While McWhorter wishes to reassure his readers that he is not against religion, even in its BLM incarnation, he also wishes to reassure liberals and leftists that he is not a supporter of the conservative Right. He seeks to address New York Times and NPR-type audiences that, he says, have wrongly accepted the argument that virtue signaling about racism will in some way help black people. McWhorter thus marshals Martin Luther King’s idea that character is more important than skin color against the kind of victim politics that emphasizes weakness and injury as rewards in their own right.
While the rejection of a culture of complaint is perhaps necessary to political integrity, it has also been an alibi for those who seek to restrict benefits to those who can already afford them. That is why McWhorter’s defeatist stance abandons the task of convincing antiracists that their approach to social praxis is mistaken. On this point, McWhorter’s post-racialism complements rather than challenges the ideology of race managers like Coates and Kendi. His call to “live graciously” among antiracist power brokers should not be countered with activist outrage and indignation, or even smarmy academic irony, but with those left critiques and strategies that have sustained the communist hypothesis across and beyond the valley of postmodernism.
While leftists are no more enamored of DiAngelo-style diversity training than the black guys at Bloggingheads or the reasonable folks at The New Culture Forum, the Left does not advocate self-reliance so much as autonomy in and through solidarity. That the concept of solidarity is now also under attack from the academic Left is only one reason why radical leftists, unlike McWhorter, do not see themselves as serving their race or, as the case may be, attacking their own (white) race. For a socialist, politics is not a matter of identity.
Building an in-group, rather than a universalist politics, so as to buttress society against the woke mob, is McWhorter’s first line of attack. The first chapter of Woke Racism is dedicated to establishing who these “woke” people are who, for example, cancel nurses for saying things like “everyone’s life matters.” What kind of people are they? Why do they get away with their righteous attacks? Should others allow them to continue?
In some ways, these questions answer themselves. The devil is in the details insofar as the mounting of any challenge to woke antiracism must appreciate the distinct aspects of the postmodern variant of antiracism. Although nothing about political purges or encounter groups is new, McWhorter is correct to say that some of what we are witnessing did not exist only five years ago. One of the shifts, as Angela Nagle has argued, is that countercultural transgression is now also common on the Right, while the liberal Left has arguably become more censorious than it was during the politically correct eighties.
To take one example described by McWhorter, the data analyst David Shor was fired in 2020 for tweeting a study by a black Ivy League scholar which shows how violent sixties protests were more likely to deliver voters to the Republicans than nonviolent protests. The fact that Shor was not endorsing this study did not prevent his critics from arguing that it was inappropriate for a white man to make this information available. What Shor did, regardless of his intention, is nothing that someone like Chris Hedges would not also say. However, not everyone has the platform that Hedges has to defend his views from those who would demand absolute conformity to inexistent and absurd rules.
What defines the new phase of antiracism is the shift away from abolition and civil rights struggles toward the kind of “third wave antiracism” (TWA) that considers whites to be inherently complicit with structural racism. The obverse to this is the assumption that the fact of embodiment makes blacks inherently radical. McWhorter rightfully decries the zealous sort of inquisitorial micro-politics that brands even leftists as backward. Wokesters do more damage than they advance the cause of antiracism when they define mathematics and punctuality as “white” or reduce Shakespeare and Lincoln to racism. That this heightening of performative politics, of giving and taking offense, has led to denunciatory rituals is an indication of the illiberal shadow of conventional liberalism. It’s a capitalist world, after all, and that is something that most cynics can agree about.
McWhorter is correct to say that the woke serve a purpose other than the one they say they do. However, his critique of contradictions does not point to those of labor and capital, but rather to an anthropological realism that is populated by bigots, killjoys, power-mongers, and social justice slayers. The “catechism of contradictions” that McWhorter attributes to latter-day inquisitors is as dualistic as it is metaphysical and no doubt the lodestar of a Protestant work ethic that continues to associate material wealth with salvation.
McWhorter contends that only religion explains why the actually existing antiracist public policies are not enough for the woke. Since these missionaries are inherently self-interested, he adopts Joseph Bottum’s concept of “the Elect” to define those who consider themselves the chosen ones who can lead their people to the promised land. A moral critique is thereby devised to strategically detract from the political and class critique. This moral critique is something that liberals share with conservatives about as much as their concern for tax breaks.
