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 in sight. 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? And there's really two forms of affirmative action that only one goes by that name, but there is a, there's a lowering of standards that you point out with respect to what passes as 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 your rash.
All and really contemptuous of Reason explicitly. So and get applauded for it. If you're someone like even candy. I don't think I've ever saw, Kandi asked to Define racism. I think he was a deacon Aspen ideas smile.
I tweeted, I tweeted that out because I consider that to be an complim attic minute of our times.
Yeah. I'm sorry. I can only imagine what would have happened to me. Had I been on that stage asked to Define anything.
Being performed in that way. It's just you would have been eviscerated. It's just Unthinkable. And yet this is 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. You know, it's not even technology. It's just it really is just a fuck you to the standards of argumentation. That would 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 we and certainly in cities. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation. You'll need to subscribe at Sam Harris dot-org. Once you do you'll get access to all full-length episodes of The Making Sense podcast along with other subscriber, only content including bonus episodes and a mas and the conversations. I've been having on the waking up app.
The making sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support and you can subscribe. Now at Sam Harris dot-org.
