The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 447: John McWhorter - Building A Diverse Team, Supporting The Black Community, & What Is Woke Racism?

Episode Date: November 22, 2021

Text LEARNERS to 44222 for more... Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com Twitter/IG: @RyanHawk12    https://twitter.com/RyanHawk12 John McWhorter teaches linguistics, philosophy, and music history at Columbia University, and writes for various publications on language issues and race issues such as Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Daily Beast, CNN, and the Atlantic. He's also the author of many books including his most recent New York Times bestseller, Woke Racism - How A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Notes: How to change someone's mind? "I try to understand where other people are coming from. I am not surprised by anyone. I think you need to listen to it from their point of view and not assume that anyone is crazy or evil." John recommends pragmatic action against racism involving only three programs: an end to the war on drugs, teaching reading by phonics to children lacking literate households and, promoting the idea that not everyone needs a college education to succeed. "I don't think of myself as brave. What I really am is a failed lawyer. My issue is if things don't make sense to me, I just want to try to make sense of it and I want people to understand what I mean." John believes that affirmative action should be based on class, not on race. What to do if your leadership team is not well represented by people of another race? From John: "Don't hire a token black person. Don't hire someone just because they are black. They need to be qualified for the role." Expansion from Dr. King's statement about judging someone for the content of their character rather than the color of their skin... "I agree with that, but I think you also have to look at class, and if they come from a poor upbringing." John criticized the 2018 book White Fragility following its resurgence in sales during the George Floyd protests beginning in May 2020, arguing that it "openly infantilized Black people" and "simply dehumanized us," and "does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching (for residual racism by white people) is necessary to forging change in society." He said, "it's a true horror of a book. The worst book I've read since I was 16." Qualities John looks for in a friend: A wry sense of humor You have to "see beyond level 1" and be smart to have this "They don't have to have the MSNBC take on race" "I want coherence." From Woke Racism: "The people wielding this ideology and watching its influence spread ever more are under the genuine impression that they are forging progress, that reason and morality are in flower. However, society is changing not because of a burgeoning degree of consensus in moral sophistication. What is happening is much cruder. Society is changing not out of consensus, but out of fear." Life advice: Don't get a degree in law unless you want to practice law To the extent you can, follow your passion "Follow your own gut. Go with your own mind. You'll have a much richer adulthood doing this." Linguistics: the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of morphology, syntax, phonetics, and semantics.

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That's storyworth.com slash leader. Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text learners to 44222 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world, will receive a carefully curated email from me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right.

You'll also receive the opportunity to read my newest book, The Pursuit of Excellence, early if you text learners to 442222. Now on to tonight's feature leader, the great John McCorder, a linguistics professor at Columbia. He's also the author of many books, including his most recent New York Times bestseller called Woke Racism. how a new religion has betrayed black America. During this really lively conversation,

we discuss how he works to change people's minds, how to handle and even work with a narcissist. Why John says the book, White Fragility is, quote, the worst book I've read since I was 16. Then how John has developed so much confidence, the qualities he looks for in a friend, and we close with some very useful, life advice. Ladies and gentlemen, I loved this conversation with John McCorder. John McCorder. So great to have you

here on the Learning Leader Show. Welcome, man. Thanks for having me. I was telling you before that I watched you on Bill Mars show. You had a one-on-one conversation with him and my immediate response was, I got to talk to that guy. I am fascinated by him, his story, and I want to know more. So before we get into some of your work, I want to know a little bit more about you. And I'm curious about where you grew up and what your parents were like and what they did for a living? Sure. I think it's probably important for me to say that I did not grow up working class. Both of my parents were college educated. And so my story, unlike many black people, especially of my generation and before, is not that my parents both struggled to make sure that their son

got into college and did better than them. That is not my story. That is, say, Michelle Obama's story. She and I are about the same age, not mine. So I had what many people think of as an unusual upbringing for a black person, but it wasn't fresh prints either. We weren't rich. There's no, belayer, just very leave it to be for middle class. And I think if anything was peculiar about it, because even in the 70s, middle class black people weren't as rare as we often like to think. It was an integrated neighborhood that I was in until I was 11 and very integrated, not as in black people were moving in and white people were moving out. But they were middle class, white and black people living practically side by side in alternation in this leafy neighborhood

that might as well be a suburb of Philadelphia, although technically it's within the city bounds. It was called Mount Airy. So that probably shaped what I'm like. I went to private schools, not academies, not prep school, but I went to Montessori schools and Quaker schools. And so that's a, it's a 70s, 80s, middle class black story that doesn't get told very often, but was more common than you might think. So that's what I was, not rich, which would be really interesting, not working class or poor, which is the usual story. I was in between. How much racism did you experience growing up? None to speak of.

Really? So this was, I was lucky. I was a post civil rights victories kid. So you have the occasional white kid who had a certain attitude, but nothing that kept me from doing anything I needed to do because I grew up middle class, essentially suburbs, 70s, 80s. How do you think that impacts what you do today? I think I certainly do not share the feeling that a lot of black people who do the sorts of things I do have that really. Racism is a serious obstacle in my life. I've never felt it. The reason being not that I was dealing with racism, but I, you know, stuck my chin out and bucked up and used strength, nothing like that.

