Is The Racial Reckoning Over? John McWhorter on language, art, and defunding the grammar police

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is the full version of the Aug 4 episode, now available to all subscribers.

Author, New York Times columnist, and superstar linguist John McWhorter returns to the pod to catch us up on what’s been on his mind now that the Woke Emergency is over . . . or is it over? We talk about how figures like Robin D’Angelo and Ibram X. Kendi have receded from the spotlight and then move on to more pressing questions topics, such as whether New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s “I vs me” confusion is disqualifying (I say yes), whether a smart person would say “stupider” or “more stupid,” when it became acceptable to say “anyways,” and why kids today have substituted “based off” for “based on.”
We also discuss John’s long-running conversations with economist Glenn Loury on The Glenn Show and how their divergent views on the Trump phenomenon have changed (and also not changed) the dynamics of their discussions. (Listen to my 2024 interview with Glenn Loury here.) John reflects on Glenn’s 2024 memoir and explains why he would be reluctant to expand the personal writing in his columns into an entire book. Finally, we talk about the definition of a public intellectual and why so many people with microphones count themselves as such. Would a legendary public intellectual like Susan Sontag have adapted to the YouTube era? What John has to say might surprise you.

John McWhorter is one of several speakers featured at the Unspeakeasy Small Gathering for Big Ideas rereat in New York City October 11-12, 2025. Find out more at https://theunspeakeasy.com/nyc.

GUEST BIO
John McWhorter writes a weekly newsletter for The New York Times, is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University, and the author or more than 20 books, most recently Pronoun Trouble, Nine Nasty Words, and Woke Racism.

HOUSEKEEPING

Order my new book, The Catastrophe Hour: Selected Essays, on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You know, I'm weird. I'm just, I'm weird. And so that's part of the reason I don't want to write a memoir, because I think people would be waiting for something educational or something uplifting. And all they would get is just one weird thing happening after another.
0:17.0	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast, the podcast that will soon be renamed The Unspeak Easy with Megan Down.
0:24.7	That's me, your host.
0:26.3	Before we get to my interview with John McWhorter, a quick reminder that on September 3rd in New York City, I'll be in conversation with novelist and columnist Lionel Shriver.
0:36.1	We'll be talking about all kinds of things,
0:38.7	including my new book, The Catastrophe Hour, and also Lionel's books and columns in The Spectator.
0:44.8	This is happening at the Village Underground Comedy Club at 6 p.m. doors open at 515, and we'll be
0:51.5	selling books there. Although you can buy your book ahead of time.
0:54.7	You should have bought it already. The link to buy tickets is in the show notes and you can also go
0:59.4	to megandowne.com slash events. If you purchase your tickets soon, you can get a discount by
1:05.6	using promo code Catastrophe 18 at checkout. It's going to be a great night, and I would love to see you there.
1:12.7	My guest this week probably needs no introduction to most of you.
1:17.3	He is John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia,
1:21.6	and one of the most incisive and trenchant commentators about race and culture working today.
1:28.3	He's the author of several books about language, most recently pronoun trouble, a must read,
1:35.2	if you like me, get hung up on me versus I, which we discuss at some length in this conversation.
1:42.4	John's book, Woke Racism, about the madness of the George Floyd era of racial reckoning,
1:49.1	came out in 2021.
1:50.8	He's also a columnist for the New York Times, a frequent guest on real-time with Bill Marr,
1:56.4	and for nearly 20 years has been having regular conversations about race and other issues with the economist Glenn Lowry on Glenn's podcast, The Glenn Show, which was originally the black guys at blogging heads.
2:12.1	Despite all of that, John rarely makes podcast appearances.
2:19.7	So I'm grateful that he did this one.
	...

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