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Book Review: “Woke Racism” by John McWhorter

John McWhorter is a linguist who has made a small splash repping the more scientifically-minded mainstream center-left in papers like the New York Times and the Atlantic. According to Wikipedia, he was called a “radical centrist” 20 years ago. This characterization appears to stem largely from his view, the focus of much of his prolific extra-linguistic work, that America’s obsession with race is in some ways harming black people even as we’ve made dramatic egalitarian progress since the 90s.

The idea that “social justice warriors” are harmful isn’t new — I could swear that term predates the 2010s — but McWhorter’s unique spin is in the subtitle: “How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”

And he really means that, writing:

I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion… I mean that it actually is a religion… An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.

To be precise on who “these people” are, the antiracists he’s referring to are the sort of White Fragility loving, Ta-Nehisi Coates quoting, virtue signaling Black Lives Matter-ers. These are the athletes in what I’ve been calling the “woke olympics” for some years now. But McWhorter, being a linguist — and doubling down on the religion angle — goes to great lengths to adopt and proselytize the term an essayist he admires has coined for them: the Elect.

I will not title them “social justice warriors.” That and other labels such as “the woke mob” are unsuitably dismissive… We will term these people the Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom… as having been chosen, as it were… as understanding something most do not.

I’m not sure I love it, but all right. Is this really a religion, though? McWhorter’s subsections address what he sees are clear parallels to the familiar religions: “The Elect have a clergy”; “The Elect have original sin” — white privilege, of course; “The Elect are evangelical”; “The Elect ban the heretic”; and on, and on. The one that landed for me is the idea that you can’t meaningfully explore any concepts with them: “white privilege”, “necessary allyism”, “doing the work”, you name it. They clam up, they turn it around to be an attack on you, it’s just that Chili Peppers song: “if you have to ask, you’ll never know.” In that sense, it is very much like a faith-based belief.

What’s attractive about this religion? It’s a lot clearer for white people today, who might feel like they missed the opportunity to claim the right side of history during the civil rights movement and are inventing another conflict to win. But for black people who buy into it, McWhorter has a tougher appeal to learned helplessness in two parts: fractured self-image from the ravages of Jim Crow — the noble victim for whom “alienation is therapeutic” — and imposed welfare from both well-meaning Great Society types and militant leftists hoping to bring about the end of capitalism. (Apparently much of McWhorter’s earlier scholarship focuses on this black helplessness idea, so this book touches only lightly upon it — but his claim that the National Welfare Rights Organization tried to collapse the economy on purpose didn’t quickly bear itself out from a quick Wikipedia dive, so I doubt whether this historical interpretation is robust.)

OK, but why is this religion harmful? And here’s where I agree: “Do not heed those who say that this religion isn’t important. Make no mistake: they’re coming for your kids.” What’s maybe most interesting about the book, then, is what it is not: it is not a handbook for changing minds. Rather, it’s a book that highlights what McWhorter sees as the most pernicious aspects of what the Elect do and, in that context, practical tips for peacefully co-existing without getting cancelled.

That said, McWhorter isn’t only a naysayer. He acknowledges the real and ongoing harms afflicting black people in America today, and he has a platform of priorities to address them:

  1. Fight to end the war on drugs.
  2. Make sure kids not from book-lined homes are taught to read with phonics.
  3. Advocate vocational training for poor people and battle the idea that “real” people go to college.

What’s frustrating for me is that these seem like the most basic, common sense appeals we could imagine. Are they radical? But all we get from the left as a platform nowadays is DEI scolding and anti-Trumpism. Is anyone seriously working to improve our lives?

2021, 201 pages.

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Book Review

Book Review: “A World Without Email” by Cal Newport

Surely many if not most of us have some amount of email fatigue, but who would want a world without it entirely? But the provocative title has this subtitle: “Reimagining work in an age of communication overload.” This book is not about a world without email, but rather ponders an information workforce that doesn’t accidentally rely upon email for coordinating most effort. The central thesis is that knowledge workers let email — and more recently, Slack — happen to us and that the optimal application of electronic communication is very likely not so unstructured. While Newport’s ruminations on successor technologies are not fleshed out enough to form a true proposal, his case studies and arguments are I think worthwhile for beginning a paradigm shift toward how we think about knowledge work this century.

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2020 Analysis Domestic Policy Election History

Ginsburg’s vacancy shows whose rhetoric is working

The passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a loss for the Court and for the nation. Chief Justice John Roberts called her a “jurist of historic stature”, a “cherished colleague”, and “a tireless and resolute champion of justice.” All that she certainly was; while this blog has at times criticized her frequently dissenting opinions, her 27 years on the bench places her among the top 25 longest-serving justices in history, as well as the longest-serving and only second-appointed woman to join the Court.