It wasn't there. And that doesn't mean that there weren't some attitudes that you could detect sometimes. It doesn't mean that it wasn't now and then that there might be a teacher where you could tell that you were going to have to prove that you were as good as everybody else. But the thing is, once I did, it worked. It wasn't 1915. And so little things like that. But, It just wasn't in my life. Now, some people's lives were different. Black people's lives were different. But in my life, it wasn't the obstacle that it once had been because there had been

the revolutions right around when I was born. Do you get criticized by other black people? And if so, how do you handle that? Oh, there are many black people, especially educated ones who think that I am the devil's spawn because they have a deep-seated sense that the job of the inform, black person today is to inform America that racism isn't over and that even though people aren't getting crosses burned on their lawns, it's still there and it still keeps black people from being the best that they can be. And I frankly think that while racism does exist and that you can

talk about something called systemic racism as in things that are baked into the system that make it harder for black people than white people to succeed, the idea that racism is a conclusive obstacle to black success, including poor black people. success, I think is exaggerated. Doesn't mean that there's no truth to any of it at all, but I think that there's a sense that the educated class of black person has, that it's our job to exaggerate. And I have always refused to exaggerate because it doesn't fit my temperament. And so, yeah, there is pushback. More, most people don't know. And it's completely understandable that they don't because, you know, there are many, many people working in the media. I'm just one person. But I've been doing

this for over 20 years at this point. I've almost always had a regular place where I was writing something regular. So within certain circles, I've been a known quantity since, you know, for all of this century. And I think that the number of black people who despised me was more 15 or 20 years ago than now, but there is still a hardcore who, you know, will never come around. And how does that make me feel? I don't care. I have a very rich life. I have all sorts of things I enjoy doing, all sorts of people who like me and love me of various colors. It doesn't affect me the way many people might suppose. You get used to it after a while. What would you say to the person who says, yeah, John, but that's because you got lucky. You have great parents, great upbringing, very little to know racism. You don't

understand what I experienced my entire life or what I've experienced a lot of. So easy for you to say, your life is not like my life. What do you say to that person? Well, unless that person was talking about the cops, I disagree that unless they're about 100 years old, they spent their life clawing their way up against racism. What they usually mean is that they had experiences with the police. And there's a whole story about race and the police. The police need to be reformed. The terrible things that the police do are not as racialized as we might think. But if the argument is you didn't grow up having run-ins with the police, yes, that's true. But the general dialogue is that racism goes far beyond the police.

It's supposed to be a whole general experience. And the next part is, as I get older, I can start saying things like this. I didn't have great parents. And so I think there are all these. What? You did not have great parents? No, I did not. They were both there, but they weren't great.

They were both very troubled people. And the sense that I think we have, once again, completely understandable, mom is loving and dad is smoking a pipe and he's kind of reserved. but every now and then he gives Cosby-esque advice. No way. There is great diversity in black families. My parents were together. Frankly, they shouldn't have been.

They both were very angry people. I love them very much. But I did not have great parents. I've known sadness in my life. And yet, you know, because racism was not something that I had to work against, because I didn't have run-ins with the cops, nor did the racism I encounter strike me as defining my life, I would just say that, you know,

I've had problems too, all kinds, but racism was not the issue. How did their relationship and you stated they shouldn't have been together, how did that impact you in your relationships as you got older? Well, I think that if you have parents with a strained relationship, it's hard for that not to serve as a model for your own. So both me and my sister didn't marry until we were 40. I'm sure that my parents were part of the reason for that.

And in that, these were just basically American problems. The problems that were in our household, I often compare to, it's a dated reference now, but ordinary people, the movie with Mary Tyler Moore. It was that stuff. Those people can be black. It was things like that. What about as a, are you a parent? Yes, I am.

Okay, what about how you behave as a parent now since you've got an example you've stated that maybe that's not the right one to model and follow? I know, John, I think from a leadership perspective, parenting and relationships are more important than work we do. So that's why my curiosity naturally takes me here. But that's what I'm thinking, like, how has that changed you as a parent? Well, what you do is you model yourself against what was not good for you. And I think we live in an age where that's easier than it used to be. And so neither of my parents were as much in a position to do that. Both of them had had troubled childhoods for similar reasons, and not because they were mired in racism, but because their

prospective parents were complicated people, too. And nevertheless, especially for men, you didn't have the ordinaryness of psychotherapy and counselors and things like that. My parents were, you know, early mid-20th century people. But nowadays, you can have a self-awareness about it, and you can know, don't do what they did. And it's an amazing thing to find that their voices are in you. I find myself saying things to my daughter six and nine, where it's a line from my mother, it's an attitude from my father. And you're never going to be perfect, but you hold off. And I'm pretty confident to say that my relationship with them is very different from what my parents' relationship was with me, because I can just think,

