How Anti-Racism Is Hurting Black America | John McWhorter | EP 241

I was raised by a mother who was a teacher of social work in the 1970s who actually taught a course called racism 101. My mother taught me what is today the woke line on how race works, and the things that she taught me were correct. To this day, I have never voted Republican. I am a Democrat, I am a liberal; I always say I am a black liberal of about 1960.

But I found, as I came of age, that as I analyzed the socio-political things happening around me that concerned race, that I didn't agree with what was supposed to be the default kinds of assumptions. I found that my assumptions, which I think would have endeared me thoroughly to the NAACP in 1960, were considered repulsive, inappropriate, naive, or conservative.

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Hello everyone, I'm pleased today to have with me Professor Dr. John McWhorter, who teaches linguistics, American studies, and music history at Columbia University. He is a contributing editor at The Atlantic magazine and hosts the language podcast Lexicon Valley. He's the author of over 20 books— that's a lot of books! Some on language and some on race, most recently the best-selling Nine Nasty Words, which was released in early 2021. And because one book a year isn't enough, he's coming out with a new one called Woke Racism: How a New Religion is Betraying Black America, that should cause a lot of trouble. That's out October 26th.

He has produced five courses on language for the Great Courses series and appears regularly with Glenn Lowry in a podcast about race issues, The Glenn Show. I first encountered Dr. McWhorter at an Aspen Ideas Festival gathering in 2018. He was being interviewed with Barry Weiss, and afterwards, he asked me a rather difficult question.

I'm very pleased to have you agree to talk to me today, and I’m very much looking forward to our conversation.

Me too, Jordan. So I'm going to start by revealing my ignorance. What I don't know about linguistics could fill a lot more books than you’ve written, even though you’ve written many. So I'm curious about why—if you could provide the watchers and listeners with a description of the field and its relevance—and also perhaps why you got interested in it, attracted by it enough to devote your life to it.

Linguistics is a cover term for an awful lot of perspectives, but it's not about translation and it's not about learning how to speak languages. It's about analyzing language as a scientific object. A lot of it is a lot like biology, and so we analyze how language changes, what are the physiological processes that allow us to produce language and allow us to understand it. How is it that children learn language? There's a certain magic that anybody can perceive in the way it happens with so little explicit tutelage. Linguists study that, and there are all sorts of other applications.

There is linguistics regarding how to teach a computer to understand and even produce language. There is language in the social sphere; language as part of a culture’s anthropology. What probably would surprise many people for very understandable reasons is that what I just mentioned is not my main focus. I can talk about those things on TV, so to speak, because the general public is very interested in those things, but I'm actually a language change, language contact nerd. What interests me is why a language is different now than it was 500 years ago and what happens when languages come together and create new languages and how that process operates.

But when you do linguistics in the media, you're expected to be kind of chief cook and bottle washer, and a lot of what is discussed in the media with bilinguals is what we call sociolinguistics, which is great stuff. There are people who really specialize in it. I'm just a popularizer of that particular subfield, but that’s a quick cook’s tour of what linguistics is and what in the world I’m doing in it.

And so what are your thoughts on that remarkable facility of children to learn language? I read—I think it was Russian psychologist Vygotsky—made a claim. He had this hypothesis he called the zone of proximal development, which is, I suppose, the psychological place you are when you're learning something new and are engrossed by it; something like the idea of flow. Vygotsky said that adults naturally speak to their children at a comprehension level that slightly exceeds their current grasp. They seem to do that automatically, even though that's an unbelievably complex thing to do, and that drags children along, you know, to further the development of their language.

This seems deep and instinctual. And what are your thoughts on propositions like Chomsky's, that there's something like a biological mechanism, a specialized biological mechanism that underlies our ability to learn language and to produce it? Is that also under your purview?

I wouldn't call it under my purview, but I find it very interesting to watch, kind of like you rubberneck at a car accident. The idea that there is a universal grammar that we're born with and that underlies all languages is utterly fascinating—only a true genius such as Chomsky could have come up with it. But the odd thing is that when you actually try to find what these universal grammar specifications are, they could plausibly be encoded in our genes and be subject to natural selection.

Frankly, since the 1960s, I think most people who practice that way of looking at things would be hard put to tell those who aren't in the club what has been discovered, what we know now that we didn't know then, or what would be useful for people in other fields to know. I find it to be a subfield of true geniuses treading water, and a lot of them would not want to hear that and they're going to say that I don't know enough about it to say it, but you know, frankly, I think I do, because I pay a lot more attention to what they do than many people might think, and I’m always wishing that more would come out of it than does.

And so I don't think it's that there is a grammar tree of some sort, even if encoded in some abstract way, that people are born with. The evidence of that wonderful notion simply hasn't borne out. But it's obvious that there is some sort of genetic specification for the acquisition of and the use of language, because if there weren't one, we wouldn't be the only species who do it. There's clearly something, but I hate to say whatever it is, is much less interesting than there being this very intricate and suspiciously computer science-like universal grammar in our brains.

Now, Vygotsky is always very interesting, and what he's getting at is that humans learn to talk when people around them are chattering and chattering away in such a way that, for example, an adult learner of the language finds absolutely confounding. You just listen to this stream of things going by, even if you've been carefully instructed in the language. It’s that grand nexus of frustration. So certainly acquisition is not teaching children word by word by word, but acquisition is also not children filling out some sort of sentence parsing grammar that they were born with. It’s something that’s much less precise than that.

Nevertheless, what’s amazing is how universally it works. You know, all cognitively normal human beings learn to speak fluidly, fluently, idiomatically, and without effort. Obviously that's programmed in some way. Well, you see one of the things that's quite remarkable if you look at people who are quite intellectually impaired—people who suffer from Down syndrome for example—they also pick up language extraordinarily well. And that's very remarkable.

So it's really something. There are autistic kids who have trouble with language, and autism, especially in its more profound forms, is an extremely serious neurological condition. But it is really remarkable that something as cognitively demanding as language, and specialized to human beings as it is, is so deeply embedded in us that even intellectual impairment doesn't in many cases interfere with its acquisition.