While her body was yet warm, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised to vote on a replacement nominated by President Trump, whose reelection would be decided in fewer than seven weeks — a position seemingly at stark odds with the one he took after Justice Scalia’s sudden passing in 2016. Then, McConnell stated — within an hour of confirmation of the Justice’s passing — that his vacancy should remain “until we have a new president.” He held that line, refusing to hold a vote on then-President Obama’s choice of Merrick Garland to succeed Scalia in order to “give the people a voice in the filling of this vacancy”, despite the fact that more than eleven months remained in Obama’s second term.

The number of pictures capturing these two together appears to be a small one.

Major papers of record (Washington Post, LA Times, New York Times), have opined hypocrisy. Some Democrats are so outraged that they’re calling for court packing, an idea endorsed by House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler and backed by many others. But is McConnell actually changing his position on Supreme Court confirmation votes? A careful read of his statements shows that ‘ol Moscow Mitch is not necessarily a hypocrite but rather a shrewdly calculating, hyper-partisan, master rhetorician. Democrats would do well to notice the difference and attempt to follow suit.

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Reporting

welcome to the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

Much has already been reported about the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, aka Free Capitol Hill, or just the CHAZ. I won’t recapitulate any of that; but as I live only four miles south of the abandoned east police precinct, I decided to go down there yesterday to check it out myself. Apparently even as I was there, it was being rebranded CHOP for Capitol Hill Organized Protest. Protest yes, organized somewhat. Here’s what I saw on Saturday June 13th. Click any image to load at hi-res.

Welcome to CHAZ! This is the entrance on 11th between Pike and Pine.
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Analysis Legal Decision Review

confusion abounds in the case of the same-sex wedding baker

One of the most publicized cases of the 2017-2018 Supreme Court term was Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v Colorado Civil Rights Commission. At issue was the petition by the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop that his First Amendment rights had been violated when he was sanctioned by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple’s reception. This petition was rejected by every court until the Supreme one, which in a 7-2 decision agreed with a small part of the petitioner’s Free Exercise claim and set aside the sanction of the Commission.

In a term beset with split decisions, this result seems at first like a resounding endorsement of the primacy of religious freedom above civil rights. The press about the decision overwhelming framed it as the Court siding with the baker, and the reaction to that formulation caused a lot of concern.

But that formulation was very misleading. The Court didn’t so much rule for the baker as it ruled against the Commission, essentially declaring a mistrial because of what it perceived as anti-religious animus in the record. Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, explicitly punted on addressing the underlying tension between religious liberty and civil rights that formed the core of the baker’s suit.

What’s also interesting is how disunited the Court was in reaching a 7-2 decision. In all, five opinions were written for this case, only one a dissent. All the opinions attack each other from footnotes, and often the targets of those attacks were themselves written in footnotes. It looks like a lot of the deliberation was done through correspondence, and the contorted opinions suffer from the confusion. But a careful reading of them reveals a clumsily evolving jurisprudence around the Free Speech and Free Exercise clauses, as well as possible fault lines in the Court that could fracture in subsequent decisions where more is at stake. A future case that forces a direct confrontation of the tension between First Amendment and civil rights could be much tighter and more explosive.

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Analysis Domestic Policy Economics Op-Ed Review

income tax apologists’ own analysis shows the rich don’t pay their fair share

No one’s much surprised, but the Democrats are losing opportunities in the messaging war on tax reform. In a gleefully titled “reality check” oped, Fox News and Townhall contributor Guy Benson recently referenced an old USA Today fact check which called the Democrats’ rhetoric ahead of the Trump tax cuts “misleading.” It’s news now because of a Bloomberg piece analyzing 2016 tax data made available by the IRS in August. While that piece is not as hostile to progressive taxation as it might be, it is itself misleading in several ways and clearly seeks to emphasize to the same startling result from Benson’s piece: just over half of federal individual income taxes are paid by the top 3% of taxpayers when ranked by gross adjusted income (AGI).

Benson seizes on this to assert that the “Left’s political stories about ‘fair shares’ and ‘millionaires and billionaires’… [are] not grounded in facts and omit crucial perspective.” But it is Benson and his tax cut apologists — making claims like “we have a federal spending problem, not a revenue problem” — who lack crucial perspective. A careful reading of the very Bloomberg analysis that motivated Benson’s opinion shows just how bad a revenue problem our nation has.