don't do what happened in 1977. And I think you're never going to be perfect at that. But if you realize that you have something to work against and something to be conscientious about, then you're on the right path. So you teach and you've taught linguistics. And I don't know if I've had, I've talked to somebody who is a college professor teaching linguistics, which is the scientific study of language and its structure, including study of morphology, syntax, phonetics,

phonetics, and semantics words. I barely know how to pronounce properly. What do you think it was in your life that pointed you in the direction to say, this is what I want to do. This is something I want to study and teach, which I found that teaching is probably the greatest tool for learning in my life. So I'm curious, what led you on that path? It wasn't, I'm not as self-directed as many people would think. You know, I have, I'm reserved, I have a baritone voice, I wear sweater vests. You would think that at a certain point, I said, I shall do this. I was never that kind of person. I drifted into linguistics, just

because I think I'm, I'm hardwired for language. I had a weirdos interest in teaching myself how to speak and read to an extent languages from a very young age. The first time I, I heard a little girl speaking Hebrew when I was five and was just blown away. I wanted to do that. And I look back now and I realize that's a weird kid. Most kids, and this has nothing to do with intelligence. It's just most kids hearing the Hebrew would think, I don't know what they're saying, and they'd move on. Whereas for me, it was, what is that? I want to be able to do that. That was the beginning of me being a linguist. And so once I came of age, I was, you know, in my very early 20s, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do after I was finished with college. But I did realize that I

wanted to be doing something. I didn't want to be somebody who just sort of hung around in New York City doing a little of this and a little of that. And one day you wake up in you're 37 and you realize that nothing interesting is ever really going to happen. I knew that wasn't going to be me. So I didn't think I shall be a linguist. It was what am I best at where I could get strong enough recommendations to get into graduate school and get fellowship money because I have no money of my own.

And I thought the only thing where it wouldn't be a real gamble is this language thing. And I knew it wasn't that I wanted to study French literature. It was languages that I liked. And I found out that there was something called linguistics. And it's been good to me, but it was lucky. I could have found out that I didn't like it at all, but I found out that I did. So I feel like you must have this massive interest in words and what words mean.

And I feel like this is especially come of age recently within the last few years. And you've certainly written a lot about this. But in the wake of George Floyd, I remember thinking like, I don't know what to say or do or read and I'm probably going to mess this stuff up. I honestly, and at that point, sometimes we just kind of go quiet. I don't know what to say. I say we, I mean me. I'm not really sure what to do. And there was a big book that really came out then called White Fragility. And I've heard you say that you feel like that book is talking down to you. So if you were, I first like to say, ask, why do you feel like that book is talking down to you?

Well, I think white fragility is literally the worst book I've ever read since I was about 16 years old, just a true horror of a book. And the reason is because Robin DiAngelo's idea is that because of slavery, because of racism, because of Jim Crow and because of inequities in the system, black people need to be tiptoed around that our feelings have to be very exquisitely attended to, You're not supposed to cry around black people. You're supposed to work up this original sin vision of yourself as complicit within a system that you participate in every time you turn on the faucet and that's somehow supposed to do something good for the black people around you. The way she depicts black people is as if we don't have the basic human resilience that all other people have.

And the idea that there's a work that needs to be done where you wrap your head around that kind of treatment of black people is really one of the most. condescending things I've ever read. And DiAngelo doesn't know it. I think very few people are actively evil or malevolent. She thinks she's doing a good thing. She genuinely does. But she is alarmingly close to chiming in with people who looked at slaves working and thought of slaves as these jolly little people who needed to be treated carefully to keep them happy. But what they were doing was about as good as you could expect them to do. It's deeply condescending. And for her response when she hears criticism like this to be to say that I'm just an uncle Tom, that I'm disloyal, as if there's something absolutely, you know, incontestably correct about the way she looks at things

is frankly disgusting. It's utterly disgusting. So yeah, that's the issue with white fragility. And that comes from a part of me that has nothing to do with anything that is concerned with linguistics. I'm not organic. I am a dilettante. I'm interested in many things that really have very little connection. So yeah, that's my thought about white. white fertility. What, what advice, and this is just for me now, white guy from Ohio, who, I mean, I don't know, I don't know the best way to say this, John, who doesn't want to screw up. What advice do you have for somebody like me to say, like, I have a very open mind. I like to think that I like to interview all different types of people from all over the world who do different

jobs. I like to learn, genuinely curious about better ways to do things. And, and, and, and, and, So a lot of the things where you need to do better, you need to learn, you need to work on yourself. Like I was hearing this. Everyone was hearing this. So what advice would you, John McCorder give to me as I am kind of seeing these messages and really trying to take them in and trying to improve, trying to get better, trying to understand this. What advice would you give to me? Well, Ryan, this is the hard thing. You have to realize, I'm sensing in you that you have picked up on that there's a certain kind of person who sees themselves as representing the angels on these.

questions who seems poised to call you a racist to tell you that you're deeply, deeply wrong. You think you're trying to help and all of a sudden they're calling you a white supremacist on Twitter. And you're asking me, how do you avoid tripping up against that? And the thing is, I've never been, I've never been called that. Yeah. But I mean, I'm good. I think, yeah, I, I, you can tell by the, the sheer length of the question, which better questions are more concise. So as I'm, I'm trying to figure out, I think that's, that you can actually sense my field the reason I bring this up because I know I'm not alone. I know others are thinking this and I'm I'm trying to like, okay, what do we do about this?

