Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 552

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America," by John McWhorter.

I write this viscerally driven by the fact that the ideology in question is one under which white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special. I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination infecting my daughters’ sense of self. I can’t always be with them, and this anti-humanist ideology may seep into their school curriculum. I shudder at the thought: teachers with eyes shining at the prospect of showing their antiracism by filling my daughters’ heads with performance art instructing them that they are poster children rather than individuals. Ta-Nehisi Coates, in Between the World and Me, wanted to teach his son that America is set against him; I want to teach my kids the reality of their lives in the twenty-first, rather than the early to mid-twentieth, century. Lord forbid my daughters internalize a pathetic—yes, absolutely pathetic in all of the resonances of that word—sense that what makes them interesting is what other people think of them, or don’t. 

Many will nevertheless see me as traitorous in writing this book as a black person. They will not understand that I see myself as serving my race by writing it. One of the grimmest tragedies of how this perversion of sociopolitics makes us think (or not think) is that it will bar more than a few black readers from understanding that this book is calling for them to be treated with true dignity. However, they and everyone else should also know: I know quite well that white readers will be more likely to hear out views like this when they are written by a black person, and I consider it nothing less than my duty as a black person to write this book. 

A version of this book written by a white writer would be blithely dismissed as racist. I will be dismissed instead as self-hating by a certain crowd. But frankly, they won’t really mean it, and anyone who gets through the book will see that whatever traits I harbor, hating myself or being ashamed of being black is not one of them. And we shall move on.

The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous. The Elect do not ban people out of temper; they do it calmly, between sips of coffee as they surf Twitter, because they consider it a higher wisdom to burn witches. 

Not literally, but the sentiment is the same. The Elect are members of a religion, of a kind within which the dissenter is not just someone in disagreement but is a kind of environmental pollution. They are not to be among us. As Andrew Sullivan noted about his having to leave his post at New York magazine in 2020, it had gotten to the point that the Elect staffers found his very presence unbearable: 

They seem to believe, and this is increasingly the orthodoxy in mainstream media, that any writer not actively committed to critical theory in questions of race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity is actively, physically harming co-workers merely by existing in the same virtual space. 

A sad amount of ink has been spilled over the idea that such people must stop being so delicate, that they are fragile creatures deformed by helicopter parenting. The truth is that this is not real fragility, but a pose. The Elect do not feel frightened, much less physically injured, by columns, tweets, syllabi, symbols, and verbal expressions. They are posing as injured in order to demonstrate the “violence” of the views with which they disagree and thus prove that those views are evil. This use of the concept of violence takes a page from, first, the writings of Michel Foucault and, second, intelligent discussions among radical feminists in the 1980s and ’90s. But it retools them as a way of enforcing what earlier human societies knew as taboo. 

People who find working at the same organization as a thinker like Sullivan intolerable—and this was not in a physical office pool but in a largely virtual space during the quarantine!—are recapitulating those who expel the heretic by making a cross with their fingers. The religious fervor is absolutist, complete with a Manichaean sense of good versus evil.