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Analysis Speculation

Kennedy no Swing Justice, Kavanaugh unlikely as dramatic upset to Court’s ideological baseline

As Judge Kavanaugh closes in on joining the Supreme Court, I’m reminded of some thoughts I had when Justice Kennedy first announced his retirement. Kennedy had long been hailed as a “swing vote” because, while a nominal conservative, he frequently broke ranks to side with the liberals. Now some are voicing concerns that another Trump pick, especially in the form of Kavanaugh, will signal a sharp and even unprecedented right turn that will last for a generation: last week, NPR’s Domenico Montanaro opined that this pick will be “replacing the swing vote on the Supreme Court” and that “for the first time in 75 years or so, there would be a conservative majority on the Court.”

There’s some truth that Kavanaugh would pull the Court to the right, but only because he is himself so sharply conservative in his jurisprudence. But Kennedy’s reputation as a swing judge is in fact quite undeserved. Kennedy was a pronounced conservative, and his “swing” decisions — typically involving individual civil rights — can be better understood through his relatively unsophisticated fear of government encroachment against finely scoped individual freedoms. If Kennedy was popularly understood to be a check on the more aggressively conservative inclinations of the modern Court, that understanding was mistaken. And if Kavanaugh is confirmed to replace him, that will most likely just cement the conservative-leaning majority the Court has actually enjoyed for most of the last 75 years.

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Analysis Legal Decision Review

recent decision shows Brett Kavanaugh should not join Supreme Court

President Tump’s pick of Brett Kavanaugh to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has ruffled some feathers. For example, my Senator Patty Murray is on record opposing his nomination on two grounds: first, that by association with Trump he would overturn Roe v Wade if occasion permitted; and second, due to rebukes he made against the Roberts Court which decided it, he opposes constitutional sanction of ObamaCare. Another complaint in wide circulation is how it is well understood (though somewhat debated) that he would support Congressional action to shield sitting Presidents from civil lawsuits.

While those concerns are valid as far as they go, I’m worried that focusing on them is unlikely to prevail in derailing his appointment since, quite frankly, it isn’t clear that they concern a plurality of Senators. I believe that Kavanaugh’s long record of jurisprudence is independently disqualifying outside those narrow political parameters and more attention should be paid to his overall legal philosophy. Luckily efforts are being made to obtain the fullness of his public record, though powerful Senators are also trying — in some cases hypocritically — to block an open review.

Thanks to reporting from the Intercept, I was made aware of a fairly shocking decision that Kavanaugh handed down — on the very day Trump announced him as his pick — from the three-judge Appeals Court on which he sat. I think that decision is a telling vignette into Kavanaugh’s current judicial philosophy and temperament. It casts serious doubt on his candidacy for the highest court to say nothing of the risk it reveals to government transparency law. I think emphasizing this style of failing will be more salient in openly evaluating Kavanaugh. My analysis follows.

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Analysis Music Review

2017 Music Review: top 10 albums, 20-track playlist

I’ve made a tradition of reviewing my take on the new music scene each year since 2012, and the format seems to be working pretty well. I like it because it keeps me honest as a forcing function to remember what I heard over the course of the year and thoughtfully consider what I liked and didn’t like; and it’s useful as a reference for posterity. As usual, I missed some things and am already aware of them now, but I try to stay mostly in the confines of what I discovered during the year 2017 itself even though I’m now so late. So here now is the sixth annual edition of that effort — enjoy!

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Analysis Book Domestic Policy Nonfiction Review

debate isn’t trash, but “identity politics” might be

So-called “identity politics” have been on the rise for some years. Growing scholarship and discussion of systemic disadvantages against demographic groups has led to a rising and justified righteous anger against those forces. But especially in recent years this has resulted in a tendency for every social issue to be framed with a racist or sexist lens. The most outspoken purveyors of this framing are so sure of their analysis that their righteous anger has turned into self-righteous anger. Their quest to unite the disadvantaged through aggressive inclusion has actually backfired in division, an idea explored by the Guardian just last week.

My own sense of the perilousness of this approach has been growing slowly, but it crystallized in part while I was recently reading Tracy Kidder’s now-15-year-old book Mountains Beyond Mountains. While debating whether to write a full review of that work in the style of my previous book reviews, several editorials emerged which highlighted for me the most important takeaway: “identity politics” — which militantly reject debate and elevate tribalist and personal “truth” at the expense of individual liberty — at best waste time and at worst threaten the foundational principle of open debate in a free and progressive society.

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