Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

I’ve been reading McWhorter’s essays with delight for the past year. But I’m still surprised by how good and important this book is. It provides deep insights on all essential aspects of woke racism, and there are many.I’ve also been reading widely about wokeism for my own purposes, and this is the best single source I’ve found. I’d read some excerpts he’d released in advance and knew he interpreted Wokeism as a religion cast it in a strictly negative light.This worried me because I felt it would limit his audience unnecessarily. However, by the time I finished that chapter, I was convinced by the sheer number of parallel features that the approach was justified. The analogies with well-known religious features clarified his points and make them memorable. I do think he might have noted that the parallels were only with the least helpful parts of religion.The religious analogy has become quite popular, but be assured that McWhorter takes it deeper than anyone else. Still, the most helpful part for me did not arrive until p. 120 — the Elite’s mistake regarding outcomes and opportunities. (The Elite is his ironic name for the woke.)As he explains the mistake “if we don’t trace the problems to racism, then the only other possibility must be that black people are inherently deficient somehow.” Since the latter is false, all racial discrepancies are thought to be due to current racism. This is ridiculous because past racism can produce cultural problems that persist for decades after the racism is gone. This is a devastating mistake that has become ubiquitous — for example, it is absolutely central to Ibram Kendi’s Antiracism.I knew in theory, about the persistence of cultural problems, but McWhorter finally provided me with the concrete explanations I had been seeking, along with references I can now consult.I’m sure that everyone who reads the book will find their own gems that suit their needs as there are many to be found. He also includes useful recommendations about how to limit the problems caused by woke racism, a problem that is starting to tear apart American culture. Read this book and tell your friends.