Yeah, it's amazing. It's clearly localized in certain ways, and Chomskyans have talked about a language organ. I don't think they necessarily mean that it's in any one place, but it's clear that there are certain parts of the brain where language is generated, where language ends up, even if those parts of the brain didn’t evolve for that purpose. They can be doing their job even if the person is quite impaired cognitively, which shows that language is a thing in some way. The question is exactly what that thing is. I think linguists are getting closer to that now than they ever have, because we're learning more.

I wonder—I have another scientific question, I guess—essentially, one of the psychologists that I had the good fortune to know at Harvard, whose name I unfortunately forget, was a social psychologist very interested in the idea of basic-level categorization, which was a concept I hadn't come across. One of the things he told me and had worked on was the notion that objects in the world—nameable objects in the world—pop out at us at a certain level of resolution. So, for example, a child will learn the very short word "cat," which is a pointer to an individual animal, rather than the more generic species level.

What would you say is perception? And I wonder if the grammar of language, in some sense, is that Chomsky was searching for, is some sense a secondary consequence of something more like a perceptual grammar? Because you know, one of the things AI researchers have been confounded by since the early 60s is the fact that the world is very, very difficult to perceive—much more difficult to perceive than we thought. And yet it arrays itself in front of us in all of these nameable and graspable objects. And so maybe the grammar is embedded—the linguistic grammar is embedded in the act of perception in some sense—and then there’s a linguistic scaffold on top of that.

I don't know if that’s an absurd idea, but of course there is labeling for one thing. Just the fact that after a while, a child learns that "cat" is not just the cat in the house, but has this concept of "cat" to which you apply the label "cat." That’s something that human language does to an extent that’s unprecedented anywhere in the animal kingdom; there’s a quantum leap. But then what you’re saying seems to be true. If my money were on it, I would say that one universal perceptual specification that there might actually be genetically set in our brains is a difference between roughly nouns, verbs, and qualities—what we call adjectives.

And so there are some things that are more likely to be labeled by a language as nouns, like a cat; there’s not going to be a language that has a verb that is "to be" like a cat or to "purr," etc. It's going to be a cat, and there are certain things that are more likely to be encoded as actions, and there are certain things that are more likely to be encoded as qualities, such as colors. Those three things are the bedrocks. Now, once you get to prepositions and adverbs and prefixes versus suffixes, all of that is up for grabs. Those things tend to be epiphenomenal upon the very basics. But yes, a universal grammar probably does entail, I think all linguists think there’s a difference between nouns and verbs; very few languages seem to contravene that—they're the exceptions to prove the rule. And then there’s also qualities, and then beyond that, there are many different schools of thought.

And you think that's fundamentally a separation between something like things and actions?

Yeah, that seems to be one of the very basic things, right down to certain brain structures that seem to be sensitive to it. There's a difference between an action and a thing and the brain seems to be ready for that. That might have something to do with what we might call a universal grammar.

So now, I read—and it was on Wikipedia, so that's another indication of my ignorance—that you're also known—forgive me if I get this wrong.

No, well fair enough. If you need to get informed about something quick, that’s a great source.

Yes, definitely. And isn’t that fantastic for all of us, that you're also known as a critic of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is really not their hypothesis at all, but it has come to be known by their names nonetheless. That hypothesis—correct me if I'm wrong—is in its strong form at least the notion that language structures thought to such a degree that speakers of different languages have qualitatively different thoughts in some sense. And that isn't something that sits particularly well for you. I think there are also some political and practical implications of that belief, and also the criticism of it. Is any of that off-base or no?

That's quite on base. The idea that the language that you speak gives you a certain pair of glasses that you see the world through is very, very attractive. I remember learning it when I was an undergraduate about the Hopi Native Americans, and it’s something that you want to be true. But the evidence just doesn't support it if you look at it in terms of lots of languages and what the implications of this would be.

Certainly language does influence thought in certain ways; it’s been shown, for example, in Russian. It’s hard for us to even imagine this unless we’re Russian: there’s no word for blue. They have a word for dark blue, they have a word for light blue; there is no word for just "blue." And it turns out that if you subject them to a highly artificial experiment, you can show that Russians do have a glimmer more sensitivity to the difference between dark and light blue than either you or I do. And the only reason for that would have to be the language; it’s not something about Russian culture and the color blue.

There are many things like that that are fascinating in themselves, but the way they’re shared with the public makes it seem as if you learn Italian, you're seeing the world in an Italian way because of the way the grammar works, because of the way the vocabulary chops up the world. And the problem with that is there are many languages that are very, very busy that mark every little jot and tittle of existence, and they tend to be spoken by small indigenous groups.

It’s very easy to see those small indigenous groups and to say, “Look at how sophisticated their language is; they're picking up on every little sparkle of experience in a way that, say, English—which is a relatively telegraphic language compared to those—doesn't." But the problem is then you have to look at languages like Mandarin Chinese, which is much more telegraphic than English in many ways. If you apply the grand old media Whorfian perspective to a language like Mandarin Chinese, the Chinese end up looking kind of dim because the language marks so little. Nobody wants it to go that way.

There was one unfortunate psychologist who actually tried to go that way quite innocently and is still being burned in effigy today, and he wrote the article during the Reagan administration. Because the truth is that if your language doesn't have a whole lot in it, if your language has a whole lot in it or somewhere in between, the evidence is that all human beings think in basically the same way except for these tiny shades of difference that a psychology experiment can breeze out, but that’s not life itself.

And so I think that people end up using Whorfianism as a way to be a Westerner who shows that they understand that non-Westerners are cognitively sophisticated, which is great, but the problem is the same thing ends up insulting half of the world's people.

Okay, so you touched on the political ramifications of the hypothesis. It seems in some sense a naively biologically naive hypothesis, because, I mean, we've only been speaking, evolutionarily speaking, for perhaps a couple of million years, which is a long time, but it's not that long given our 60 million year mammalian heritage, let’s say, and everything that came before that upon which our perceptual capabilities have been predicated.

And so the idea that language could affect something as basic, let's say, as color perception seems to me to be, on the face of it, quite absurd. I mean, I'm pretty convinced by the arguments, for example, that our capacity to distinguish between green and red is a consequence of our ancestry as fruit-eating primates, essentially.

