John McWhorter

Thanks for the link! I wonder if you've read the whole thing? Several chapters in [0], we find:

...I’m realizing I can’t use the term neoracism in the subtitle of my The Elect book.

From assorted social media posts, I am realizing that if I say Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and Their Threat to a Progressive America, many understandably think I am referring to black people being racist against whites.

I need to specify – despite that it may dampen the enthusiasm for my book among some – that I do not think of black people being racist against whites and white people being racist against blacks as equally reprehensible.

Many whites are deeply aggrieved that they are assailed for being racists, but that no one seems to mind black people not liking white people. They want us to assail black racism as vociferously as we do white racism.

I must disappoint. I am fully on board with the idea that racism is about who is up versus down. Black racism against whites is, at least at its foundation, about resentment at being abused. To apply the same judgment to this as to blacks being racist against whites is facile, uninsightful – frankly, almost a debate team trick.

“But where does it lead if you hate me and I hate you and you hate me …?” – okay. But we live in our own limited time slices. There are two layers here.

One: just a few inches past about 1964, is it so unpardonable, so incomprehensible, that black people might be mad at white people?

Two: if you object that 1964…

I'd be happy to. A good place to start is the excellent, nuanced commentary on this topic from black professors Glenn Loury and John McWhorter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0H4M5uP_y8

One thing they reference during this podcast but don't talk about in much detail is the case of Tony Timpa. Many of the things many claim only happen to black Americans are in fact more general issues of police brutality, poor training, or hard realities of policing. And that means yes, it happens to white Americans too.

The last thing I want to do is distract from the issues. I want us to move past these surface level discussions that we are inundated with in both the professional and social media realms. Please watch the Glenn and John episode above for more on what I mean.

Edit: Apologies. To be clear, Tony Timpa was a white man killed by a police officer in Dallas a few years ago via knee on neck. No media attention or mass protests.

Edit 2: For those more textually inclined, here is McWhorter's most recent post on the topic
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-victorians-had-to-accept-darwin

> seem to treat their agoraphobia with the same fervor and source of moral purity as a religion

Oh yea, I'm gay and it clicked to me recently that the gay clubs I go to are basically just monasteries now. It used to be that gay people were known for unabashedly saying what couldn't be said (the profane) - it's now the complete opposite, gay people largely are enumerating an endless list of what's considered profane. Constant pearl-clutching, tip-toeing, hushed gossip, forced repentance and excommunication.

It's hard not to see the illiberal attitudes on the left (which at least in recent history were concentrated on the right, a consequence of their rigid sense of morality and tradition) as nothing more than rule-book fanatics evangelizing and prescribing a sacred morality.

John McWhorter calls these people The Elect, and I think correctly identified that this is fundamentally a religion. It spans all sorts of topics, but maintains the same character, for instance, in something like anti-racism:

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-posing-as-antiracists

And that sounds like something a racist would say. Seriously, "a white"? Does my race matter to you because you judge the validity of arguments by the skin color of the people making them?

Also, while I haven't read DiAngelo's greater oeuvre, that's a pretty poor quote to pull. The symptoms (anger and fear particularly) and strategies he gives of a white person experiencing "white fragility" could just as easily be applied to a black person experiencing racism! Which honestly is in accord with my wider experience with the anti-racist movement. Its most ardent supporters tend to say things that, as a non-American (and non-European before you make that assumption), are almost indistinguishable to me from white supremacy. I find myself agreeing greatly with John McWhorter (https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-posing-as-antiracists-e2f?s=r) over Ibram X. Kendi.

I’m referring to his use of the word in his new book (which he is serializing for free on his substack), “The Elect: Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and Their Threat to a Progressive America”. [1] The first place I saw the term used (he has also used it on the Glenn Show podcast).

Regardless, I came not to blame him, but to praise him.

Though I do agree with Kmele Foster’s insistence that the term “racist” is well and good enough to describe the type of segregationist thinking and reification of the fiction of race that is promoted by so-called anti-racists.

[1] https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-posing-as-antiracists

> This is the take of people who have little on the line, and don't face issues everyday

This kind of narrative is an easy way to dismiss the opinions of people who disagree with you, but it bears little resemblance to the real world, where people of all kinds face issues that you may or may not know about, and people of all demographics actually do care about things like beloved Dr Seuss books going out of print: https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/and-then-they-came-for-on-beyond