{"id":247588,"date":"2021-12-28T08:45:51","date_gmt":"2021-12-28T08:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=247588"},"modified":"2021-12-29T08:49:32","modified_gmt":"2021-12-29T08:49:32","slug":"book-review-woke-racism-how-a-new-religion-has-betrayed-black-america-by-john-mcwhorter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=247588","title":{"rendered":"Book Review \u2013 Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, By John McWhorter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jane Coleman \u2013 Legal Insurrection Dec 26, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Earlier this month, and unbeknownst to one another, Professor Jacobson and I listened simultaneously to oral argument<\/a> in the Supreme Court tuition funding case, Carson v. Makin<\/em><\/a>. The petitioners in this case are parents challenging Maine\u2019s school funding program, which prohibits students from using state funds to attend schools that provide religious or \u201csectarian\u201d instruction. The high court must decide whether Maine\u2019s program violates the Religion Clauses of the Constitution.<\/p>\n

During oral argument, the Court\u2019s inquiry touched on a fundamental question: What beliefs, if taught in school, would amount to \u201creligion\u201d? As the state\u2019s lawyer acknowledged<\/a>, \u201cthat is an issue that this Court has struggled with over the years\u201d in cases involving conscientious objectors or IRS tax exemptions, where it has had to determine \u201cis this thing a religion or is it something else?\u201d<\/p>\n

As the state\u2019s time was coming to a close, Justice Samuel Alito asked the question that made us both sit up in our seats: What would the state say \u201cabout a school that teaches critical race theory?\u201d Would such a school be eligible under Maine\u2019s tuition aid program?<\/p>\n

The lawyer for the state balked. That question, he replied, is \u201csomething that the legislature would have to look at.\u201d No more was said about critical race theory, which was not at issue in this case to begin with. And, to be clear, the lawyer never implied anything more than that, as with \u201cwhite supremacy,\u201d which teaches \u201cprinciples of hatred,\u201d the legislature could determine that teaching critical race theory might be \u201cantithetical\u201d to the public school program.<\/p>\n

Still, one might reasonably ask: Which moral principles do amount to religious doctrine and which ones don\u2019t? And why should it be left to some \u201cbureaucrat in Bangor,\u201d as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it, to decide which ethical teachings constitute religion and which ones don\u2019t? Above all, if a school were<\/em> deemed \u201csectarian\u201d under the program because it taught critical race theory, then, under the Establishment Clause, public schools should not teach critical race theory either. These questions all lingered in the abstract after oral argument was over.<\/p>\n

Although critical race theory has yet to be deemed a \u201creligion\u201d in court, Columbia University\u2019s John McWhorter<\/a> makes the case that we should treat it as one in his book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America<\/em><\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>McWhorter is a black (the term he uses) Professor of English and comparative literature who argues that today\u2019s \u201cantiracism\u201d \u2013 whose \u201crootstock\u201d is critical race theory (CRT) \u2013 is actually a religion. Its core tenet is that racism is \u201cbaked into the structure\u201d of American society. Whites are complicit in racism merely by virtue of their existence in society. They are born with the \u201coriginal sin\u201d of \u201cwhite privilege\u201d that they can never wash off. And if they deny it, that just proves they are racists.<\/p>\n

McWhorter calls this new religion\u2019s adherents the Elect<\/a>, an elite group, smug in their belief that they \u201cget the racism thing\u201d and others do not. Their clergy includes the likes of leading spokespersons Robin DiAngelo<\/a>, and Ibram Kendi<\/a>. And they have their \u201cCatechism of Contradictions,\u201d a \u201ccollection of tenets\u201d such as, \u201cSilence about racism is violence,\u201d and \u201cIf you\u2019re white and you date only white people, you\u2019re a racist.\u201d<\/p>\n

None of this \u201cdogma\u201d makes any sense. It\u2019s not supposed to. Its purpose is to help you keep finding racism wherever you look in society, whether it\u2019s there or not.<\/p>\n

For the Elect, it is not enough merely to click your tongue in disapproval at the people who don\u2019t toe the antiracism line. These heretics must be \u201cexcommunicated\u201d or canceled, \u201cnot just spoken out against, but called out, isolated, and banned.\u201d This applies to anyone who dares disagree with them \u2014 in other words, the \u201cinsufficiently antiracist.\u201d Because Americans have been indoctrinated to be terrified of being called racists, McWhorter explains, the Elect are able to intimidate them into compliance with \u201cSalem-style\u201d threats.<\/p>\n