McWhorter ignores the reality that causing “beautiful trouble” is today not only a matter of social justice but also a career in the creative and knowledge industries. The main character in the TV series The Chair tells the continuing education student David Duchovny that a great deal has happened in the last 30 years, like affect theory, ecocriticism, digital humanities, new materialism, book history, and critical race theory. Indeed.
McWhorter predicts that the woke will soon have to tamper their Elect nonsense if they are not to lose more people to the Trump Right. In the meanwhile, the best defense against the Elect is knowing how to identify them and understanding the ways in which they operate like a religious sect. The woke do not know they are religious, yet they unquestioningly accept doctrine as a matter of etiquette, demanding the submission of their followers. Their clergy includes gifted orators who denounce the sin of white privilege, going the extra mile to denounce the presence of this within themselves. Testifying to privilege on Sunday is more important than what one does the rest of the week.
Woke evangelism teaches that the discussion of racism is in and of itself a matter of revelation. Donations to the church of woke by corporate America, even in the form of expiation, like the removal of Confederate statues or The New York Times 1619 Project, or just taking a knee, are accepted as signs of the infallibility of the Elect’s view of the world. As the list of heretics who are burned at the stake increases along with the number of words that constitute blasphemy, their power increases. In practical terms, this means that unless one is actively committed to issues of race, gender and sexuality, one can be suspected of heresy.
While the Elect can be found anywhere, their presence among university faculty adds intellectual cachet to their prosecutorial might. All of this is true enough, but the reality of academic life is that it is a competitive environment in even the best of circumstances. Cornel West has been decrying the gangsterization of academic life since at least the 1980s. The difference now is that, with the disappearance of tenure and the overreliance on adjunct teachers, the pressures placed on instructors by neoliberal administrations and disrespectful students has made “the last job that makes sense anymore” into an increasingly privatized zone of conflict.
Because it risks undermining solidarity, TWA accompanies and facilitates the managerial deskilling, commodification and marketization of education. Even those programs that specialize in TWA are affected by what they do. As McWhorter claims, or as Thomas Kuhn might have put it in more scientific terms, TWA supplants older religions. While one might think that ceci tuera cela is par for the course in an innovative knowledge sector, new knowledge is not necessarily better knowledge. The march through the institutions by radical intellectuals is undermined in this regard by the broader defeats of the Left in the postwar era, leading, as Richard Barbrook has put it, to a replacement of the struggle between socialism and capitalism with the struggle between old (left) forces and the new (left) social movements. Since TWA is by and large a postmodern phenomenon, even this matters less than the term social justice suggests.
If religion has no place in the classroom, which is not a claim that can be fully sustained, what about race metaphysics and applied social justice postmodernism, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay refer to it? McWhorter claims that the woke do not play according to the rules of Enlightenment reason. However, if the classroom is to remain a place of critical inquiry, it does not serve anyone to limit what can and cannot be studied. As Slavoj Žižek says, it takes religion to make good people do bad things. McWhorter says the same about woke antiracism. For this reason, he insists that trends like critical race theory can not only be taught, but that they can also be criticized. The question for us is whether the extended metaphor of religion is fair in that regard.
As with fascist irrationality, the definition of woke antiracism as a religion allows McWhorter to generously add that its advocates are not simply insane. Like Pluckrose and Lindsay, his rejection of TWA allows him to make a second, arguably more ideologically important move, which is to relate the “performative ideology” of the woke Elect to literary deconstruction and then extend this critique of postmodernism to the academic Left. If woke activists can claim that seeing a white man hold a black baby hurts them, or claim that cisheteropatriarchy justifies looting, then the shift from a socially reformist Left to a culturally conformist Left transforms the politics of equality into a guerrilla war against reason, objectivity, truth and accountability. This is not a politics of speaking truth to power but a will to empowerment through the relativization of truth claims through concepts like standpoint epistemology. Postmodernism’s suspicion of meta-narratives becomes the meta-narrative of suspicion.
McWhorter argues that Electism is today more powerful than the Marxist pretense to offer a comprehensive worldview. The woke are thus identified and identify themselves as the left in contemporary American politics. So long as there is no socialist around to provide some needed contrast, the woke can present themselves as the redeemers of humanity, filling the left-wing hole that was created with the political shift to neoliberalism.
