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A review by gazzahaz
Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John McWhorter
2.0
While I agree generally with McWhorter that online performative allyship and aggressive social character assassinations are reductive and mostly unhelpful, I found this book to be guilty of the same reductive reasoning it claims to be so thoroughly against. He overblows, in my opinion, both the cultural power and the consequences of “wokeism” while simultaneously mischaracterizing modern antiracist movements and ideologies as little more than a meme. Rather than engaging with the tenets of Critical Race Theory, Marxism, or other academic frameworks of thought that inform leftist movements, he tosses them into his arguments as something his readers should unquestionably dismiss as nothing more than fodder for religious zealotry that has no meaningful consequence in the “real world”— a term which he smugly overuses as if it’s something antiracist protesters have absolutely no interest in. He’s right that black folks aren’t a monolith. Neither are these protesters.
I see no reason why ending the war on drugs, pedagogical reform, and promoting vocations that do not require college degrees cannot comfortably coexist with the grander cultural community finding new ways to hold people accountable for racism or white supremacist viewpoints. And while they figure that out and fail at times to do it in helpful or productive ways, our children are not facing existential danger from these ideologies in an even remotely comparable way to when the ideologies taught in schools were (and in many places still are) institutionally white supremacist. McWhorter asserts multiple times that antiracist education for our children is exclusively nefarious bullshit that will harm them and we (more reasonable and rational and therefore morally superior folk) should rally against these mentally unstable mobs to protect them from it. This sort of fear-mongering serves white, middle-aged Tucker Carlson re-tweeters and pretty much nobody else.
Some of the most thoughtful, engaging, and deeply empathetic people I’ve ever met are participating actors in the antiracist movements going on in our country, and I join them in the struggle for a better world and a better country. Ideological disagreements aside, I can’t think of a single person among them who would disagree with McWhorter that the reforms he proposes would be empowering to the black community in America, and in addition to calling out people for perpetuating racism, they are also donating their time and money to these and other reforms that are making a measurable difference in the “real world.”
I see no reason why ending the war on drugs, pedagogical reform, and promoting vocations that do not require college degrees cannot comfortably coexist with the grander cultural community finding new ways to hold people accountable for racism or white supremacist viewpoints. And while they figure that out and fail at times to do it in helpful or productive ways, our children are not facing existential danger from these ideologies in an even remotely comparable way to when the ideologies taught in schools were (and in many places still are) institutionally white supremacist. McWhorter asserts multiple times that antiracist education for our children is exclusively nefarious bullshit that will harm them and we (more reasonable and rational and therefore morally superior folk) should rally against these mentally unstable mobs to protect them from it. This sort of fear-mongering serves white, middle-aged Tucker Carlson re-tweeters and pretty much nobody else.
Some of the most thoughtful, engaging, and deeply empathetic people I’ve ever met are participating actors in the antiracist movements going on in our country, and I join them in the struggle for a better world and a better country. Ideological disagreements aside, I can’t think of a single person among them who would disagree with McWhorter that the reforms he proposes would be empowering to the black community in America, and in addition to calling out people for perpetuating racism, they are also donating their time and money to these and other reforms that are making a measurable difference in the “real world.”