My review of Woke Racism by John McWhorter
Photo by Funeh
I loved Woke Racism. John said a lot of things I have thought about and expressed ideas I have often been unable to put into words concerning the woke movement being a religion. Over the last 6 or so years, I have watched in dismay as young adults who were brought up in the church left in droves because Christianity had become overly religious and seemingly unaccepting of people who did not believe and act in a certain ‘Christian way’.
Atheism and Agnosticism on the other hand have become the go-to. It is perceived as trendy and considered to be the ‘accepting’ and open-minded alternative to Christianity. I would go out on a limb and say that the need for some ‘kind of religion’ to fill the void contributes to the situation where far more liberal college students engage in the woke religion than at Christian colleges. How they do not seem to see the irony blows my mind. They are more zealous and religious than most Christians today.
Although he makes it clear that he believes strategies that focus on ‘dismantling’ racism do not and have not helped black people, I admire how he acknowledges that racism exists and in subtle ways, suggests that he supports other activists that go about black empowerment in ways very different from his methodology. I thought this was a welcome change from most writers who completely bash and discredit differing solutions. With statements like, “Either fight micro-aggressions with us or you’re the enemy”.
John does the same when he talks about the ‘Elects’ not as the scum of the earth but as reasonable people who are trying to get by in this world where being called a racist is an unpardonable sin. Elects, by the way, is the term he uses for activists of the woke religion. For white Elects, he says, “Electism is presented as complex—i.e., in requiring the “work” we are told is necessary—but it is also, in being motivated by a simple quest to show that one is not a racist, rather easy. Easy is always attractive to all of us: Electism is a kind of politics hack.”
Addressing Elects the way he does in his book, I believe, will make his writing more open to be received by people of opposing viewpoints. Elects, for example, are unlikely to feel that his words found them, captured them, crucified them and started hurling rocks at them. I think they might instead feel understood. They might see it as John’s assurance that they are not evil as he gives them an explanation for why they did what they did.
He suggests that the history of African Americans explains the black inferiority complex which blacks attempt to solve by the claim to victimhood. About black kids, he says, “Even black kids had already been imprinted with a subliminal idea that white was better than them. A decade-plus later, after the Civil Rights victories, the proud dissemination of slogans like Black Is Beautiful was, in their way, a symptom of the same inferiority complex. What was notable was that the very concept of black being beautiful needed to be stressed at all. Or consider Black Power… It was a reminder that black people could be strong—but again, the reminder was necessary, and it also pointed to little that could actually be done. It left a hole still gaping. A people seek a substitute sense of pride and positive identity in circumstances like this. An available “hack,” as we might put it today, was the status of noble victim.”
Hence the black draw to elitism is in maintaining a shared sense of belonging to a community of black people who have experienced the struggle and are united in a common experience of suffering and discrimination. Crying racism in other words binds us. On the binding effect of racism, he says, “But the theme here is that being Elect can be, for a black person, like a warm blanket. You belong to something. Anyone who questions how “black” you are because of your speech, appearance, interests, or upward mobility is likely to hush up if you’re on the barricades with them decrying the racism of your university—or, later, your workplace, town, or country.”
He goes on to suggest that woke religion has the opposite effect of hurting black people. Here’s a random selection of three areas he draws from:
Black boys are not disciplined in schools so as not to appear racist.
Condescension of blacks as respect.
Blacks are taught to live obsessed about how someone possibly doesn’t like them.
John suggests that racism is so layered in time and policies that it would be impossible to simply get rid of it. He offers three actions that he thinks would move the needle in solving the black problems. 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.
Throughout the early to middle sections of the book, John made a lot of comparisons between the Woke Religion and Christianity that I disagree with, especially concerning virtue signalling or showing off one’s purity. He doesn’t seem to understand what the Christian faith is about. What he seems to be highlighting in his comparisons are the religious zealots of Jesus’ day - the Pharisees. Jesus made it clear that Christians were not to be like the hypocrites.
Matthew 6:1-2, Jesus said, “Be careful not to perform your righteous acts before men to be seen by them… So when you give to the needy, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honoured by men…”
I was therefore surprised by his understanding of Pharisees towards the end of the book. So it is either he knows that what he had been describing as Christianity all along was wrong, which is more likely the case or he chose to ignore the irony in his line about the Elects prosecution of sinners contrasting with Jesus’s embrace of them. If throughout the book, he had compared the Woke Religion to hypocrites and Pharisees from Biblical times, it would have been more accurate.