Sydney M. WilliamsWoke Racism, John McWhorterNovember 19, 2021“The failure of so many thinkers to understand the difference between the effects of racismIn the past and racism in the present has strangled discussions about race for decades.” John McWhorter Woke Racism, 2021John McWhorter is an independent thinker – a rare (at risk of becoming extinct) individual in today’s academy. He is professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history. At age 56, with a PhD from Stanford, he has written almost two dozen books. In his spare time, he is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and an opinion columnist for The New York Times. He describes himself as a “cranky, liberal Democrat.” He is a black man who believes that affirmative action should be based on class, not race, and that woke racism hurts those it claims to help.In this book, he argues that woke racism represents a third wave of anti-racism, “…from people wishing they hadn’t missed the late 1960s.” This wave, he claims, has assumed the traits of a religion, with white privilege as original sin. The third wave “has taken it from the concrete political activism of Martin Luther King to the faith-based commitments of a Martin Luther.” He castigates the proselytizers of this religion, “The Elect,” as “pious, unempirical virtue signalers.” They resemble, in his words, early Christians who “thought of themselves as bearers of truth, in contrast to all other belief systems…” Like other such movements, they appeal “to an idealized past, a fantastical future, and an indelibly polluted present.” For the Elect, black people’s noble past is Africa, a glorified future is one without hate, but the present consists of oppressors and oppressed. He finds the Elect’s sanctimony insulting to blacks, who are led to believe that victimhood is destiny and success is due to special treatment. When conservative blacks deny victimhood, they are smeared by the Elect: Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor-elect Winsome Sears is a “white” supremacist and South Carolina’s Senator Tim Scott is an “Uncle Tom.”Mr. McWhorter does not deny the existence of racism. He writes: “Racism, in all its facets, is real, but since the late 1960s a contingent of black thinkers has tended to insist that things are as bad [today] as they were in 1940, leaving many black people who actually experienced Jim Crow a tad perplexed and even put off.” The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were positive steps toward racial equality, but they feed the argument “that black people could [no longer] have a basic pride in having come the whole way…” In the 1950s, black leaders criticized minstrel shows like Amos ‘n Andy for not showing successful black people Today, black leaders denigrate shows like Julia for not showing poverty and racism experienced by American blacks.Interracial marriages in 1970 represented less than one percent of all marriages in the United States. Today, according to a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, “about 17% of new marriages in the U.S. are interracial couples.” Blacks represent about 11% of college graduates today; fifty years ago, that number was less than five percent. These are facts ignored by the Elect. Ironically, colleges often teach black students a view of whites as oppressors. Mr. McWhorter quotes a Pew Research Center survey, which noted that nine percent of black high school students report experiencing racism regularly; “the number doubles among black college graduates to 17.5 percent.” “Half of black people with college degrees say that racism has made them fear for their safety; just a third of younger black students do.”It is the condescending attitude of the Elect toward blacks that troubles him most. He writes: “An enlightened America is supposed to hold a public figure accountable for her ideas. On the issue of the Revolutionary War, Hannah-Jones claim is simply false, but our current cultural etiquette requires pretending that isn’t true – because she is black.” The claim that America is systemically racist ignores societal changes over the past several decades. Is there further to go? Of course. Are those like me brought up in educated white families privileged relative to blacks brought up in poverty? Of course. But should the focus be on pretending there has been no change or celebrating the fact that racism has declined over the past fifty years? Privilege is less a factor of race and more a matter of class.McWhorter writes that if we could accept “three real-world efforts that combine political feasibility with effectiveness” that would address what ails America today: “There should be no war on drugs; society should get behind teaching everybody to read the right way; and we should make solid vocational training as easy to obtain as a college education.” In the book, he elaborates on all three. As to accusations that he is not “black enough:” “I know racism when I encounter it, even when it’s subtle. I have written about it often. And yet I still believe every word I am writing in this book.”Professor McWhorter is better educated than most of his critics who comprises the “Elect,” which gives this short book heft at a time when emotion outranks composure. “Reason,” he writes, “must prevail. This is the heart of the enlightenment. The abolitionists knew it; Civil Rights leaders knew it; today’s liberals know it. Only the Elect propose that rationality, where it discomfits them, is mere ‘whiteness’.”I encourage all my friends, especially those who consider themselves liberal Democrats, to read this book. Heather MacDonald, in City Journal, wrote words on science being viewed through the lens of “equity,” which apply to Mr. McWhorter’s book: “Step by step, we are shutting down the very processes of open inquiry and the cultivation of excellence that have freed humanity from so much unnecessary suffering.” Dispassionate discussion on race is being similarly treated. Anti-racism is racist, as it targets the group, not the individual. It is contrary to Martin Luther King’s plea that people should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Common sense and tolerance, with a focus on the person should be our guides regarding race, not the absolutism of religious puritanism. This is a powerful book.

If a black person says that some posture is betraying black americans you should listen why and how it is so. Very well written and explainedMade me think about other New Religions rising and their damage.

This book is a great piece of work, and I believe it will age like wine in the decades to come. This book is non-partisanship, and illuminates the novel religion harming a prosperous, vibrant future for all, regardless of ethnicity and stuff of that nature.You don't need a creational foundation to create a religion, it's a type of belief structure that John will walk you through. We aren't insane, and this fabulous panacea will be our bible that we connect ourselves with to push back against the Elect. The author is a bona fide intellectual, and his work clarified my disordered thoughts about this topic into an organized format.

Intelligent and perceptive, this book sets out the case woke beliefs are a religion just like any other faith. As such they present a threat to freedom of thought and liberal society. It's a must read from a courageous author who's not afraid to stand up to the Elite as he terms the proponents of this new religion and the silent majority who seem too cowed to speak up for themselves. Excellent.

