I enjoyed Professor John McWhorter’s lectures on the history of language and was very interested to read what he had to write about the modern social justice burlesque known as anti-racism. He gets some things wrong considering he’s coming from a secular liberal background but the thesis as a whole is right on and it needs to be widely read.
McWhorter starts off asserting correctly that the modern anti-racism social justice campaign is a religion with all the characteristics from a clergy, a book(s) of prayer, and unquestionable truths. This is a bad thing to McWhorter, not because wokism is a false religion but that it’s a religion at all and that is clearly a no-no in the left-ish secular circles of academia.
As an orthodox Catholic, I disagree that all religion is wrong or in fact bad for society. It’s not even irrational as McWhorter assumes
All humans were created to worship God and if you reject the one true God, you inevitably fall into worshipping a false god, whether it be the god of money, science, or, in this case, racial justice. But I don’t need to agree with McWhorter about religion on the whole to absolutely agree that wokism is a religion and a disastrous one at that.
He has also succumbed to the illogic of race in general. As I’ve written, racism certainly exists, but race is fake. It’s really due to the fact that race is fake that racism is so sinister. That doesn’t bother me though because it’s pretty clear that McWhorter is not racist.
A curious thing about the book is that the author takes forever to get to the realization in the title: that modern anti-racism is actually racist itself. McWhorter mentions the idea that many have today that education is a “white thing” stems from the racism in the 1960s in which white teachers and classmates made blacks feel out of place following integration. That’s probably accurate but he is slow in making the connection to the neoliberals doing the exact same thing by labelling good time management or logic as “white things”. They are being racist. McWhorter obviously does make this point but not until the end. Wokism is a problem, not only because it’s a religion but because it’s a religion based in racism.
McWhorter’s suggestions of ending the war on drugs and promoting phonics and trade schools are great and will help a lot of people. Unfortunately, they won’t address the root problem of the illiberal neoracism: socialism, an America progenitor of which McWhorter ironically defends in Woodrow Wilson. It was Wilson who led the eugenics charge in the early 20th century that metastasized into Nazism in Germany decades later. Later, Wilson’s ideological grandson Lyndon Johnson laid the groundwork for the modern political paradigm in which blacks were dependent on the Democrats for their progressive socialism.
As Dinesh D’Souza wrote in Hillary’s America:
Johnson and his fellow Democrats cynically recognized that as long as blacks were beholden to them—as long as they stayed on the Democratic plantation—anyone who dissented from the progressive program could then be accused of being anti-black. Republicans who opposed progressivism could be charged with being racist! Blacks themselves—politically beholden to their providers—could be counted on to make these accusations. They could also be counted on to keep other blacks on the progressive plantation.
It was the Great Society programs that tore black families apart and set fatherless kids up for failure, decades before the war on drugs.
The race issue is being used for political ends again as Marxists camouflaged as social justice warriors use the disparities between blacks and whites that government exacerbated to usher in a communist utopia. That’s why the BLM demands of defunding police and dismantling the traditional family make no sense with regard to helping the black community. They’re not trying to help the black community. They’re using the struggles of blacks to overturn capitalism. The Elect, as McWhorter calls them, are the new useful idiots.
Thankfully McWhorter is speaking out against the useful idiots even if he’s unaware of the ultimate goal. Woke Racism is an engaging read that should expose the cult of social justice for what it is to many people.