John McWhorter — Anger, Shame, Sadness, and Race in America

The Glenn Show

Glenn Loury

Politics, Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2021

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

John and I often talk about how we feel about race in America, but we rarely delve into why we feel the way we feel. What factors in our own lives primed us for those emotional responses? While John and I often agree about where the politics of race have gone wrong, we just as often experience very different feelings about these matters.

I start the discussion off by raising a question a friend put to me recently: are we wasting our time engaging with “red meat” issues in the race debate? Should we stick to the hard data before wading into the culture war? This leads us to discuss our very different emotional responses to the people we disagree with. I tend to go to anger and John tends toward empathy. We look to our respective pasts to try to understand why we diverge in this way. In fact, we stay in the past for a while, looking back on our exposure to Afrocentrism and black radicalism in our youths and to the skepticism that often attended those encounters. Finally, we work our way back around to “Omar.” Personally, I believe that the Omars of the world can and must lay claim to their agency. That they often refuse to is source of constant frustration and, yes, shame.

It’s an intense episode. It’s also one marred by technical difficulties. John lost his connection at several points during the conversation, and finally what had been a dialogue became a monologue. Apologies for the rough edges!

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0:00 Are Glenn and John wasting their time by talking about race?

10:36 How Glenn and John’s families shaped their attitudes toward race

20:42 Looking back on past radicalism

27:15 Glenn: Is my anger necessary?

33:26 Can “Omar” change his ways?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello out there in virtual viewership land. This is Glen Lorry of the Glen Show. We used to be a
0:07.7	blogging hit that TV. Now we're at the YouTube slash, forward slash C, forward slash Glen Lorry
0:15.9	Show and we're also at substack.com. I'm with John McWater in my regular conversation partner.
0:20.2	We talked twice a week, twice a month. Let me slow down and get a grip. John teaches at Columbia
0:27.7	University. He's a linguist widely published and fabled the instructor in the court curriculum
0:33.8	there. I teach at Brown University and we're back to talk about the stuff that we talk about.
0:40.2	You know, I didn't warn you, John, but I have been burdened in the last couple of weeks with
0:48.2	a correspondence with a dear friend whom I won't name who is invading with me that I'm wasting my
0:56.7	time talking about race. He says, you're an economist. You know, I had Larry Kotlakoff
1:02.0	on last week on the Glen Show. We talked about inflation just the way, you know, it was inside
1:06.3	baseball, economists to economists, quantity theory of money, Milton Friedman, all that kind of
1:11.3	good stuff, you know, inflation. And he says, you should give your audience vegetables before you
1:18.6	feed them dessert to make them think hard about the real stuff before you go off into the fluff
1:26.9	and I asked him a tongue in cheek, well, is it okay if I talk about the written house trial,
1:32.8	the Ahmed Arbery trial? Would that be okay? I mean, you know, while I'm returning to respectability
1:41.3	and unsullying myself with this cheap race talk, could I address myself to, you know, one of the
1:48.4	most gripping issues that's confronting the country today, you know, so I was being a little bit
1:52.8	sarcastic, but I don't know. We've talked about this before, being confined. Now that you're at the
2:00.8	New York Times, you have this megaphone with your twice weekly newsletter and whatnot. And you
2:07.6	got range, so you're not always talking about race, but do we cheapen ourselves by, you know,
2:14.0	constantly coming back by self-consciously calling ourselves the black guys and by feeding red meat
2:20.6	to bubble because we have so many fans out there who just want to hear a couple of black guys say
	...

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