And I was just going to say you have to allow a certain kind of noise because a certain kind of person is going to yell at you no matter what you say. But if you're actually trying and they're going to yell at you in public and you just have to you have to walk on. But the thing is if you're actually trying to help, the issue is what do people, if you're thinking about race, what do black people who need help, not me, not some journalist, but black people who need help. What do they need? And frankly, what they need is not for white people to sit around in prayer circles talking about their complicitness. There's no reason you have to have that prelude to doing what black people actually need. And in my book, well, racism, I say that end the war on drugs, focus on vocational

education, teach reading by teaching kids to sound out the letters instead of hoping they'll just drink it in by osmosis. Those three things alone would turn Black America upside down in 25 years. And to the extent that somebody wanted to be an ally, working on any one of those things, maybe all three, maybe two, maybe one, that's the work. And those are things that are perhaps less exciting to foster than sitting around working on your original sin. But the issue is not charisma here. The issue is what actually changes lives. So that's my genuine answer to that. question. So let's go with each of those and the war on drugs. Share more. What do you mean by that? Well, what I mean by that is if you are a black man, you're in an underserved neighborhood,

you've had a crummy school, there's no money, you haven't been able to travel, you've barely been outside of your neighborhood. What are you going to do when you leave school or drop out of school? What are you going to do? Well, if one thing that you can do is sell drugs illegally out on the corners with your friends, you might choose that because that's so much easier than going and seeking legal work for reasons you're not sure of,

you're not sure how you're going to do, and you're a little wary of the wider world anyway, and we all live our lives one day or one week at a time. If it's possible to sell drugs on a black market, that's what some people from shitty neighborhoods are going to do, and I completely understand that. That's exactly the way it's gone since about 1970 in too many poor black neighborhoods.

If there was no such thing as making half of a living selling drugs illegally, if there was no black market, that would mean that the choices available to underserved black men would be different. I think a lot of people think that if the choices were different, those men would basically just sit down on sidewalk grates and I guess just petrify. That's not what would happen. They would seek legal work. And the way that I know that is because that's what the same black men,

did until there was a war on drugs that created this black market. So take that away, that unfortunate temptation, and then you start working on how you bring black men of that world into legal work so that step by step they can build lives that are more constructive than the ones that most people selling drugs can have. And how about teaching people to read bifonics, especially children lacking literate households? what about that? Well, with that, it comes down to that, you know, it can seem so minor that I bring that up. But if you see kids in especially bad schools, they didn't learn to read well.

By the time you're about eight, if reading is hard, and I think I ask people to imagine if you've gotten pretty good at some other language, think about how it feels to read it and how even if you're pretty good at it, you'd kind of rather not. Let's say you're pretty good at Spanish, but you know, you'd rather not read a novel in Spanish. You'd rather not read anything in Spanish if you don't have to. It takes more work. Imagine if that's what English looked like to you as a native English speaker, you'd kind of rather not. If you're not a good reader, you don't do well in the rest of school either. And next thing you know, you're itching to get out. You might leave before high school. And you can see that happening

to a lot of poor kids. And because poverty is disproportionate in the black community, it happens to too many black kids. And so you don't want somebody who is, you know, say 20 years old and you're in a diner and they pick up the menu and you can see them mouthing the words and they decide to just kind of guess what there might be and ask the waiter. That's very ordinary. That is somebody who was taught how to read wrong. It's not somebody dumb. It's not somebody with some cognitive deficit, but they were taught to read as if they were middle class white kids coming from homes where their parents subscribed to the Atlantic. That's not most kids. And so teaching via phonics is crucial for a great many black kids. And if it isn't done,

you end up turning them off of school. And next thing you know, they're leading crummy lies as they get older. It's one piece of the puzzle. And the, how about the needing a college degree? And I, I, I continually go back and forth because I feel like if you have the certification of that degree, obviously the statistics prove that the chance of things going well for you dramatically increase. Now, I have friends. I know stories of people who have absolutely made an incredible life for themselves and their family and they dropped out of college or never went to college. So I know that that can't happen. I think they're in the minority. Like you have to kind of assume that that's rare because it currently is. I know that's part of this too. How to go, especially from a college professor, this is an interesting take, how to to maybe change that moving forward where you don't have to have to have. the certification of a college degree. Because we tend to forget how many people don't have college degrees, especially if we are college educated people. We have this sense that after high school, you go spend four years somewhere taking courses, most of which you'll never remember.

