John McWhorter on Woke Politics, Race, and Education

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 6 January 2022

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A professor of linguistics at Columbia University and author of the recent book Woke Racism, John McWhorter has been an outspoken critic of woke politics. The appeal to wokeness, he argues, presents a simplistic view of race and attempts to discredit any contrary points of view about ideas and policies. According to McWhorter, the woke end up having disproportionate power simply because of what social media allows them to do to people. He argues that we should stand up to them—and focus on developing policies that can help people rather than shutting down debate.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined today by Professor
0:20.2	Linguistics at Columbia, John Recorder, who's a, you know, I bet having an interesting discussion
0:25.5	about Linguistics off camera, we'll have to do a Linguistics conversation sometime on camera,
0:32.1	but I guess that's not our topic today or not our main topic today. But John, thanks for,
0:36.1	thanks for joining me. I assure you, Mr. John does. We'll get to what we're going to talk about
0:40.2	a second, but John hosts a very interesting podcast about Linguistics called Lexicon Valley
0:46.9	about language, not about linguistics, but about language. That's a better way of saying
0:51.4	which is of interest to people who are just interested in how languages develop and different
0:56.2	languages around the world. And I recommend that it's not political at all. Is that right, John?
1:00.8	It is not about politics. It's about language and linguistics. It's a language geek's podcast.
1:06.3	Yeah, it's a whole other side of me than I think a lot of people have reason to know exist, but
1:10.6	yes, it is my labor of love. Good. Yeah, my wife, who's a classist, is very much like some of your,
1:16.0	has read some of your writings on language and it's very, it's a big fan of them and she told me
1:20.7	we have to do a podcast on that, so we'll do that conversation on that later. But we should talk
1:25.3	about somewhat more political subject today, which I guess, wokeness and its history, its
1:31.5	implications and the broader how to think about that whole topic you've written among your
1:37.5	many books, the best selling book recently on woke racism. So let's, let's discuss that.
1:43.6	How much of a problem is it? What is it? How much of a problem is it? What do we do about it?
1:46.7	etc. So I'm very struck by the term. I mean, since you are a linguist, maybe say word about what,
1:52.9	why are we all talking about wokeness? So what is it we are talking about when we talk about
1:56.6	wokeness? Well, the term begins in black slang and it meant to be awake, awakened to certain
2:06.0	political realities that threaten or concern the black condition. And it's first recorded in the
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