Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and we'll only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to

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please consider becoming one. I am here with John McWhorter. Sean, thanks for joining me again. Of course. Good to be here. So it's been, I think it's been four years. I checked my own website, and that's what it said to me. We spoke about your book, woke racism. Is that when that came out before? That would have been in 21. That's right, or maybe early 22. Yeah. Yeah.

And we first did it in 2020, didn't we?

Yeah.

I think you've been on the podcast twice.

Yeah. During the troubles is right, was our first one. Yeah. Well, how are the troubles? Have the troubles continued? Where are we in the, uh, your side of the cultural war? Well, to tell you the truth, I think that there was a peak woke nationwide, which now looks blissfully quaint.

You know, some of the reasons. Well, to tell you the truth, I think that there was a peak woke nationwide, which now looks blissfully quaint.

You know, some of the reasons for the de-fenestration, some of the double talk, what I wrote

woke racism to be part of the resistance against.

That's another era.

But from what I've seen, a lot of academia and a lot of the arts are possibly ruined for the duration,

because there's no way of uprooting it from those places, especially since it emerged so much from there.

And to tell you the truth, that way of thinking.

We got to double, hold on, we got a double click on that, or at least make sure you get back to it.

I want to know how the damage has been truly unrecoverable or unrecoverable quickly in your view. Oh, I would just say that especially if you are an academic or a certain kind of journalist, and maybe an artist, you see yourself as having a unique kind of insight for one thing. You think

that you have discovered a truth rather than you have an opinion, and you don't recognize

yourself in that description. And you have authority to pass on a way of thinking, not so much

to undergrads. That gets exaggerated, but to graduate students who then become professors

themselves, as long as they aren't

white men. And you have what you decide a conference is going to be about. You have what you

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