That's something that many people do, but that should be one choice of many, just as it was before 1945. That idea that everybody goes to college is a post-World War II GI Bill idea. And it was nice that more people got to go to college. That was good. But at this point, I think it's become quite clear, especially during the pandemic, there are too many colleges. And really what most of them do is not necessary to somebody becoming a functional adult. So the idea is to look at the world and see how many, I'm just thinking men now, how many men who are crucial in our lives did not go to college. Whoever gives you your Amazon package did not go to college. Whoever does your ultrasound did not go to college. Those are not people who are clawing their way up from the muck. Those are people who are

often, especially if they're married, living normal, middle class existences, and nobody went to college. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but we have to think, what are these underserved men going to do? If it's not going to be the drug selling, are they going to go to four years of college and take eight semesters of irrelevant courses? One, they don't have the money. And two, even if they did, why should they do that? Maybe their kids will choose to do that, but I'd rather see that person go learn how to repair heaters and air conditioners and make, you know, good $100,000 a year in today's prices. There's nothing wrong with that life, but it should be easy for that guy to do that. And eventually it should be a norm. He should know lots of his friends who go do that. And next thing you know, you have people living lives that don't involve prison and death and their home to be with their kids. So in your new book, Woke Racism, which congratulations in New York Times bestseller, one of your arguments is that there's this new ideology that is actually a religion. Can you share more about what you mean by that statement?

Well, what I mean by being a religion is partly that it's based on a notion of original sin, which is how white people are encouraged to think of their privilege. But it's also that people who disagree with this way of looking at things are nowadays treated as if they should not be in polite society. They are to be fired. They are to be dismissed from an organization. They are to be stripped of their honors. They are to be pilloried in the public square. That is the way a certain kind of religious person used to treat a heretic.

And so people say, well, that's problematic. And you think, okay, it's problematic. But why are you saying that with the idea that the person needs to suffer? And it's because of heresy. And also it's that you are encouraged to expect that superstitious reasoning is allowed. Beyond a certain point, you're not supposed to reason from A to B. And so a very simple question, for example, might be somebody's living in an underserved community. They're in much, much more danger of being killed by somebody they know than by a stray white cop who comes through. Why is it that our conversation is much more about the stray white cop than what goes on in the community when the second thing I mentioned just now is much, much more of a problem for actual people walking around living actual lives. It's because we have this religion where the imperative is to show that you know racism exists, above all, and whether or not you're talking about the welfare of the people in question. And so you have this idea that it's

just worse if a cop does it than if somebody down the block does it, which if you roll the tape back and just play everything again, doesn't make any sense, especially to the people who are suffering, losing their loved ones under these conditions. Why is that considered a nervy thing to say? There are eyes that will roll, if I mentioned this. It's because it's not supposed to make sense. You're supposed to show that you know racism exists, regardless of what the feelings are of the actual people. Moving out from that is defund the police, which nobody who lives in communities like that agrees with. But you're not supposed to think about that too much. So here's this, you know, hyper-wifes, woke person, defund the police. Here's this person from the actual community who thinks that's crazy.

And often the person saying defund the police is white. The person in the community is always black. And yet we're supposed to listen to the woke person more. That simply does not cohere logically, except that the woke person is showing that they know racism exists by calling for the police to be defunded. And so that person considers their message crucial, despite the fact that the people living in the communities who are black themselves don't want the police to be defunded. And what we call that is complicated in the same way as with religious questions that have no answer. You call it complex. It's a religion. And what worries me about it being a religion is that the people who believe in this religion are trying to take over our institutions, which means that religion is trying to take over the state.

Now, they don't know their religion because they call themselves being about social justice rather than faith. But that, if we're going to say that my linguistics has anything to do with it, that's just a matter of terminology. That's just labels. What they're doing, their concerns, the way they think is liturgical. And that's not the way a nation is supposed to be run. At least not since about 250 years ago. But they're trying to reverse what we took as a very basic tenant of how you run a country. Okay. I'm not sure how to ask this again. So let's say, John, and this person has been me. before. You take your leadership team. So this is the person we're talking about is a leader within a big company. You take your leadership team to an offsite. You were gone and there was about 15 to 20 of you at an offsite. And you look around and there's not a single black person there. And that person has this realization that's, I need to do something about this. That's, that's wrong. We have a problem. I'm sure there's a number of different reasons why, but I'm willing to go to this. I'm,

uncomfortable place because I honestly, I'm curious to hear what you'd say. What advice do you give to that person who looks around and sees a bunch of white guys, maybe some women, but a bunch of white guys in the room at their leadership offsite saying, oh, this is, we need to do something about this. What advice you give to that person? Negative advice, which is this. Whatever you choose to do, don't choose a black person just because they're black who doesn't have the qualifications that the rest of you have. That, if we're going to be religious, is a sin. part of the new environment is that we're supposed to forget. It's religious. We're supposed to just ignore that there used to be something called the token black person. Now we think of that as