Deconstructing privilege, the woke have come to view their struggle as the activist dismantling of hegemonic structures. Unlike Jane Addams and MLK, McWhorter says, the woke do not accomplish anything much since they have given themselves the easy task of denouncing everything as racist, sexist and homophobic. He argues that buzzwords like structural and institutional racism anthropomorphize the term racism and require that people suspend their disbelief that not everything is driven by prejudice. This interesting suggestion does nothing to alter the reality that these concepts are products of the same Cold War liberalism that McWhorter ascribes to but does not analyze, better to leave his readers none the wiser about that fact. And why should he when so many of the more critical voices among academic and activist leftists do not do so themselves?
Woke antiracism is an ideological support of neoliberal institutions that have undergone a thorough legitimation crisis. Since McWhorter defends this system, his sleight of hand on the issue of antiracism substitutes class politics for disingenuous concern about the fate of black people. While nothing about his own politics has much in common with the labor politics and anti-imperialism of the Civil Rights generation, the fact that BLM has little to do with them either allows him to pose as the defender of black interests.
The transformation of black radicalism in the form of TWA difference politics now finds “allies” among whites who gladly engage in sycophantic rituals of humility and demand that others do the same. Although not all black people want or expect this from whites, the focus on the condition of being psychologically broken, according to McWhorter, is advanced as proof that one has not sold out to the white power structure. The loyal opposition of the woke antiracist is therefore not the Marxist Left or white liberals but right-wing whites. The Elect ultimately associate all heretics with this group, regardless of the reasons for them having fallen out of favor.
The only group remaining that can advance the cause of blacks, McWhorter claims, are black conservatives. Along postmodern lines, today’s blackness is more a deconstructed category than it is a matter of black essentialist authenticity since blackness is not defined by the woke in terms of what it is, but rather in terms of what it is not, namely: not white and not racist. “Elect ideology,” McWhorter writes, “requires non-white people to found their sense of self on not being white, and on not liking how white people may or may not feel about them.”Like the hysteric in Freudian analysis, antiracists do not call for people to stress their individuality but their condition of secondariness. On this topic, McWhorter avoids the more heady concepts of people like Orlando Patterson, Sylvia Wynter, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Fred Moten.
Although someone can genuinely be said to be victimized – like George Floyd, for example, or Julian Assange – victim politics counter-defines McWhorter’s definition of individualism. One is an individual (like John McWhorter) because one is not a victim or because one refuses the status of victim on the singular basis of ascriptive racial category. However, one can be both an individual and a victim. The experience of victimization need not lead to the balkanization of the self but a social world in which the latter would be a desirable outcome, in the form of negative theology, is one in which Marxism has lost all purchase on reality and praxis. That this can be reverse engineered by the kind of zealotry that McWhorter otherwise accurately describes merely underscores the reactionary if not fascist frames of reference in which these social phenomena and discussions take place.
This perhaps more than anything else explains why woke antiracists make “being oppressed” the essence of black identity — because victim status is a seemingly winning hand in a game that blacks cannot lose given the postulate that majority subjects cannot make similar claims. If they do, they identify with reactionary racist whites and lose the game twice over. While McWhorter’s rejection of antiracism as a performative and expressive anti-politics is shared by some leftists, the limitation of (black) politics by anyone to notions of masquerade and transgression is not something that can pose a serious challenge to capitalism.
McWhorter is correct to say that there is nothing progressive about a performative game of victim politics that is gloomy, illogical, and pointless. However, a different game cannot be played when people insist on its unwritten rules. Changing the game means changing the rules of the game. On this point, McWhorter is no help at all. While he does not wish to insist on “the race thing” in the same way that people like Kendi do, he is self-admittedly short on solutions.
Rather than the long list of policy demands that defined the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, for example, McWhorter is satisfied to identity three policy proposals: 1) end the War on Drugs, 2) teach phonics to improve literacy, and 3) get past the idea that everyone needs to go to college and instead value working-class jobs. Why so few planks? Because, McWhorter says, platforming too many good ideas is more performative than actionably pragmatic in a polarized parliamentary system. Although Great Society efforts are facts of history and Democratic Party liberals like Mark Lilla advocate a return to them, McWhorter dismisses this as unsophisticated utopianism. Better to keep your sights on the realistic future rather than bygone times, he advises, adding that those gains achieved by the labor struggles he cannot bring himself to mention have not, in his estimation, had any lasting effect. Only a limited number of policy proposals that have a chance of making it through Congress and come with in-built gains should be pursued.
