[Martin Elster]

Originally Posted by Julie Steiner

Martin and Jim,

Unsurprisingly, since I'm not a fan of John McWhorter anyway, I am less than enthusiastic about his point of view on this subject. He has a very fine mind, but he seems to be missing a heart sometimes.

I often get the impression that McWhorter's number one priority when he speaks on race is to battle what might be the main racial injustice that affects him personally--namely, the intolerable notion that anyone might think that he, as a cultured and intellectual Black man at the peak of his career, has anything in common with the lower-class Black men for whom the Black Lives Matter movement is demanding justice: George Floyd, Philando Castile, et al.

I concede that that assuming some sort of kinship based solely on the fact that he's a Black man, too, is racist. But it's disappointing that he doesn't seem to feel any sort of kinship just based on the fact that they are fellow human beings.

You are a brilliant person, Julie, and I am always intrigued by what you have to say. I am just as eager to read your thoughts as Mark is. So, just because my opinions don’t always mesh with yours doesn’t mean I don’t respect your opinions, which I definitely do. I’ve been following John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, and Coleman Hughes for almost a year now. I find their ideas quite interesting and cogent. I suppose they can, at first, seem as though they are “missing a heart.” But I think that isn’t really true. Here is what McWhorter says about that:

Third Wave Antiracism is losing innocent people jobs. It is coloring, detouring and sometimes strangling academic inquiry. It forces us to render a great deal of our public discussion of urgent issues in doubletalk any 10-year-old can see through. It forces us to start teaching our actual 10-year-olds, in order to hold them off from spoiling the show in that way, to believe in sophistry in the name of enlightenment. On that, Third Wave Antiracism guru Ibram X. Kendi has written a book on how to raise antiracist children called Antiracist Baby. You couldn’t imagine it better: Are we in a Christopher Guest movie? This and so much else is a sign that Third Wave Antiracism forces us to pretend that performance art is politics. It forces us to spend endless amounts of time listening to nonsense presented as wisdom, and pretend to like it.

A white version of this 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 my new book on this subject, which I am now publishing in serial, 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. As in, to realizing that what I am documenting matters, and matters deeply. Namely, that America’s sense of what it is to be intellectual, moral, or artistic; what it is to educate a child; what it is to foster justice; what is to express oneself properly; what it is to be a nation—all is being refounded upon a religion.

This is directly antithetical to the very foundations of the American experiment. Religion has no place in the classroom, in the halls of ivy, in our codes of ethics, or in deciding how we express ourselves, and almost all of us spontaneously understand that and see any misunderstanding of the premise as backward. Yet since about 2015, a peculiar contingent has been slowly headlocking us into making an exception, supposing that this new religion is so incontestably good, so gorgeously surpassing millennia of brilliant philosophers’ attempts to identify the ultimate morality, that we can only bow down in humble acquiescence.

But a new religion in the guise of world progress is not an advance; it is a detour. It is not altruism; it is self-help. It is not sunlight; it is fungus. It’s time it became ordinary to call it for what it is and stop cowering before it, letting it make people so much less than they—black and everything else—could be.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/j...the-neoracists