something people said, I guess, in black exploitation movies or plays written in 1972. But no, there's still a such thing as token black. And it shouldn't be fostered. If the choice is between all white and tokenism, choose the all white and hope. that you can find some qualified black people later. Get the word out. But, you know, sometimes, this is the awkward thing. Sometimes there just aren't any black people who happen to want the position in a particular district or area. Sometimes there just aren't any. Now, Ibram Kendi will tell you that the reason must be that there's this discrimination against the black people, that they're black people, you know, at the windows clamoring who aren't being let in. All of us know

that that's not always true. It doesn't do anybody any favors to pretend that that isn't true because Ibrahim Kennedy has dreadlocks. So do what you need to do, but don't be tokenizing. And that will mean sometimes that you just can't have any black people for a while. And the world will keep spinning. Speaking of that, I think I read that you, when talking about affirmative action, you think it should be based on class, not on race. Did I read that right? Yeah. Can you share more about your thoughts on affirmative action? Sure. In the 1960s and before, to think of blackness and poverty is the same thing. It was approximate even then, but close enough. To be black was to be disadvantaged. And even if you weren't poor, there were all sorts of things you couldn't do,

places you couldn't live. So affirmative action comes in as a policy designed to redress that kind of entrenched discrimination. And what it's really about, despite things in the documentation about women, et cetera, it was about black people. It was a reparation. And for it to be about black people, made perfect sense. Originally, the way it was done in universities was kind of crude. You would bring in poor, unprepared kids to competitive universities.

And it didn't work. They couldn't hold their heads above water, but it was worth a try. But the problem with having race-based preferences is that because, for one thing, it very quickly became the case that not all black people were poor and middle class black people were quite ordinary and they were pretty much the only ones you met in college, for example. It's inconvenient. Race-based preferences are delicate. There will always be people who question the wisdom of it unless the people of the race are like a lower cast in India where it's just so clear that anybody who's black needs really special help. But that's not been

the case here for a very long time. So my feeling about affirmative action is that having, it be based on race was something that made sense, but it should have been time limited. So I think it starts officially, I'm going to say 1966, though I think that's accurate and I'm a little under-caffeinated today. Let's make the number easier. 1965. If it starts in 1965, there should have been a thought that we'll do this for, say, 25 years. And that's about when the fabric had frayed so much that it was time to make it be about disadvantage. Being disadvantaged, folks, and having it really be just about black people made perfect sense in 1972. But by about 1990, that's enough. And yet I do think that there should be adjustments in admission standards according to how you have lived. That's what people were trying to do for black people. It worked enough that it was time to let it go. The analogy that I've used in some places is that racial preferences is like

chemotherapy. And it may work, but it creates so much damage elsewhere that you don't want to do it forever. And I think that a lot of people today feel that you should have racial preferences until black people are represented in exactly the proportion that we constitute in the population in all areas of society. I disagree with that. That's oversimplifying it. I think at this point, racial preferences should be about socioeconomics. Some people think that would bring in too many white people, but it would certainly bring in an awful lot of brown people as well. It would bypass people like me are my kids. And as far as I'm concerned, that's fine. I was born in 1965, honestly, a nerdy middle class kid like me who grew up in the 70s and 80s, it was ridiculous

that I ever got racial preferences. I can't turn the tape back. Some people will say they wish that I hadn't, but I shouldn't have been getting it even then. And that was the excess of the system. Maybe it made sense. Nothing's going to be perfect. But there comes a point when just looking upon somebody because they're brown as opposed to because of what they are and what they can do. Again, you get into tokenism again. And so, go ahead. What just makes me think of like Dr. Martin Luther King. I mean, his dream, I mean, I'm surprised we're going here, but his dream was, you know, to be, to be judged by the content of your character, not the color of your skin.

I feel like in a way, I mean, there, this just seems like it's changed a little bit where they're like, basically, let's just judge people. by who they are and their character and their values and what they do. It seems like that shift, or at least people, some want that to be shifted. What do you think about that? Well, I think to make it fair, what people are thinking these days is you don't judge by the content of character, you judge by the extent to which people are suffering from the oppression of whiteness. And that's where the exaggeration comes in because the idea is that even fortunate middle

class and affluent black people in a defining way suffer from the oppression of whiteness. And so to just make it be about character to people like that is ignoring the fact that whiteness is so oppressive and we have to bring that into the equation. I would say, judged by the content of the character, unless we're talking about socioeconomics, to look at a poor black kid and say, okay, here she is. No special breaks for her. We're not going to think about what she's not been able to have or not been able to do, we're going to just judge her by the content of her character. I don't think that's what Dr. King meant. But I think Dr. King did mean that my girls should be judged by the content of

their character and not whether or not they're going to fill out a diversity tableau for a university administrator. I find you to be extremely compelling and I think you could change minds. I'm curious in your day-to-day life, how frequently are you seeing actual minds changed by your ability to be such an effective communicator. Nobody's ever asked me that. My intent actually is to change minds. I think a lot of people think my intent is to make money, writing editorials and talking places.