Yes, exactly. And you can't mess around with something that deep by painting a surface of linguistic ability over the top of it, at least that’s how it seems to me.

Yeah, I think that's correct. And we all face, in many ways, regardless of where we are, the same sorts of problems. We have to get along with others, we have to eat, we have to quell our territory, let’s say. And so there’s a lot more that unites us perceptually and cognitively than there is that divides us.

There is! And if you really look at different languages, you see that you have to celebrate what unites us, rather than what divides us, on the pain of being really anti-scientific. There are languages of New Guinea, for example, where there doesn’t happen to be a difference between eating, drinking, and smoking in terms of the language. They have a word that we would translate roughly as “ingest,” and they use it for all those things. Based on the Whorfian analysis, they're not as sensitive to the difference between eating and drinking and smoking as we are. And so, you end up implying that they’re kind of coarse or that they're kind of crude, and if you look at the group themselves, they are as interested in food and varieties of foods and ways of cooking as we are.

You find that sort of thing over and over. So I wrote the Language Hoax because it really started to stick in my crawl that a lot of people end up believing this media kind of morphianism, as opposed to academic psychological warfare-ism, which is irrefragably true. I was bemused; I'm glad that book got around more than I expected, and it seems to now be just contributing a conside to an argument. There used to be only pro ones for the general public, so we’ll see how it all pans out.

So now, when you came to study linguistics, you were also extremely interested in something else. You teach American studies; you also teach music. What else—what element of music?

I teach—Columbia has its core curriculum where every student has to take certain courses in the kind of great books tradition. There's a music course for that, and everybody goes through one semester of the masterpieces of Western music. So what it really is, is good old-school “great” music—clapping for credit. It teaches you how to appreciate complex music, and the course, as you might imagine, is undergoing some changes in recent years, but it basically takes you from Gregorian chants through roughly Philip Glass, and many of us would add jazz at the end. So I had been doing that.

Yeah, are you interested in the musical element of language? Because it carries a lot of the emotional weight, right? So there’s just the linguistic end, if a semantic end let’s say, and you know perfectly well that you can structure the same sentence with two different intonations and mean exactly the opposite. You do that when you're being ironic. And so was your love of music—does that, what would you say, color your linguistic theorizing in any sense or is that a separate endeavor?

No, the music-loving me is a different person, and to the extent that there’s music as you’re putting it, that has not happened to be my area. The best person on that is Ray Jackendoff, who is somebody who actually has very good proposals against the Chomsky idea too. But you know, we should talk to him. I know about him; I should talk to him. Very important.

You see the sculpture behind me? This thing here?

Yes.

Yeah, I made that 30 years ago. It's called The Meaning of Music, and it was the consequence of about a year's meditation on what it was that music was doing to us and why we were so attracted. It’s such a remarkable phenomenon.

I have a weird thing.

Yeah, it is a weird thing. And I’ll just run my initial hypothesis by you. So music is often regarded as a non-representational art form. I had a great journalist up to my house this week, Rex Murphy, and he said to me—this was a quote, and I don't remember where he derived it from—that all art aspires to the condition of music. I've heard, which is a lovely phrase.

And so when I started to think about music, I was thinking about it because it was essentially an engaging experience that was immune from rational criticism. Not really. So it had this intrinsic meaning that could not be subverted by criticism. And so it struck me as something extraordinarily powerful.

I started to understand at that time that the world, in a really deep sense, is made out of nested patterns, and those patterns we perceive as objects and actions, but what they are, are patterns in space and time, and that music is actually the most representative form of art because it represents the harmonious interplay of patterns. And then we pattern ourselves to the music and find that what would you say existentially engaging in a very profound sense.

Anyways, that's my music theory.

Oh, without a doubt! And the easy version of that is a good beat because a good beat implies, in a primal sense, a certain predictability and therefore a certain truth. I think you can see in a lot of people a sense that a good beat, in the way you move your body to it, equals a kind of truth because of the consistency, and look how it unites us.

Yeah, and it brings people together. Classical music is harder because it's longer-lined, and so a lot of teaching people to appreciate classical music is to teach them how to hear it as something other than just this endless desultory string of whatever. There’s pattern in it too, and you don’t really appreciate it unless you just learn how to breathe and take in the longer pattern.

Yeah, so when you listen to a great classical piece, say a Bach concerto or something like that, how do you—do you have to listen to it multiple times before you understand it?

Definitely, yes. My rule is you don’t really know it until you’ve heard it about seven times if it's challenging music.

Yeah, okay, okay.

So I didn't know if that was my—I’m sure there are some musical super geniuses who don’t need that length of exposure to get it, but I don't get it.

Well, maybe two or three with some people, but to me, I want to drink it in. You know, I’d sit with headphones and a CD—and that’s becoming very old-fashioned, but that’s the only way that I can really do it.

Yeah, it’s amazing too, as you expose yourself continually to that pattern, and then you need a certain degree of familiarity with it, so it still retains some novelty. And then you really fall in love with it. And then if you listen to it a tremendous number of times, in some sense, you tend to exhaust it.

Although, the greater the piece of music—in my experience, and maybe this is a marker for depth and quality in music—the greater the piece of music, the longer it takes to exhaust it.

Yeah, and if it's a really great piece of music, it's never exhausted in my experience.

But yes, that's true. If it's an okay piece of music on the level of, say, a hot dog, you’ll need twenty, twenty-one, and then you’ve kind of gotten past that and you look twenty years later and you realize, “Wow, that fell out of the rotation,” and you sort of realize why, as a parent.

As opposed to the things that never fall out of the rotation, because it sounds so corny, but you’re always finding something different, or whatever you initially found, the feeling is such a kick; it’s such a mind-blow that you want it over and over. It becomes church.

There’s almost a religious story.

Yes, there is definitely that, and we could talk about that more too. One of the things I also find absolutely staggering about music is how it can have that long-lasting and gripping form in such an endless variety of genres, and how that greatness and depth can manifest itself in each of those genres, regardless of what the genre is.

And something that’s very difficult to understand, something as simple often—and say as country and western music, something like Hank Williams, which is very straightforward in some ways, still to me has that quality of inexhaustibility.

And it’s so, yeah, what amazes me—and if I were more profound about these things or more interested in bringing different parts of myself together—I would study harmony, because melody is one thing. You know, melody is a lullaby.