Well written book…

In this book the term Woke Racism combines Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the culture of victimhood that they encourage. The author is addressing an American audience but there are lessons for those of us who live elsewhere. Notice the title is not ‘Woke Antiracism’ but ‘Woke Racism’ because that is what the book is about. The author is a humanist. He describes Woke Racism as a religion because it has some of the worst features of religion (such as disdain for evidence) without the better ones (such as humility and respect). The book’s main thesis is that Woke Racism is hypocritical, denigrates black people, and is just plain wrong. The author provides evidence to support this view. While woke activists seem to devote most of their energy to manufacturing resentment, this book takes a more constructive approach in that it offers three interesting ways in which blacks in America can be helped to improve their lot. Of course this won’t please the woke ‘antiracists’ because, as the author observes, the last thing they want are solutions which make them redundant. The author believes that the great majority of people who regard themselves as ‘woke’ are decent and well-meaning but have been duped by activists whose agenda is far more harmful than they realize. If they knew just how harmful most of them would recoil from this vindictive mob. The astonishing thing is how people in academia, of whom one would expect better, timidly bow down to the woke mob instead following their better judgement. The author sees similarities between this ominous trend and authoritarian regimes.The book starts with three examples of people who unfairly lost their jobs in 2020 because of statements that most people would find inoffensive but for which they were pilloried on social media simply because they were white. Of the accusers, the author asks “What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?” This book is a call to push back against woke activists. The author then gives a brief resumé of the history of antiracism in America:“First Wave Antiracism battled slavery and legalized segregation. Second Wave Antiracism, in the 1970s and ‘80s, battles racist attitudes and taught America that being racist is a moral flaw. Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.”So the current woke trend denigrates blacks by implying that they are fragile and have to be protected, and worse, that they should not be asked to meet the same standards of achievement and behavior as other groups. Does anyone expect blacks to be motivated by this? No, but it motivates the activists. Then he says:“People in positions of influence are regularly being chased from their posts because of claims that they are insufficiently antiracist. School boards across the country are forcing teachers and administrators to waste time on “antiracist” infusions into their curricula that make no more sense than anything proposed under China’s Cultural Revolution. Did you know that objectivity, being on time, and the written word are “white” things?”The author provides a table where a sample of 10 antiracist tenets (left column) are given with their corollaries (right column) to show their absurdity and self-contradiction. I shall take three rows from that table which are representative of the rest. Each tenet is followed by the ‘BUT’ that illustrates the activists’ lack of logic because they keep contradicting themselves:TENET: “Silence about racism is violence” BUT: “Elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.”TENET: “You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people” BUT: “You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.”TENET: “Show interest in multiculturalism”. BUT: “Do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it.”Notice the childishness of the demands. It’s like a three-year-old who wants the rules constantly changed to allow them to win.The author looks for a label for woke people other than “social justice warriors” or “the woke mob” which he regards as too dismissive. He takes his cue from the author and essayist Joseph Bottum who compares the woke to religious groups who consider themselves “the elected ones” in the eyes of God. McWhorter borrows this idea to call the woke the ‘Elect’ which is the label he uses throughout the book. Meaning they see themselves as above the rest of us. He even compares them to medieval Catholic Inquisitors who condemned heretics and he asks us to notice that the ‘Elect’: “do not see that they, too, are persecuting people for not adhering to their religion.”Chapters 3 and 4 expand on these themes with more examples of woke intolerance, but Chapter 5 takes the next step by advocating three policies that will actually help blacks. Here they are:1. Stop the war on drugs.2. Teach black children to read with the phonics method which works better for them.3. Advocate for vocational training instead of telling everyone they should go to college.The author gives his reasoning and it is roughly this: The first one will move thousands from prison into legal jobs. The second one will reduce illiteracy. The third one is a proven success (in countries like Germany, although he does not mention it). At least his solutions are more constructive than woke defeatism.In the final chapter he suggests how we can fight back:“The Elect, in terms of the combined efforts of their warriors and their quiet supporters, are today a mob, pure and simple. They are unreachable for the simple reason that they are arguing from religion rather than reason, trying to foist their dogma into the public square out of a misguided sense that they are