“The Elect,” a work by Black Columbia associate professor John McWhorter, is being published in serialized form on the web site Persuasion. The subtitle to one of his entries pretty much says it all: “The Neoracists: A new religion is preached across America. It’s nonsense posing as wisdom.”
McWhorter suggests the Civil Rights movement in the States to have gone through three phases, the First entailing the elimination of various laws that clearly were oppressive and indeed violations of the Constitution, the Second, spanning the sixties, seventies and eighties, seeing the gradual demise of a lot long held racist attitudes, and the Third, the focus of his present work, pushing an Ideology claiming to be “anti-racist” which is in fact “neo-racist” and a dire threat to the progress of the first two phases.
Deeming this “Anti-Racism” to be little more than a form of religious dementia, McWhorter lists some of the basic tenets endorsed by its proponents which seem to him to be utterly ridiculous:
While Black people are apparently responsible for none of the actions of other Blacks, White people are responsible for the sins of their forefathers going back hundreds if not thousands of years.
Obviously there are White Racists. But those Whites who vehemently deny that they are so, by that very declaration prove that they are! So one way or the other, all White People are Racists!
Academic institutions with affirmative action programs inevitably grant admission to minority students whose marks are inferior to others who have been turned away. But for a White person to so much as consider that any particular colored student might have benefited from that special consideration, makes that person a Racist. The only solution would seem to be to somehow forget the irrefutable fact that affirmative action initiatives exist!
As a White person, one must strive to understand the Black experience. But as no White person possibly can, none has the right to so much as comment on what is and apparently always will be utterly beyond them. Any criticism of Blacks, therefore, no matter how seemingly valid, is Racist!
Citing what he calls “third wave Anti-Racist fury,” McWhorter sympathizes with Whites who have been “cancelled” or indeed had their lives destroyed for making comments, in some cases years ago, that are utterly innocuous.
“What kind of people did this?” he asks. “Why did they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?”
They got away with it and continue to do so because our educational system was hijacked by Neo-Marxists several decades ago. I was there to witness the coup. Whereas at the beginning of my university studies in the mid sixties, Western literature was still revered by academics as an example of Man at his most Civilized seeking to explore the nature and meaning of his existence, by the time of my mid-seventies departure from post graduate school I was aware of several young profs who were less interested in the substance of the literature they were teaching than in exposing it as a tool of bigotry, bias and oppression.
It marked the beginning of this absurd era in which “intellectuals” are less concerned with the integrity of Ideas and the Values they imply than in exonerating those which clearly appear to be inferior. Hence the assertion by various “progressives” that 2+2=4 is not a Fact but merely a White Patriarchal “construct.” But if we can’t agree that 2+2 is 4, how do we even begin to talk to each other? If a White person who has never entertained a racist thought or committed a racist act in their life can nevertheless be found guilty of Racism, has not Language lost all semblance of meaning? If those outside a particular “marginalized” group have no right to comment on the beliefs and behavior of those within it, no matter how vile, has not Human Morality simply become a thing of the past?