Any human being is given that rhythm, especially consistent rhythm. I’m sure that we are genetically programmed by accident to appreciate that. Harmony is a funny thing, and I think that people who, for one reason or another, either training or temperament or both, feel harmony and get harmony think that all human beings hear harmony the way they do.

No, it’s a very odd kind of ear, and I find myself wondering what is it about major and minor and then everything else. And the fact that if you're a music listener, you associate those things with certain feelings, you often find that other people don’t have the same feelings about the ones that you do.

But yeah, it’s a weird thing, this thing called music. You associate a certain combination of notes with nostalgia—for me, the flat fifth means it reminds me of the past.

Why? Very interesting things. Why would it remind you of anything when it’s something that didn’t exist when Homo sapiens emerged? Fascinating stuff.

I had a master's student when I taught at Harvard who did her thesis on the meaning of music from a biological perspective. One of the things she came across—and I don’t remember whose thoughts these were—was that deep bass notes remind us of large animals, and high notes remind us of small animals. This is obviously a partial explanation, right?

Obviously, and that more major tones are more maternal and comforting, and minor tones are more discordant and reminiscent of emotional upset. Something about that feels right; it’s so...

And that ties in in part to the emotional aspect of language itself and all those things that we pick up. But yes, but then the question is, you know, we “quote unquote” Europeans—I know it’s weird for me to say that, but I think people understand—we hear major and minor and low and high that way. I wonder if someone, an indigenous person who had never heard music like that before—let’s go to Irian Jaya, it’s not called that anymore, but the western half—somebody from there, I wonder if they would hear it that way.

And I can make a guess: the low notes being associated with the elephant and the high notes being associated with the hummingbird; that’s probably universal because that's true about language. “Oh” is big; “e” is small. That’s true.

However, the other parts, I wonder if all of that is just arbitrary European stuff that we pick up, you know, from starting from listening to Mother Goose songs and then it going on. I’m sure this has been studied, and I have not nosed into what those people were looking at.

Yes, probably someone knows this, and we're just ignorant about it.

But so—that's all fascinating. American studies—now you also were educated in American studies, and you teach American studies, so quite a wide range of teaching interests—so tell me about American studies and what you're teaching and how you got captivated by it.

Well, you know, honestly, American studies to me was a backdoor thing that I became passingly interested in in the ‘80s after I got my BA, because I thought of it as a way of studying in a systematic way American popular culture of the late 19th through late 20th centuries, which obsesses me to this day. I’m a huge fan of the movies, the radio shows, the comic strips, the cartoons, the music; I could get along living in 1936, hopefully, you know, white, but living in 1936 and knowing everything that was going on better than I think many people could, just because I enjoy—it's not that I think 1936 was better, but I just like that stuff.

And if you do American studies, you get to read books by historians and philosophers and film scholars about those things. I got a master’s degree in it at NYU at a time when the program in American studies for most of the people in it was kind of a night school. And the truth is, I sense where you might very understandably go, which is that I have the master’s in American studies and that informs why I’m a media commentator about race issues these days. But actually, no, the American studies degree I wrote a master’s thesis on Scott Joplin’s opera treatment and then left that behind and got into linguistics, which had no relationship to any of that at all.

Linguistics I found was where I needed to live as opposed to American studies, where I got to read an awful lot of great books, and I don’t regret it. I really enjoyed it, but it was really just a passing phase when I was in my early 20s.

Yeah, I did wonder about that, that relationship, and thought that there might be some connection. What is it about the mid-30s that fascinates you so much?

It first looked good. And it was—it was a terrible classist, racist, sexist time. Everybody’s smoking cigarettes. It’s not that I think that it was somehow better, but if you think about it, the 1930s—the fashions, the people looked good, their hair looked good, the cars looked good. The music hit a really sweet spot in terms of how a swing band sounded or even before that an early jazz band sounded.

Then there was an awful lot of great—I love literature. The thirties jazz—it’s the third is a great era. The ‘40s I kind of lose it, but the ‘30s was just a great feeling. I just love to walk around in it for seven days and then come back.

So, alright, let me ask you some more questions. So, as you developed your career as an early professor, you stopped being an assistant professor. And you were at—sorry, it’s just escaped my mind—you where were you first as a professor? Cornell or no? And then you went to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank?

I did, yeah.

Okay, so obviously that requires some explanation. And so one of the things I kind of wonder about, maybe you could shed some light on is what attracted you to conservatism to the degree that you were attracted? And what is conservatism now? If I’ve been trying to puzzle this out psychologically, I’m not thinking about it so much politically—because you know I think there’s room for liberal thought and for conservative thought and that the dialogue between those two is absolutely necessary—but what was it about conservatism that attracted you? Because it’s not an obvious choice.

No, no. It was really a matter of an eccentricity about the way race has been discussed in this country in the mainstream for a very long time. I was raised by a mother who was a teacher of social work in the 1970s who actually taught a course called Racism 101. My mother taught me what is today the woke line on how race works, and the things that she taught me were correct. I have to this day never voted Republican. I am a Democrat; I am a liberal. I always say I am a black liberal of about 1960.

But I found, as I came of age, that as I analyzed the socio-political things happening around me that concerned race, that I didn’t agree with what was supposed to be the default kinds of assumptions. I found that my assumptions, which I think would have endeared me thoroughly to the NAACP in 1960, were considered repulsive, inappropriate, naive, or conservative.

And so the Manhattan Institute, I didn’t choose it. A lot of people think that I’m much more self-directed than I am. A think tank taps you. I barely knew what a think tank was, but they were doing work on race in New York City, and beyond that, I agreed with it. And what they were saying was not “black people are all thugs and criminals, and they need to shape up.” They were working with, for example, Cory Booker, who was the mayor of Newark then, on prisoner re-entry programs. They were really trying to do good work for black people.

And I didn’t see any other think tank that was doing anything like that, and they summoned me. That Manhattan Institute is a conservative think tank, but they’ve always been hospitable to an extent to Democrats. I was not the only one there, but understandably, while I was there—and I was there for a good long time—a lot of people thought that meant that I was a conservative Republican.