It's not that. It's that I have some things that I think many people might consider, and I try to think very hard about what the obstacles in people's minds are to hearing what somebody like me has to say. There are all sorts of preconceptions and stereotypes that people often very reasonably have. But the idea is to try to cut through those obstacles and try to make some sense to people. And sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. I think what I know is that I hear from a lot of people who say you've made me think differently. And quite a few of them are black. It's not just white Republicans, as I think some people think. And also, it's that this goes back to

that thing about how long you've been around. I think if you ask most people who know who I am today, they think that I started doing this roughly in about 2015 and some pieces for the Daily Beast. You're never as good as, you're only as good as what you did two weeks ago,

but I've been doing this a long time. And I think the reason that the mainstream media has kept me in the Rolodex, despite the fact that I'm always saying, quote, unquote, the wrong thing about race. You know, I've never been blackballed by NPR, or the New York Times who now, you know, are actually paying me a salary. I think it's because I try to understand where other people are coming from,

and I am trying to persuade, not just to declare. And I'm not patting myself on the back. It's not always successful, and it's always a learning process. But my general idea is, and this is advice that I have for many people, anticipate the objections, and one way you anticipate the objections is listen to the other side without presuming that they're evil or crazy. Very few people are evil. Almost nobody is crazy. Listen to why these perfectly coherent, intelligent, good people think so differently from you. And usually what you're going to find is that there are a couple of basic tenets that they think of as

truth. They're going on the basis of those things. And if you feel that those things aren't truth, then your job is to specifically identify why those things are not truth and work with it. And so, for example, what I was saying just now, the idea that to be brown-skinned is to define your existence as being an eternal battle against white oppressiveness. That is not the way most brown-skinned people feel. That is not the way most black people feel. If it were, it would be something we should question. But that idea that to be black is to suffer from the depredations of whiteness and that that's what should define you, that's what is what many of these hyper-woke people think. They couldn't imagine that you would deny that.

But no, I do. And I'm not denying it as somebody who thinks of himself as eccentric. I think a great many people, including black people, understand how reductive that is. And so you have to get at that instead of just saying the things that you would say to your own flock, because those people don't need to be convinced. So, yeah, the idea is nobody's evil, nobody's crazy, find the obstacle, address the obstacle. And then realize that you can't just do it with, you know, one, one editorial. It's like advertising. It's like Madison Avenue. You have to do it year after year

after year. And gradually, maybe you'll have some sort of influence on the way some people think. It's called being part of the conversation. I agree and love the thought of not looking at anybody as if they're evil or crazy because they disagree with you. With that said, I have to imagine there are times where you find yourself in a conversation, maybe an argument, with somebody who is maybe not, maybe a narcissist, not even nearly as educated in the topics as you are, not even close to being reasonable. All of us probably have been here before. How do you deal with those, do you just avoid them? I mean, how do you deal with those types of people? How do you deal with those situations or conversations?

I'm trying to think of what sort of person. Okay. Yeah. One thing is that if you work these things out in your head, it gets to the point where nobody is going to surprise you. Maybe some people would call that jaded, but you've heard it all before. And if you work your way through it,

then it's not going to hurt you. And you know with certain people that as soon as a certain kind of dialogue seems to pop, up, just leave, you know, and maybe not literally and maybe not abruptly. But for me, with a certain kind of person, there's certain buzzwords you hear, certain half sentences, and I just think, oh, it's that. And then I just, I'll nod sometimes, change the subject, just figure there's no point in getting into these things with people like that. But yeah, there's, there's some people. And as you get older, you get this less, because it's assumed that you're no longer culturally relevant and I'm past 50. But there's a kind of black person who thinks, well, because

I talk in a certain way and because I dance in a certain way, I've got a certain vernacular flavor, and you don't have it, I'm really black and you're not. And so even though you've read a lot of books, I can bust a move, you know, to use the most current slang, I can bust a move. I am this kind of, I mean, I'm in touch with the street. You know, I wear my hair in a certain way. When's the last time you X'd or Y or Zed? And then, of course, the cops, you weren't pushed up against the wall. And, you know, long ago, I read. realize that kind of person is going to say that. But it's not so much that the books I've read make the difference. It's just that I've reasoned something out. And when I've reasoned it out,

it's with the benefit of that person in mind. And if what it really is, is that they just don't like the flavor of a black person who to them sounds white, et cetera, I can, no, this is the thing. They're not crazy. I can put myself in their heads and feel how that might be, how they might think that I started out talking like them and then I learned a new way to talk because I wanted to seem more white. That's what they're thinking. I would think that too if I were them, but I know that that's not true. And then you move on. You know, chances are that person's not your next door neighbor and you know that you are doing something that is morally valid. And you just have to realize there will always be that dissonance. To be somebody who is known as a quote unquote

contrarian is to make your peace with the fact that to an extent you're always going to be hated. But you know what? If nobody hated me, frankly, I don't know if I'd be doing anything terribly interesting or important. And that doesn't mean that I go out trying to be hated. But the sorts of people who are adored by everyone, like to get close to it, something like, God bless her, but Oprah, I don't want to be Oprah. I'm trying to push beyond what we think of as ordinary. I'm not putting down Oprah at all. But there's no way I could be me and not be hated by some people.