And like the residents of Salem accused of witchcraft who confessed in submission<\/a> to the Puritan Elect, cowed whites confess their white privilege in submission to their modern antiracist counterparts. Such genuflecting was out in full force in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd, when, for example, Democrats in Congress \u201ctook the knee<\/a>\u201d for a now-famous photo op, or when the police chief in the town of Webster, Massachusetts, famously prostrated himself<\/a> on the pavement\u00a0 in solidarity with Black Lives Matter protesters. These gestures of submission were admissions of white privilege that supposedly validated the antiracism narrative.<\/p>\n

Maintaining that narrative, McWhorter explains, is a \u201challmark of critical race theory\u201d and it matters more than the reality of any racism. No grammatical sleights of hand are lost on McWhorter, whose Ph.D. is in linguistics. He shows the reader how words can be chosen very carefully to suggest racism of the past \u201creaches into the present.\u201d As a case in point, he recounts how one historian used the present perfect tense in describing how \u201cthe work of Black creative artists has been disregarded<\/em>\u201d instead of \u201cwas\u201d or \u201chad been,\u201d giving the impression that the racism that took place at an earlier time is still alive now. And while it might seem pedantic, McWhorter demonstrates how a consistent use of these subtle turns of phrase can be misleading.<\/p>\n

Like so many ideologies that exist to perpetuate themselves, woke racism also relies on empty catchphrases, and here again, McWhorter calls them out. Readers who have been on the receiving end of a woke lecture will appreciate his scare quotes around hollow expressions such as, \u201cwe have to talk about\u201d or \u00a0\u201cwe really need to be talking about\u201d or \u201cwe must continue having the conversation\u201d about battling racism. Many of these expressions have made their way into the common parlance such as one would hear, say, in an office or corporate setting. Their hollow simulation of action to describe only talk makes it sound as though the speakers are doing something when they are really doing nothing at all. But woke racism requires that there always be racism to talk about.<\/p>\n

Other expressions, though, belie the most damning indictment of antiracism: It hurts the black people it claims to help. So when the Elect hold forth about \u201cdismantling structures\u201d while actually harming the people living in those structures, or about \u201cdecentering whiteness,\u201d when blacks don\u2019t want or need their \u201cwhiteness,\u201d they perpetuate a poisonous narrative: Black peoples\u2019 identity is formed out of what white people think of them: They are nothing but victims. And, just as whites can never erase their original sin of white privilege, blacks can never be anything but victims.<\/p>\n

If they don\u2019t understand that their essence is victimhood, McWhorter argues, they will be told they don\u2019t know \u201cwho they are,\u201d as seen by whites<\/em>. Recall, for one memorable example, then presidential candidate Joe Biden\u2019s admonition to undecided black voters: If you don\u2019t vote for me, he scolded, \u201cyou ain\u2019t black<\/a>.\u201d What could be more destructive to the human spirit than to tell the individual he has no agency over his own identity?<\/p>\n

That denial of selfhood is the insidious teaching of CRT, the \u201crootstock\u201d of the new woke religion that, as parents learned this past year, has infiltrated the K-12 school system. CRT teaches children of all races to view the world as divided between the oppressor and the oppressed, based on race. White children are made to feel ashamed of being white, and black children are made to feel victimized. Why should they be taught to identify with either group? Why should they see themselves as pitted against one another? CRT demands it.<\/p>\n

And though the harm it inflicts on children as young as five should be reason enough to ban it, McWhorter reminds the reader once again that antiracism is religion: \u201cWhen we understand that the Elect are a religious body,\u201d he writes, \u201cwe understand that their adherents have no business being the final arbiters on our school curricula.\u201d That is because, under the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, public schools may not teach religion. The dogma of antiracism, as McWhorter makes clear, is nothing other than \u201cchurch\u201d that has no place in \u201cstate.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2013<\/p>\n

Jane Coleman writes on law and policy and lives in New Jersey. Her legal treatise Secondary Trademark Infringement was published by Bloomberg BNA. You can follow Jane on Twitter @JaneBColeman<\/a> and LinkedIn<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new book argues that \u201canti-racism\u201d has become a new religion and those who won\u2019t obey its dictates are tantamount to modern heretics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,58,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Current_Affairs","category-Race"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=247588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247590,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247588\/revisions\/247590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=247588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=247588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=247588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}