Whereas it's not that. My views, if anybody were to bother to read the work that I’ve been doing for what I hate to say is twenty years now, they’d see I don’t disagree with any of the things that you would consider to be the liberal orthodoxy except when it comes to a certain plangent view of race relations where the idea is that the proper black thing to do is to cry weakness rather than look for solutions. I don’t get that, and I know that my civil rights forebears wouldn’t have gotten that either, but that’s considered a conservative take only because what’s considered the mainstream take on race has moved so far to the radical left.

Okay, so let’s unpack that a bit. So what I’d like—see, I kind of look at all of the things that you are discussing in some sense as an outsider, because these are fundamentally American issues, although not entirely. And I’m a Canadian, and we have our problems, but we don’t have exactly the same problems that you have in the United States.

And so I’m looking at this from the outside to some degree and trying to understand it. What do you—what is this set of assumptions in more detail that perturbs you, and why do you—let’s start with that. What is this set of assumptions about race relations in the U.S. that perturb you?

Well, there’s one main assumption, which is that it’s the job of the, shall we say, woke black person to focus on racist obstacles to black success and to purport that racism, be it social or systemic, is a conclusive obstacle to general black success rather than an impediment that you can get around.

And then there’s an extension from that, that racism of both of those kinds is so oppressive that it’s the defining experience of being a black person. And so it means that if you are a black person and you’re writing, you know, be it fiction or non-fiction or opinion, your focus is supposed to be always and forever on racist oppression, because if you’re not doing that, you’re not authentic and you’re dissociating yourself from blackness in some way.

And I find that, as a Montessori kid who has a lot of interests, I’ve always found that extremely confining. As soon as I hit adolescence, I realized, “Wow! I’m expected to be this racism-focused person maintaining a wariness of white socially that has not been necessary since about, you know, five years before I was born.” And I think that it is a cloak that people put on because human beings seek comfortable cloaks to put on.

It becomes a sense of being part of a tribe, but it has a way of departing from what reality actually necessitates, and I have just not been able to gracefully allow that sort of thing to define my life or to pretend to believe in those things. And so when I was around—how old am I when I start to pop—in my early 30s, I was at Berkeley; first was Cornell, then was Berkeley, then was the Manhattan Institute.

And at UC Berkeley, the racial preferences were discontinued. The idea was that there were no longer going to be different standards for allowing black and Latino students to be admitted than white and Asian students. And the way this was talked about was as if all black people are poor, as if the idea was that you don’t change standards even for people who’ve grown up hard, when actually most black students at Berkeley by then were very middle class, and the problems were different.

And I just couldn’t remain silent. I remember the hardest thing for me was that there would be a white professor who would come and lean in my doorway and start saying all of the usual pious sorts of things about race that I don’t think truly cohere, such as implying that racism defines my entire existence, and I was expected to just sit there and nod. They really thought that any black person thought that way, and I thought, “No, you’re missing me completely.” Many, many black people feel misread by whites.

Well, I was having a different version of it, and I just got weary of it. And so, very circuitously and not as deliberately as many people think, I started writing about these things. I thought at first I was just gonna put out one and a half yelps so that people would know how I felt and then go on being a linguist only, but for various reasons, that’s not what happened.

And here I am talking to you about it.

Well, and you have this new book Woke Racism.

Woke Racism and how a new religion is betraying Black America. So, okay, so that’s quite the title. I mean, I’m sure it was very carefully chosen, and Wikipedia informed me that you’re formally atheistic and so, which may or may not be relevant to our discussion. But it’s very interesting to me that you picked that as part of the title. Why? Why do you believe that? Why this emphasis on a new religion, and what does that mean exactly?

Well, you know, we’re at a point where the kinds of beliefs that I’m talking about about black people are no longer held as an opinion. It’s at the point where a certain kind of person lives these beliefs in a way that is so impervious to any kind of reasonable discussion that you start to notice that it really is a matter of religion, in the sense particularly of Abrahamic religions rather than opinion.

And there are all sorts of—so what’s the difference between religious belief and mere opinion in your estimation?

It is that many religions require that at a certain point you suspend disbelief and stop relying on conventional rational reasoning and logic. There’s a point at which, when it comes to race, there are things that one is supposed to insist upon and believe regardless of whether they correspond to reality or even any sense of justice.

One in Christianity is supposed to be dedicated to showing that you have faith in Jesus. Within the religion that I’m talking about, the cardinal point is that you show that you know that racism exists, just that you know that it exists. Now, what you’re going to do about it is irrelevant; whether or not what you’re showing actually is racism is irrelevant. The fact is that you knew you were supposed to be looking for it, and only that imperative, as ding-dong as it sounds, explains a lot of the things that we’ve seen, especially lately.

There’s a real jump in the rails after summer 2020, but even before that. And it means that a lot of people look at what goes on with the race scene in the United States—and I know there’s an extent that there is that in Canada too—you… whenever you see these sorts of things happening, and you see brilliant people making arguments that don’t make any sense and utterly despising those who disagree with them as if they were heretics—word chosen deliberately—it’s because what we’re seeing, even though these are people who are usually very secular in their self-conception, it’s a religion.

This is exactly the kind of person who sent Galileo into exile a very, very long time ago. And the people back then often didn’t think of themselves as religious; it was just considered truth. We’re faced with that same kind of thought, even if the word isn’t applied, and it makes the reason I’m putting it that way is not just to annoy people by calling them religious, although I think it will annoy them, and it’ll also annoy actual religious experts who will say that I’m stepping outside of my lane, which I most definitely am.

But all of this stuff only makes sense if you realize that these people are religious and that they have to be treated as parishioners and not as people who are up for an argument.

I’ve had a number of people make the same case to me recently—very profound people in my estimation—so I want to run a few ideas by and see what you think. So I’ve thought a long time about the religious endeavor, let’s say, from the psychological perspective, trying to unpack it. And it’s related in some sense to the idea of depth.

And so, if you think about stories—literary stories, let’s say—great works of literature, for that matter—and lesser works—we all have this intuition that some stories are shallow, and they might be entertaining, but they’re shallow, and some stories are deep.

