John McWhorter — What’s “Systemic” about “Systemic Racism”?

The Glenn Show

Glenn Loury

Politics, Society & Culture, News

4.8 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2021

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this edition of TGS, John McWhorter is back for one of our twice-monthly conversations. We take a long, critical look at the concept of "systemic racism"—what it is, what it isn't, and why it's become so popular in progressive discourses about race in the US.

We focus attention on institutions of higher education, drawing on our own experience to question whether this concept really applies at the elite institutions (Brown/Berkeley/Columbia) with which we have been associated. We open on a laconic note: neither of us were in the best of moods when we had this conversation. We close by inviting you to suggest topics for our future discussions that are, a) not about race, and, b) areas where John and I are likely to disagree. We hope you'll take us up on this!

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0:00 Intro

2:19 Does systemic racism still exist in the US?

12:26 Addressing “racial inequities” rather than “systemic racism”

18:30 John: “The idea that modern colleges and universities are racist spaces is false”

29:18 Race and the academic job market

34:40 Why does anger persist even after progress toward racial redress?

44:57 The (possible) origins of the recent wokeness wave

52:55 Glenn and John agree to disagree

Links

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America

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Transcript

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0:00.0	John McWhorter, my old friend. How you doing? Hey, Glenn. How are you doing?
0:08.4	I'm getting by, John. I'm getting by maybe just barely, but I'm getting by Glenn Lowry here,
0:12.8	the Glenn show at substack.com, Glenn Lowry.substack, and at the blogginghead site, bloggingheads.tv,
0:22.6	I'm with my conversation partner, John McWhorter, where the black guys at bloggingheads.tv,
0:27.6	he teaches at Columbia University and publishes frequently, writes for the Atlantic,
0:36.5	is got books coming out, left and right. I am in semi-retirement here at Brown University,
0:45.6	just trying to keep the whole thing going, I don't know, man, I'm feeling okay. How are you?
0:49.2	John McWhorter. It's then I've had some stuff, but I'm here. That's how I am. So, yeah.
1:02.7	Yeah. John McWhorter, had some stuff. Nothing medical, but you know, one goes on.
1:10.4	So that you don't want to share with our audience, but that is nevertheless a heavy weight on your
1:14.8	spirit at this moment. So I think both of us are in that condition. Yeah. Yeah, my sister passed
1:21.2	away at the age of 71, just a week ago, I'm getting myself ready to go out to California for her
1:31.2	funeral and spend time with her family, her children, her husband. So I've been
1:38.8	you know, processing that, grieving the loss of my sister and taking about her. My own mortality,
1:47.8	our life together is little kids growing up in Chicago, our mother who's been gone for 20 years,
1:55.2	our father who died a few years ago. And I'm the only one left of that crew. So, yeah.
2:05.5	Yeah. I can imagine. I can very much imagine. That's coming for me soon. So, yeah.
2:14.3	So anyway, what are we talking about here this week, John? Are we the black guys at bloggingheads.tv?
2:18.9	You've got to live up to our reputation. Editors, could you please, when you do this,
2:24.3	just speed up this a little bit. Don't have everybody listening to all these hesitations and things.
2:30.6	I think that we should talk about the fact that we deny that there's a such thing as systemic racism.
2:38.7	You know, over the past year, the term systemic racism has become part of the national conversation
	...

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