the world’s first humans to find the Answer to Everything. ““The Elect must be othered. We must stop treating them as normal. Already, the term “woke” is used in derision . . . it isn’t enough. How do we step up with such a destructive current of cognitive interference in our way, wielded by people with power, and chilling us with the threat of social excommunication?”The author finishes with sample dialogues that we might use to engage the woke but I find them a bit tame and wish that the author had gone further. He is still in employment as a university professor so his opinions will make him a target for some activists. This may be why he takes an overly gentle tone throughout his book. I have read other books critical of woke ideas and they generally take a soft line as well, exposing the injustices and hypocrisy of woke activists but not demolishing woke ideas in the way they could and should. In the humble spirit of the book, let’s see what more can be said about woke racism.In the past we thought there were different races of humans. So when different ‘races’ showed disdain toward each other we called it racism. We know better now, that we are all one race. End of racism. But the woke want to recreate race by saying “race is a social construct”. This is the argument of subjectivists. You can’t argue with subjectivists but this book rejects that depressing idea and so should we.Migratory patterns have organized us into ethnic groups like Asians, Caucasians, Africans, American Indians, Aborigines. Within these there are tribes. Then there are the innumerable groups based on shared interest. All it means is that we humans have a natural affinity for people like ourselves. Our tribe, our language, our interests. We all do it and accept it when others do it too. It’s not ‘racism’ it’s groupism. But our group preferences can sometimes lead to unwise actions. Such as telling one tribe to massacre another (the Bible).Anyone who has not spent their life in a cave would be aware that numerous studies have shown that there are differences between ethnic groups. But these are only average differences. The important finding is that the differences within each group are far greater than the average differences between ethnic groups. Therefore a sports team is recruited on the basis of ability not ethnicity. Unless they like losing. And an HR department also selects candidates on ability not ethnicity. Unless they want their company’s share price to go down. We all ‘get this’.So what does the author mean by “Did you know that objectivity, being on time, and the written word are “white” things?”. This is one of the critical sentence in the book and it can be explained like this: knowing the proportion of blacks in the American population, and allowing for the statistics on the average abilities of this group, it still remains that blacks are under-represented in American universities, law schools and medical schools. And even when these places admit more blacks by lowering their academic barriers, the results (unsurprisingly) do not translate into proportionally more black graduates. Why? The hint is in the phrase “white things”. As a black professor teaching black students for many years, McWhorter tells us the issue is mainly a cultural one. He observes that black Americans are, generally, less fond of study. And that they ostracize other blacks who are fond of study for “acting white”. The author would like to see this change. He cares about blacks succeeding and wants this to happen. This means dropping the unhelpful racist idea of “acting white”. Against this you have the woke antiracists who have no solutions to offer except to tell blacks they should be more racist by blaming whites. That’s crazy.The absurd irony of all this is that ‘whites’ are the least ‘racist’ group. It is the only group which is ashamed of its slavery, ashamed of its segregation, has tried to atone for these and continually bends over backwards to show remorse and make amends. No other ethnic group is making anything like this effort. Perhaps the woke activists are unhappy about this. Seeing as the whites have slackened off on being ‘racist’, let’s make the blacks more ‘racist’ to keep things running nicely. The woke activists actually regard that as an achievement.If we need to see the worst effects of ‘racism’ then it is not to America we should look. Consider Nigeria (1967-1970), Uganda (1972), Cambodia (1975-1979), Somalia (1990-1992), Rwanda (1994), Sudan (1983-2005), Ethiopia (2020-2022). Those alone add up to millions expelled or slaughtered for being in the wrong tribe or group. Not a wonder many of them would like to emigrate to ‘racist’ America.Black Lives Matter. But if we say “Everyone’s Lives Matter”, which is more inclusive, we are told we are not being respectful. So inclusion is not so great after all, unless it is applied to the right people (who must be identified by our woke masters). American crime statistics have shown a startling demographic that varies little from year to year and the author brings it to our attention. That a black man is far more likely to be murdered by a black man than a white man (by a factor of about ten). Whites show a genuine outpouring of remorse every time a black is murdered by a white. In contrast the woke news media weaponize it and gleefully rake in the proceeds. The several blacks murdered by blacks on the same day go unnoticed. Presumably because no white cops were involved. The author wonders why blacks don’t care more about these absurdities. His book is trying to help, by using analyses and explanations, then solutions.Read the book. It is far better than my review.