And we have the same sense in music for that matter, but so we have this natural sense of depth, and part of what that is related to is something like place in the axiomatic structure of propositional thinking. So something is deep if a lot of other things you think depend on it, and it’s shallow if you can dispense with that, and it doesn’t do much to your underlying cognitive architecture.

So does that seem reasonable so far?

Very much.

Okay, okay. And then I would say that there’s a set of experiences that are universally human, more or less, that occur when our deeper beliefs are challenged, and that threatens the way that we construe the world and our ability to act in it. It threatens us with nihilism; it threatens us with chaos. It’s no trivial matter that happens often when hitherto separated cultures come into contact with one another.

Definitely.

So worlds can move when that occurs.

Okay, so and then I would say that the set of emotions that are associated with the movement of deep beliefs are what we describe when we describe religious experience.

And this is part of the reason I’ve had a number of conversations with famous atheists and very smart people—I mean, Sam Harris, for example, is extraordinarily smart person, and I’m familiar with Richard Dawkins’ work and Daniel Dennett’s work; these people are far from foolish, but they miss the point to some degree, from speaking even scientifically speaking, because they treat religion as if it’s a set of abstract propositions about the material structure of the world.

And that’s usually how the argument with religious people is framed, and they’re often foolish enough to accept that initial framing. But there are a lot of phenomena that fall into the religious domain that have nothing to do with propositional truth. I mean, we’ve already had a conversation about music, and music has often been used across many cultures for sacred purposes, and part of the reason for that is the emotional state that it’s capable of invoking.

Which is something like awe at the deepest level, and also its ability to unite people in harmony, let’s say, and in dance and all of that. And so there’s no escaping the reality of the religious instinct. And so—and here’s the point I’m trying to make with all that, to some degree.

So imagine this: think about this for a second. So there’s this statement in the New Testament that we should render unto God what is God’s and see unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and you couldn’t find—you’d be hard-pressed to find a single statement ever uttered by anyone that had a more remarkable effect on the development of political systems, because in some non-trivial manner, the idea that state and church should be separated is justified by that statement.

So it’s a deadly statement, but I also think it might be true psychologically, and that if we don’t have an explicit territory marked out psychologically and socially for the sacred—and so that would be for the deepest things—then what happens is that things that should not be so deep start to take on exactly that aspect.

And I’ll finish this with one observation. I’ve been talking with someone I really admire; his name is Jonathan Pageau, and he’s one of the deepest thinkers I’ve ever encountered in the religious domain, and he’s well-versed in post-modern.

Can you spell his last name?

P-A-G-E-A-U.

Got it.

Yeah, French Canadian, Catholic, turned atheist, turned Russian Orthodox icon carver—that’s part of his background. Anyway, he made a very interesting comment in a talk I was watching on the weekend about false gods, let’s say, and he talked about the danger of the idea of inclusivity when it’s elevated to the highest place or put in the deepest place, let’s say.

And so if the purpose of all organizations becomes radical inclusivity, so that’s the uniting factor, then the specific purpose of all those organizations is instantly threatened. And so part of the problem here is that what should be lower in the hierarchy of values is put in the higher place inappropriately, and that produces all sorts of social catastrophe.

So, yeah, the hard part here is that it makes you feel like Rousseau was correct, that we’d be better off as small groups of people, say about 200 people living on the side of a river.

And there is some sort of religion, probably animist, but it isn't part of the warp and woof of existence because people have a sense of purpose, people have a sense of warmth, people have a sense of what you might call the sacred in that it’s your group and you know everybody, and you’re a brother and you’re an uncle and you’re a husband, and that’s what you are.

There’s nothing existential that’s going to happen to anybody. And I hear from a couple of people who study hunter-gatherer groups that that’s true of hunter-gatherers; that there’s no such thing as a feeling of anomie when you are, say, living in the Kalahari. But then once you go further, you start to have this need for something larger, which I fully understand.

And there are many people who have said that this new woke religion—and I think it really is one—is something that comes as a replacement for what would have been ordinary, even if gestural, Christianity among the same people in 1955.

And I myself—I have religion for me, what people get out of religion, I get out of—and this is going to be taken wrong, so I have to put it carefully—I get it from musical theater, and I don’t mean that I’m really into Liza Minnelli, you know; it’s not grand old ladies in dresses and things like that. It’s actually the primal thing of life being set to music, including its regularities and its harmonies and probably culminating in people all doing things together partly in rhythm and singing in big harmony. To me, although I know that isn’t real, it seems to give life a kind of transcendental meaning.

And to me, that is—so that's like church.

Okay, so that’s all extremely interesting. But one of the things that’s most interesting to me about what you just said is that you also felt compelled to interject that it isn’t real. Now, obviously, musical theater is not—okay, let’s talk about that for a sec, because I’ve gotten trouble with this sort of thing when I’ve been interrogated, let’s say, about my beliefs many times in the past.

So when you say something like that, it begs the question: What do you mean by real? It’s not real? It’s like, “Well, wait a second.” And this is something I talked about with Sam Harris.

So here’s a weird thing: are Dostoevsky’s novels, despite the fact that they're fictional, more real than a purely objective account of someone's day, or less real? Because they’re definitely not—they never happened. But the fact that they never happened doesn’t make them not real.

And so then we have an annoying quality. You mean because they're channeling something underlying about the human spirit and experience, or do you mean something else?

Let’s look at it this way. So let’s say I took four remarkable people and I distilled down their biography, and then I made a metabiography about one great person that incorporated and united all those biographies. Would I be closer to the reality of greatness?

Obviously, we have to decide what reality is.

Well, that’s the thing, obviously. But the thing is, it’s so interesting what you said, because on one hand, on the one hand you’re deeply gripped by this artistic and theatrical representation, and you’re unapologetic about that.

And you also think of it as something, at least personally, that’s deep and profound and meaningful enough to describe it in at least quasi-religious terms, and then the critical mind comes up and says, “Yeah, but that’s not real.”

And I think, “Well, that’s like the guy in the movie tapping the kid on the shoulder who’s watching Pinocchio and saying, ‘Well, you know, these are just drawings, and none of this is real.’”

It’s like, “Well, that’s not so obvious that none of it is real,” because to some degree, it depends on what you mean by real.