One can see from this why it is that working-class jobs need to be valorized. If nothing can realistically advance the interests of the working class in corporate America at the level of wages, paid time off and holidays, affordable housing, free college tuition, universal health care, criminal justice reform, ecology, day care and elder care, etc., then conservatives do well to minimize demands for equality since any one major gain for the working class, like those civil rights laws that were not simply utopian, threaten to lead from one victory to another.
Woke Racism offers no real solutions to our problems. It is not even a good analysis of them. It just says no to woke antiracism in the same way that conservatives say no to the countercultural “mobocracy” that they consider to be little more than a nuisance.
McWhorter is right to say that opposition to racism is not by itself a politics. What would do the most to alleviate the problems that are exacerbated by racism or that lead to racism is not something that he addresses head on. Rather than the broad set of phenomena that cannot be limited to minorities or to racism, he prefers, as a black man, to think of woke antiracism as an exaggerated form of virtue signaling. If the performance of black authenticity is inoperative as the substance of left politics, it is not, as McWhorter suggests, because it lacks logic, but because it does not, by itself, provide a radical perspective on class relations.
While there are different approaches to the identity and class debate, Žižek’s recent publication, Heaven in Disorder, offers a useful summary of the fundamental dilemma. In the entry “Class Struggle Against Classism,” Žižek mentions the political divide between progressive neoliberals like Biden — who give lip service to identity and demographics but are otherwise no different than the Republicans — and progressive populists, who mobilize constituencies on the basis of progressive policy as well as cultural competence, meaning the kind of postmodern equity that replaces universalist equality with attention to disparities based on ascriptive differences.
An ostensibly “inside-outside” populist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can criticize the Biden administration while simultaneously rejecting the “class essentialism” of socialists. This criticism, Žižek argues, is the old liberal-left trick of accusing the Left of serving the Right. It is reflected in Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara’s downplaying of the January 6 coup attempt and warning to the Left that too much criticism of the Democratic Party only serves the far Right.
The “brocialist” Left is said to privilege class over anti-racism and feminism. The question is: Does the progressive neoliberalism of Clinton, Obama, and Biden actually do anything better to advance the cause of women, blacks, and minority groups? Assuming it is accepted that global capitalism is the target of left politics, class essentialism cannot be considered to be the problem, that is to say, except as Stalinist deviation.
Contrary to his equivocation on the Biden administration on the Bad Faith Podcast, Žižek does not accept the Democratic Party agenda as part of a strategy that, by making things worse, would eventually lead to change. He does not advocate staying “inside” the system so as to pursue a more radical “outside” politics. This does not imply that the Left must reject any and every progressive policy put forward by the Biden administration — not that there have been very many, beyond the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The accusation of class essentialism, Žižek says, misses its mark. Without dismissing ecological, feminist, antiracist, decolonial, and national struggles, class should be understood as the dynamic that overdetermines these interacting and multiple struggles. Against radical democratic and intersectional approaches, Žižek rejects the bell hooks idea that class is only one in a series of antagonisms. When class is reduced to one among other identities, he argues, class becomes another version of identity politics. The resulting “classism” advocates (self-)respect for workers, which Žižek says is a characteristic of both populism and fascism.
The problem with John McWhorter’s Woke Racism is that it tacitly accepts racial oppression because it defends class exploitation. Since capitalism makes use of antiracism in ways that are similar to its use of racism — by and large to divide the working class and defend the interests of the ruling plutocracy — internationalist class solidarity is the missing element of his study. Class overdetermines the relation between race and class in McWhorter’s analysis. Because he accepts capitalist class exploitation, his description of race politics has no explanatory value.
Not only is McWhorter’s theory regressive with respect to the possibility of improving people’s lives, but it must rely on anthropological guilt structures, couched in the terms of religion, in order to make capitalism seem eternal and unchanging. In the end, it is McWhorter who is a strange bedfellow of woke antiracists since both rely on a static view of the social order. The woke libertarian’s emphasis on the original sin and eternal damnation of racism is echoed by the economic libertarian’s conservative theory of human nature and ratification of capitalist social relations as the norm and telos of social progress.
Marc James Léger is a Marxist cultural theorist based in Montreal. He is author of Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (2022) and Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (2022).
