My guest today is John McHorter. He is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University,

the author of many books, most of which are about linguistics, but some of which are about

racism in the United States. We talked about the language that we use around racial

topics and also about his theory that the kind of new anti-racist politics has become

a form of religion. I think it's a really interesting conversation. I think a bit of a

controversial conversation in some quarters, but I think you're going to enjoy it.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Weeds on the Box Media Podcast Network. I'm

Matthew Glacias, my guest today at John McHorter is a professor of linguistics at Columbia University.

He's a columnist at the Atlantic and elsewhere, the author of many books. Here's our conversation.

You, I guess, did a did a lexicon valley episode about this, but a lot of what people are doing

in this reckoning is actually linguistic in its nature. I think talking about both some of the

substance to that, and I read language hoax a while ago, but I feel like some of that

super-warf stuff is implicitly drives some of what people are thinking these days. I don't

know if you agree with that, but I think I know what you're getting at, but keep keep going,

because to tell you the truth, the language part of me and the race commentator proud of me are

literally two different brains. I feel like a lot of what happens these days is a strong assumption

that changing the way people talk about things is going to beat the racism out of them,

or otherwise construct the world, and that we should really judge people based on their

sort of mastery of up-to-date verbal formulas rather than their actions in the world.

And then there comes to be a kind of a weird like class skewing to it, because I'm very current,

you know, on whatever activists are saying lately, because this is my job, right? So I can,

I can use BIPOC correctly, I can, you know, do all the things, but like just because somebody is

...