And why are you so sure that the child being gripped by that isn’t more aware of reality than your rationality, as in it might be part of reality to experience and consider, and even on a certain level, believe in these idealizations, these refractions of what actually happens in real life—that that is something that deserves a place within our cognition as we go through life as people?

There's something that’s gripping you, obviously, because you love music. And then you related this story, and so on—the stage is being portrayed various modes of being in some compelling way, and music accompanies that to fill in the context, in some sense, that’s lacking in the fictional.

Yes.

And so I’m not so sure that—it seems to me that there’s more reality in literature in a very profound sense than there is in the fractionated view of much of the scientific enterprise, and for a bunch of reasons, it isn’t obvious to me at all that science can truly guide our actions, because we have to make value judgments.

But when you watch a great theatrical performance, a gripping theatrical performance, you’re being informed as to how to perceive an act, which is a vital thing to be informed about, and you’re doing it collectively; you’re doing it to music.

And then, you know, I’ve watched many rational cognitive psychologists, especially kind of dismiss the whole creative entertainment enterprise, which also gripped you with regard to the ‘30s, as sort of epic cognitive epiphenomenon, right?

Yes, and that’s not right. That’s not only wrong, that’s really deeply backwards. It’s way, way more important than we think it is, and it’s more real than—how else could it unite us if it isn't real?

Well, what do you mean by real?

You know?

Yeah! And I would extend it to the rock concert, which I think probably more people could relate to. And I stand outside of that, because the music forum doesn’t grab me as much. But it’s clear that people are feeling the same thing that I’m talking about, and it seems to be almost a human universal to the point that—to the extent that they’re human groups where music plays very little role—and I hear that there’s some and they don’t have anything that you would call theater, it’s just some—it’s not the human norm. Most human beings have something along these lines.

But I bet they have stories—bigger groups—and once you have enough people, you have something that we would call performance, even if in smaller groups everybody participates in the performance. But that’s even more—the same thing that we’re talking about. The idea that you’re a passive audience is something that happens particularly in the West rather late in the game—that you sit and clap. You usually—people are more involved; everybody is.

But that is even more of what you’re talking about.

Yeah, I would say that those things are real. And in a sense—and I’m not just trying to yank it back to Woke Racism to push the book, but I’m really thinking about this. My book is about people. It’s actually—I’m known for saying things that black people don’t like; a lot of black people aren’t going to like Woke Racism, but what racism is going to be hated by a lot of white people too.

The woke person I’m really thinking about in that book is a white guy, and the white guy in that case is not somebody who I can hate because I do see that there is a benefit that a person gets to this religion, even when it doesn’t necessarily make, if we may pardon the term, sense.

The person can't help it; I see where they're coming from. And they frustrate me often, but it worries me that because religion is, let’s call it for our purposes here, a different kind of reality, it can conflict with what an oppressed group needs in order to be most comfortable and happy in a complex society.

Well, okay, so let’s talk about that for a minute now. One of the things you told me earlier on was that—I think—and I don’t want to put words in your mouth—absolutely, so if I’ve got this wrong, please correct me. It seemed to me that you were implying, if not outright stating, that the collectivist ethos of much of that discourse was interfering with your self-regard as an individual, but even more importantly, your ability to manifest yourself, appear as, and be treated as an individual.

And so we’re looking here, at least to some degree, for what might constitute a reasonable uniting principle. And one of the reasons that I’ve been opposing the collectivist thought that’s characteristic of the insistence that group identity is the primary phenomenon, say socially and cognately, morally more importantly, is that it’s the wrong uniting principle. The right uniting principle is the divinity of the individual, to speak in religious terms.

And we can strip that of its religious significance and say, well, part of it is that the proper level of analysis for political discourse is predicated on the sanctity of the individual. And so we need to get serious as a culture about whether or not we actually believe this and what the relationship between that belief and reality actually is.

So that’s hard, because as you know, you’re far ahead of this—far ahead of me on this. It’s hard to be an individual; it’s not natural. It’s not—I don’t think it's what we’re hardwired for; it’s a rather new concept, and many people spontaneously will say they want to be an individual.

I think to an extent, though, that's fashion, and to most people, group identity is what gives them a sense of purpose, and that’s the way human beings have always been, and it’s hard to really make a person realize being an individual means that it’s really just you. For example, many very smart black people I think are under the impression that being an individual means that you have the bravery to stick your fist up and battle racist attitudes.

But the problem is that is now a group activity; that’s something that lots and lots of other people are doing. It only may seem a little bit unusual to a very naive white person looking on or subject to it.

And so the question is, how do you really feel about these things? If you want to battle racism, how would you like to do it, as opposed to adopting certain mantras and battle cries?

But mantras and battle cries are what we human beings do. We do it together. That’s hard—that's a tough thing—because individualism might not be the way that humanity needs to go. I personally would prefer it; that’s my sense, and that’s your sense, I think.

But I think a very coherent case could be made that that particular conception of marching to the beat of your own drummer is an eccentricity that certain solitary-minded people came to cherish amidst industrialization over a certain two or three hundred years. I don’t know if I could refute that.

Okay, so that’s okay. So I think that’s an extremely astute objection, let’s say, especially the observation that—and you touched on this earlier—that that requirement for group identification is deeply embedded in the substructure of human consciousness, so let’s say.

Well, we want to have friends, we want to have a family, we want to have a town or something like that, a community of 200, right? Embedded in a town. I think the question isn't—or the issue isn't so much the fact that the idea that the individual is the uniting principle should supplant that; it’s that that should be organized underneath that in some way, because it isn’t an issue of the absence of the necessity for group identity.

Because without that, we couldn’t do anything together, and wouldn’t that be a catastrophe?

Right.

And so that has to be recognized. And I do think, to give the woke types—and even if it's a religious manifestation, they're due—if that does produce a sense of cohesive group identity, then you can understand the longing for that in a fractionated community that in some senses got too psychologically large.

So that has to be contended with, but I do really see, because I view the culture wars in the university—I really believe they’re battling out something extraordinarily deep. It’s not—it isn’t a surface issue. Part of the debate, and this emerged out of France, the French intellectual tradition fundamentally, as far as I’m concerned, is the question of what level of conception should be primary.

