A review of Woke Racism:  How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

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Woke Racism:  How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, by

John McWhorter, Portfolio/Penguin, 2021, 201 pages.

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John McWhorter says some important things about wokeness and critical race theory in this book, and as a black man, he can say them without being ensnared by the Catch-22 of CRT, which holds that non-blacks are ipso facto racist if they criticize CRT.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t say it very well, in spite of teaching linguistics at Columbia University. The book appears to have been written hurriedly and loses the reader at times in fuzzy abstractions.

The main theme is that wokeness is a religion, and as such, it is futile to try to change the minds of true believers or to even have an intelligent, rational discussion with them. It’s akin to an atheist questioning the tenets of any of the major religions. 

This brings back memories of religion class in parochial school, when I would question a tenet of the Catholic Church. Instead of addressing my point, the nun would respond, “You have to have faith.” However, unlike the Church of CRT, I wasn’t canceled or called names. Of course, I would’ve been burned at the stake in medieval times.

McWhorter doesn’t say it this way, but we’re still in medieval times when it comes to discussing race in America. I’ve been through it all and was at the vanguard of much of it: civil rights, equal opportunity, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, affirmative action, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, detailed affirmative-action plans, college admission quotas, the Black Panthers, black liberation theology, racial encounter groups, racial sensitivity training, the diversity movement started by R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. and subsequently corrupted, and a lifetime of reading the works of black writers and the history of the evils and blessings of America.

That history is necessary for understanding where we are today and why much of CRT and wokeness is hokum. But McWhorter doesn’t get into that.

He is good, however, at giving examples of today’s cancel culture and how it has ruined careers. He also is courageous for speaking out against it. Surprisingly, though, his three recommendations for saving black America, while sound, doesn’t address a major reason for the widespread and seemingly intractable socioeconomic problems in so many African-American communities. He writes:

What ails black America in the twenty-first century would yield considerably to exactly three real-world efforts that combine political feasibility with effectiveness: There should be no war on drugs; society should get behind teaching everybody to read the right way [phonics instead of the whole word method], and we should make solid vocational training as easy to obtain as a college degree.

McWhorter is silent about the tragic impact of single parenting on black America, especially the absence of fathers from the household. Fathers are absent from African-American households at more than twice the rate of white households and seven times more than the households of certain Asian nationalities/ethnicities. Not surprisingly, those Asian households rank at the top in income, test scores, and law abidance.

The problem of missing fathers has become so entrenched that the words “parent” and “spouse” are now missing from inner-city lexicons, having been replaced by “baby momma” and “baby daddy.” Many baby daddies have children by multiple baby mommas, in a form of polygamy without marriage, a problem that also exists among poor whites, driven by changed social mores and poorly designed welfare programs.

This is a complex problem with a complex history and complex causes, but ignoring it will not solve it. Ever since Vice President Dan Quayle was skewered for his Murphy Brown comment, it has become the third-rail of sociology and politics, and, as such, is largely missing from discussions today about social justice.

As is commonly known, the liberal Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted the problem when he was a sociologist at the Department of Labor and wrote his controversial 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” Less known is the 1963 book that he co-authored with Nathan Glazer: Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. Moynihan would go on to be an esteemed U.S. Senator, and Glazer would go on to publish a book in 1988, The Limits of Social Policy.

In the introduction to a 1970 revised edition of their joint book, Moynihan and Glazer expressed their dismay with new and divisive racial categories and associated thinking, as follows:

In 1969, we seem to be moving to a new set of categories, black and white, and that is ominous.  On the horizon stand the fantastic categories of the “Third World,” in which all the colors, Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red (these are the favored terms for Negro, Mexican-American and Puerto Rican, Chinese and Japanese, and American Indian—a biologically and humanly monstrous naming, it seems to us—among some militants of southern California) are equated as “the oppressed” in opposition to the oppressing whites.

Beyond the Melting Pot and The Limits of Social Policy have remained on my bookshelf for decades, because they are scholarly, bipartisan works and thus unlike the propaganda, agitprop, sophistry, banalities, partisan rancor, and axe-to-grind protestations that pass today for intelligent writing and thinking about race, including the specious thinking behind critical race theory.

Woke Racism is better than those other writings, but not good enough to keep on my bookshelf.