Sam Harris and John McWhorter: Is wokeness dead? – Why Evolution Is True

In this shortish (23-minute) video, Sam Harris and John McWhorter discuss whether wokeness is finally dead.  The short answer is “nope.”  It may have lain down, but it refuses to die.

The YouTube notes (there’s a transcript you can see as well):

Sam Harris speaks with John McWhorter about language, ideology, and moral certainty. They discuss the rise and persistence of “wokeness” and DEI, the legacy of George Floyd’s death, the role of social media in amplifying moral panic, how identity shapes perceptions of Israel-Palestine, the linguistics of Donald Trump, the rise of casual speech, conspiracy thinking, positions McWhorter has reconsidered, and other topics.

John McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia University and writes a column for the New York Times. He earned a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University and is the author of several books, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, Word on the Street, and, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He is also the host of the language podcast Lexicon Valley.

When asked whether the damage of wokeness is unfixable, McWhorter (who wrote Woke Racism ) notes that academics continue to pass on wokeness—not mainly to undergraduates but to graduate students. This ensures, he thinks, that woke ideology will be perpetuated because in that way it gets imbued in future professors as well as in academia as a whole. McWhorter cannot imagine anything will change this pathway. Asked by Harris whether Trump isn’t uprooting DEI from schools, McWhorter suggests that DEI isn’t really disappearing, but simply going underground, branded with a new name. (I agree; that is happening everywhere, including my own school.)

McWhorter teaches music appreciation at Columbia, and discusses a claim by Philip Ewell that music theory is inherently racist, a view that McWhorter considers absurd, and yet Ewell is greatly lionized. In response, Harris muses about whether the defeat of the woke Kamala Harris was the “high water mark” of the ideology.  McWhorter responds that while “high woke” has indeed has peaked (McWhorter means by that “an eternal and punitive battle against whiteness”), the same fury and lack of reason has shifted, and can be seen in the pervasive support for Hamas among progressives as well as in “trans issues, especially surgery and sports”. Ergo, the old woke ideology is being applied to new issues, but with the same concentration on power issues.

How to solve it? McWhorter’s own solution is simply to call attention to this stuff over and over again, but in writing rather than via podcasts—though he finds that tedious given the variety of his interests.

At the end, Harris asks McWhorter what the elites, the intelligentsia, and the MSM “got wrong” in response to the tsunami of emotion and ideology that followed the death of George Floyd.  I’ll let you hear his answer in the last five minutes.  Thrown in at the end is a description of a rupture that McWhorter had with his erstwhile podcast pal, Glenn Loury.

McWhorter and Harris pretty much agree that, for the nonce, wokeness is here to stay. Though it may manifest itself in new ways, the underlying ideology (derived from postmodernism) of power differentials and “personal truths”, most notably in emphasizing inequities between blacks and whites, shows no signs of disappearing.

So it goes.

h/t: Bat