And the assault on the patriarchy, and there’s more to it than that, is part of an assault on the idea of individuality and the truth that individuals hold in their language. It’s an assault on all of that. It’s deep—deep criticism. And I think it’s incredibly dangerous, but I understand why it arose.

And so, definitely!

And I was curious about you because you said at the beginning that even though your mother had taught you the—in some sense these woke precepts, there was something in you that rebelled against it.

Yeah, it’s not—I don’t rebel against the idea that, for example, there is institutional racism. I don’t think it should be called that, but there are inequities in society between, say, black and white that are due to racist attitudes, usually in the past, and racist biases and racist lookings past. All of those things are very real.

I never felt like I rebelled against that. What I rebelled against was the idea that you base your whole sense of identity upon those things, such that you live a life that’s abbreviated because you’re exaggerating how bad it still is, and you’re distorting what’s necessary to create dignified lives for black people.

And my feelings have always been you probably have about 80 years; you know, you’re lucky if you’ve got 80 years. And if you spend your whole life maintaining, in my time period, the same battle poses in the ‘80s and ‘90s that people needed in the ‘50s and ‘60s, after a while, you’ve spent your life play-acting, and then you die and the world goes on.

What I rejected was the exaggeration. And so, for example, I remember what really—there was one moment where I realized there was something wrong with me. It was in the wake of the Rodney King trial in 1991, and a lot of black people I liked very much were united in saying, “What happened to Rodney King shows that a black man can’t get justice in this country.”

And I remember thinking, “No, no, that—that statement would have made sense in about 1965, and in many American cities, 1975.” And there were islands of it, even in 1991. But the idea that as a 20-something black person you were living in a country where you just couldn’t get justice struck me as beyond rhetoric, especially given the general attitude they had towards what being black meant.

Then, as we were standing around at Stanford University, a campus where all of us had been evaluated according to adjusted standards out of the idea that we were really wanted on that campus, etc., that we were supposed to still be speaking that language that the Black Panthers had spoken—it struck me as a pose.

And there was a part of me that was deeply disturbed by the artificiality of it, and that you were actually expected to live it. Why?

Why are the artifacts...

Okay, so again you use very specific words—"a pose," "artificial." What do you compare it to?

And what are you trying to live, apparently, but what do you—what is that exactly?

The question is how much of an obstacle is racism after formal segregation has been battled, after racial attitudes changed profoundly in the 1970s? And I’m just old enough to have watched that happen. Just—it gets to the point where, okay, racism does exist, both social and institutional, but how much of an obstacle is it to doing pragmatic things that will make poor Black people less poor and all black people happier?

So a quick example would be that these days, you can look at the fact that black kids tend not to do as well on standardized tests as other kids. It’s there.

Now, you can look at that and you can say, “Well, if black kids don’t do well on the test, that’s because of racism, and so we need to eliminate the test because the test is racist.”

Now, in what way is the test racist? Forty years ago, maybe those tests asked you what wine goes with chicken; that hasn’t been true for generations now. So it’s not about asking people things that they have no reason to know.

How is it racist? And there are people today who even will imply that black thought is somehow incompatible with tests like that, which is very close to saying that black people are incapable of disembodied abstract thought.

And many whites are probably identical without claiming.

Yeah, it’s very unfortunate, especially given that the people who are saying it know very well the history of that being said about black people.

And so you look at the tests and you say that because black kids don’t do well on them, they are examples of systemic racism. But you have to get rid of racism, so you have to get rid of the tests, which means that you tell America that black kids can’t have their abstract reasoning measured without it being racist.

And then when you get somebody saying, “Well, then black kids just must not be as quick on the uptake,” you call them a racist. And in the meantime, it’s ignored that you’re considering helping black kids get better at the tests, helping black kids’ parents realize what free test prep programs there are in those neighborhoods.

The tests just take a little bit of practice, but you’re not supposed to talk about it because the tests, quote unquote, are racist. That’s an abuse of language. It’s abuse of the very conception of what racism is. That’s not what my mother raised me on. That’s not your grandmother's racism, that’s something that comes from a way of thinking that was marginal in 1955, became sexy in about 1966, and here in 2021 is being treated as impregnable wisdom.

Someone black has to speak out against that, so that’s what I mean by the exaggeration and the artificiality and the outright harm that comes from these sorts of things.

Well, and with regard to it being a pose, so is it a pose of so—I could say, well, is it a pose of unearned virtue? I mean virtue is not easy to earn. True virtue, you have to establish, let’s say, we'll see where we go with this. Maybe you have to establish a relationship with beauty, and beauty is real.

You have to establish a relationship with truth, and truth is real. And so to earn virtue is difficult because beauty and truth are imposing and formidable, if you have any sense at all, you see that.

And so that’s a daunting task to establish genuine virtue, and a terrifying task. And is the pose the willingness to adopt—see, because when I talked to the ideologue types—and maybe that happened most famously with an interview I had with— I think I was just thinking about it, you mean Michael Eric Dyson, right?

Oh, I wasn’t thinking about Dyson; I was thinking about a GQ interviewer.

And that interview has been watched like 40 million times now—it’s just this ideological pose, is it? Is the aping of virtue, as far as I can tell—and I mean that in a sort of technical sense.

Is that you master this language and it contains the expressions of true virtue, but you know the kind of problems that you were talking about? And I see this on the environmentalist side of things too.

Well, how do you get black kids to do better in elementary school, let’s say? Well, that’s a more manageable problem. It’s a problem that would take a little bit more humility to conceptualize, and it’s also a really, really hard problem. And so to be virtuous in your attempts to solve that would require it probably require the dedication of your entire life really to take a good crack at that problem, right? Because that's a tough problem, man.

And so maybe you don’t want to do that because it’s—and then you’re enticed, and you’re enticed by your educators into this alternative possibility where all you really have to do is master a set of propositions and you’re on the winning side, and that also gives you some convenient enemies.

And maybe it fulfills, to some degree, the religious instinct. And it depauls me to see the universities complicit in this and that they’ve come to see that.

And I think part of that falseness and artificiality that you described—I think the fact that that exists is part of the overbearing insistence that the veil not be lifted and that no one questioned this, because what is underneath it is so damn ugly.

Yeah, yeah.

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