Woke Racism Quotes

“We need the hard left to point us to new ways of thinking. However, we need them to go back to doing this while seated, with the rest of us, rather than standing up and getting their way by calling us moral perverts if we disagree with them and calling this speaking truth to power.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“Black boys do commit more violent offenses in public schools than other kids. Period. This means that if we follow these prophets’ advice and go easier on black boys, we hinder the education of other black students. The Elect earnestly decry that most black kids go to school with only other black kids, because it fits into their agenda to point out “segregation.” But that “segregation” also entails that the black boys they think should be allowed to beat other kids up in school are handing out the beatings to other black kids.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“The work we should do involves calling for the war on drugs to end, supporting phonics-based reading instruction, and celebrating every political move that helps dilute the conviction that all people need to spend four years living in a dorm before they start training for the workplace. That’s work enough, and it will help change the world.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“The reality is that what the Elect call problematic is what a Christian means by blasphemous”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“To anticipate a question, yes, I do believe that to be white in America is to automatically harbor certain unstated privileges in terms of one’s sense of belonging. Figures of authority are the same color as you. You are thought of as the default category.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“DiAngelo’s White Fragility seeks to convert whites to a profound reconception of themselves as inherently complicit in a profoundly racist system of operation and thought. Within this system, if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too “fragile” to admit it. The circularity here—“You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you are”—is the logic of the sandbox.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism and privately almost hope that it doesn’t, because it would deprive you of a sense of purpose. We must conceive of such people as adherents of a sect called the Elect.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“A critical mass of the people he was referring to no longer just quietly pride themselves on their enlightenment in knowing to be offended about certain things, but now see it as a duty to excoriate and shun those (including black people) who don’t share their degree of offense.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“At the University of California, San Diego the year before racial preferences were banned in the late 1990s, exactly one black student out of 3,268 freshmen made honors. A few years later after students who once would have been “mismatched” to Berkeley or UCLA were now admitted to schools such as UC San Diego, where one in five black freshmen were making honors, the same proportion as white ones.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“Third Wave Antiracism insists that it is “racist” for black boys to be overrepresented among those suspended or expelled from schools for violence, which when translated into policy, is documented to have led to violence persisting in the schools and to have lowered students’ grades. Third Wave Antiracism insists that it is “racist” that black kids are underrepresented in New York City schools requiring high performance on a standardized test for admittance, and demands that we eliminate the test. Forget directing black students to (free) resources for practicing the test and reinstating gifted programs that shunted good numbers of black students into those very schools just a generation before – those wouldn’t be quite “revolutionary” (and anti-“white”) enough.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“Whatever color you are, in the name of acknowledging “power,” you are to divide people into racial classes, in exactly the way that First and Second Wave antiracism taught you not to, including watching your kids and grandkids taught the same, despite that progress on racism has been so resplendent over the past fifty years that an old-school segregationist brought alive to walk through modern America even in the deepest South would find it hard not to turn to the side of the road and retch at what he saw.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“we must not be on the alert for hotheads. The challenge of the Elect is precisely that they are no more pushy, arrogant, or otherwise socially unschooled than anyone else—they are just folks.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“A key part of their tool kit is that they call those who disagree with them racists, or the more potent term of art of our moment, “white supremacists.” That kind of charge has a way of sticking. To deny it is to confirm it, we are taught; once the charge is hurled, it’s like you’re caught in a giant squid’s tentacles.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“One can divide antiracism into three waves along the lines that feminism has been. First Wave Antiracism battled slavery and legalized segregation. Second Wave Antiracism, in the 1970s and ’80s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist is a moral flaw. Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites’ “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“you wish to expel religion from our European civilization you can only do it through another system of doctrines, and from the outset this would take over all the psychological characteristics of religion, the same sanctity, rigidity, and intolerance, the same prohibition of thought in self-defence. Here is an Austrian psychoanalyst writing in German in 1927 about precisely what would”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“we need to start reconsidering our sense of racial classifications. Namely, if we really believe that race is a fiction, we need to let racially indeterminate people make the case for that, by letting go of the idea that anyone with one peep of non-whiteness in them must “identify” as not white. We must ask why someone who doesn’t even appear black must “own” their blackness in the twenty-first century in the way Jefferson Davis and Bull Connor would have preferred them to. Who can’t see, on at least some level, the basic nonsensicality in this requirement—including that even what happened to George Floyd does not somehow justify it?”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“In 1987, a rich donor in Philadelphia “adopted” 112 black sixth graders, few of whom had grown up with fathers in their home. He guaranteed them a fully funded education through college as long as they did not do drugs, have children before getting married, or commit crimes. He also gave them tutors, workshops, and after-school programs, kept them busy in summer programs, and provided them with counselors for when they had any kind of problem. Forty-five of the kids never made it through high school. Of the sixty-seven boys, nineteen became felons. Twelve years later, the forty-five girls had had sixty-three children between them, and more than half had become mothers before the age of eighteen. So what exactly was the “racism” that held these poor kids back that could have been erased at the time and created a different result for these children? The answer is none. Social history is too complex to yield to the either/or gestures of KenDiAngelonian propositions. What held those poor kids back was that they had been raised amid a different sense of what is normal than white kids in the burbs.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“To tar America as insufficiently aware of slavery is more about smugness and noble victimhood than forging something new and needed.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“[P]rofound social change can happen without the entire populace being junior scholars about racist injustice. Such change has been happening world-wide for several centuries.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“Antiracism should focus strongly on ending the war on drugs, and there is no need for legions of whites to be instructed in how privileged they are for this to happen.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

“They are unreachable for the simple reason that they are arguing from religion rather than reason, trying to foist their dogma into the public square out of a misguided sense that they are the world's first humans to find the Answer to Everything.”
― John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America