Columbia's John McWhorter: People Are Pretending To Agree With "Anti-Racism" To Avoid Being Publicly Shamed

Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter said anti-racism teachings have created a "reign of terror where you’re just dared to disagree," on this week's broadcast of 'Firing Line with Margaret Hoover' on PBS.

McWhorter says that making these teachings the "fulcrum" of pedagogy has turned schools into “antiracist boot camps."

HOOVER: Your next book is entitled Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Explain what is the relationship between antiracism and critical race theory?

MCWHORTER: Well, antiracism is a fashionable word these days, but what it means in practice -- you know, who knows what its definition in the dictionary is -- but what it means in practice is that if there is some kind of imbalance between white and Black people, the reason is something called racism -- either bigotry or some raw deal that Black people have been done as the result of it, and probably a mixture of the two. And that, therefore, what we're going to do is we're going to battle that racism. That's what anti-racism means in our current context. And the problem with it is that often what we're seeing as, quote-unquote “racist” isn't. So Black kids tend not to do as well on standardized tests. Well, instead of saying how do we get Black kids to do better on them, which is something that has happened in the past, the new idea is that you say, ‘let's just get rid of the test because the test must be racist.’ You don't have to specify how, but if the Black kids don't do as well on it, the test is a racist practice. That's a real leap. That is a hyper-radical way of looking at things that I think most people, if presented with the mechanics of the argument, would think of as rather cruel, frankly, to Black kids. That's not the way to run a society, most of us would think. Some people might be able to make a case for it, but most of us wouldn't agree with that. But instead, we're being taught that if you're not an anti-racist, you're bad and we're going to embarrass you on Twitter. And as a result, many people end up pretending to agree with ideas like this.