John McWhorter

You had a lot of faculty members.

You know, like I think John McWhorter is one who's someone I really admire.

And I thought, oh, that's great.

So to hear that it has taken such a nasty left turn is it really is very disappointing.

What prompts this is, uh, just a brief rant, and if you guys wanna pick up on it, fine.

Uh, but Jon McWhorter, who normally writes fairly sensible stuff, uh, even when I don't always agree with him, he has a column in The New York Times this week in praise of land acknowledgements, and it's the dumbest thing he's ever written.

I, I...

What, did he phone it in or what? It was all very emotive and, "Gosh, you know, I used to deal with Native Americans when I was a teenager in Maine, and I felt bad.

I don't know if your earth shattered, but mine sure did.

Until, that is, I read and reread with incredulity Columbia University Associate Professor of Linguistics John McWhorter's op-ed piece in The New York Times against the sentence-ending preposition rule.

Essentially, if this is okay with Professor McWhorter, it's okay with me, although not without a little resistance on my part, because old habits die hard.

You know, rules are rules until they're not.

Yeah.

Do you, do you just try and pull yourself up by your bootstraps and pull yourself up the socioeconomic ladder in very traditional ways? And I mean, to Rich's point, there'd be many Black academics today saying, "Yeah, that's exactly what you should be doing," right? This would echo the sort of criticisms of like Thomas Sowell or Glenn Loury or Roland Fryer, John McWhorter, like these sorts of voices who are like, "Uh, you should play the game.

You should play the traditional game, and you should play it really well." Um, and there's a reason that game is successful as well, 'cause this is-- I guess this is what I meant at the beginning by it's in some ways a story about tradition.

Like how much do you hew to the tradition of people who have made it playing this game previously? And a lot of that has just been like, yeah, um, nuclear family, working your way up the, up the corporate ladder.

This isn't yours.

And his, you know, John, Liverpool John Morris University, who gave him his PhD thesis, they apparently exonerated him.

They analyzed his work and said it was all due to sort of mistakes and like understandable errors.

And he chalked it up to his autism, et cetera.

It doesn't help gay men to pretend that they're not the ones who are overly at risk for monkeypox.

And similarly, holding up Jason Arday ultimately is going to make all black academics look bad and make everyone suspect them more and suspect that they don't deserve to be there.

And that, you know, you hear from like John McWhorter is an argument against affirmative action in general, because it creates a Paul where people don't pay as much respect to black people in general.

And they've, you know, you see that in the way that people talk about Michelle Obama and talk about Katonji Brown Jackson, that they're DEI hires, et cetera, that they don't deserve the positions that they've earned.