One of the most ironic things about what's going on is that in the 70s and 80s, being a racist became practically equivalent to being a pedophile in what you might call enlightened America and also beyond it.

So now we have a situation where this small group of people, this vocal minority, can scare

the rest of us into pretending an allegiance to things that we know we do not truly have the

kind of allegiance to that this crowd do, that often we're pretending allegiance to ideas that we know don't make any sense.

We are excluding from the common context things that we know that we value, simply because it has become such a feared thing to be called a racist.

It's good to not want to be a racist, but these people piggyback on it.

Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dome. My guest, John McWhorter,

teaches linguistics and music history at Columbia University. He's the author of more than 20 books, a contributor to the Atlantic,

and the host of the Slate podcast Lexicon Valley. If you're a fan of this show, chances are

you know John from his writings and is talking around issues of race. Since 2007, he has been in

regular conversation with Brown University economist Glenn Lowry on the bloggingheads.tv platform, where he's become highly respected as a uniquely honest voice on the complexities and often the hypocrisies of certain progressive anti-racist orthodoxies.

Last summer, John began writing a new book about all of this.

It's called The Elect, the threat to a progressive America from anti-black, anti-racists,

and it's being made available in serialized form on his substack and will be published later this year.

Meanwhile, John's new book about language, Nine Nasty Words, is out this week.

I spoke with John about his work over the last several years, his frustrations with our so-called

racial reckoning, and believe it or not, how he'd bowed not to write about race anymore

until his appreciation for cookbook author Alison Roman made him change his

mind. You'll see. I want to start actually by thanking you. As you know, and as I've written,

the conversations you were having with Glenn Lowry, starting in about 2014,

2015, a profound effect on me. And that's because you were talking about being a black person,

the way I wanted to talk about being a woman. You were talking about racism the way I wanted to talk about sexism. And until I

...