The issue is to not be hated by most people. And I'm pretty sure that that's not the case. And so you just, you move on. I sense a great deal of security in oneself from you, right? The opposite would be a very insecure person, which there's certainly a lot of them. those, we all have to kind of figure that out. Have you always been this way or have you, have you gotten really good at working on yourself, a lot of self-reflective work?

Like my question is like how to get to this place of this high level of comfort in your own skin of knowing yourself of, of I just sense almost zero insecurity in you. And I think that's rare. I think it's a rare quality in person. How do we get to or how did you get to that place? I ask because I want to get to that place, you know, like we all do. So I'm curious about that. What do you think? Yeah. And see, there's where I'm not sure that a person like me can help because if I look back on my history, that was there from the beginning. I am described as confident, even as a little boy. I was contradicting my teachers in school. I remember the first time I remember doing it. Reconstructing this, that and the other thing, the year would have been 1970, which means that I'm five. And I remember, what was it? I was working with these letters in class. And I spelled I and C, ink. And a teacher came over and she said,

John, that's not how to spell it. And I looked up and I said, yes, it is. And I took the K that she put, and I put the C back. And she said, that's not how to spell it. And I said, yes, it is. I've seen it on trucks. You see it spelled that way all the time, like incorporated.

Sure. And I insisted. And I want to specify, that teacher was white. And so this isn't something that I would only do, you know, within the comfort of the black community. I just thought, I know. And to be honest, I think I meant ink. I don't think I knew the word incorporated,

but I was trying to spell what I saw on the truck, and I would not be told otherwise. That's probably not most kids. So that is me, and I was that way. I remember in grad school, my advisor, saying, you're so confident. And I was thinking, I didn't know I was confident. I thought I just had 2020 vision.

So there's some of that. And then also, I'm not a joiner. And that doesn't mean that I am. incapable of having loving relationships or that I don't have any friends. But I march to the beat of my own drummer. I'm not in, I've talked about this with Glenn Lowry, when we do blogging heads. Both of us are like this. I think a normal human trait is that you see a group of people thinking in a certain way and you seek the warmth of the crowd. You need that embrace. That's normal. That's what people are like. That's how we have built up the world to this point and are about to ruin it.

you know, people, people group. I'm not that sort. If everybody is thinking something, I'll join in if it makes sense to me. But if it doesn't make sense to me, I don't have that normal human tendency to kind of put a patch on it and go with the general idea because I don't want to get my feelings hurt and I'd rather be embraced by the crowd than deal with the trouble of airing it that I think differently. And that, again, is probably just a configuration of neurons that I don't need that group membership the way some people do. But I would definitely say that what I do is I think, do I believe this? And if I don't, for me, it's like having an eyelash caught behind your contact lens. So when I first, to give you a sense that I'm human but weird,

when I first started teaching at Berkeley back in 1995, anybody brown and most people white were absolutely aggrieved that racial preferences had been discontinued in the University of California system. And the idea was that not having racial preferences was barring poor black kids from coming to schools like Berkeley and UCLA, that you needed to adjust standards because of these ghettos that they had grown up in. Now, I wanted to agree with this, especially because it was so clear from the beginning that to disagree would mean that you were going to be pushed out of a window, especially if you're a young black professor. I tried so hard. I spent the first two years trying to believe what everybody else did. But my own empirical experiences there showed me so

clearly that almost none of the black kids at Berkeley were poor, that they were very middle-class kids, and that the difference in their performance and the difference in the rates that they were accepted was due to cultural factors, which were traceable to racism, but it was just too complicated. I couldn't keep that to myself. I had to start having my truth. And that's when a lot of black people started to hate me. And I think that's where there's the difference. I think any number of young black professors could see

that the way racial preferences were being discussed at Berkeley in 1995, six and seven was fake. Anybody who can rationalize from A to B could see it. I think the typical black professor, though, thinks, my tribe is my people, and maybe things are quote-unquote, complicated. I think that's the box people put it in. But I'm not going to disagree with the basic idea. I can't do that. And it's not just about racial issues because it's the same way

with some very race neutral issues within linguistic science where I do that same thing. I don't know if that's confidence or it's just a passion for order. I don't like things not making sense. That's part of what linguistic science is about. And I extended into looking at the world. But yeah, I am a confident person that I was born with it and I don't know how you can acquire confidence. I'm told that if you stand up straight, but then the science isn't great on that. But I require clarity. And I think that's something people could work on. You've had the, I think the good fortune to be around a lot of impressive leaders.

And I'm curious, John, from your perspective, what have you found to be some of the commonalities, the common traits, the qualities, the qualities, the qualities. and leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time. Ryan, I'm sorry, but I hear where you're coming from with that question, but you're talking to an armchair college professor. A great deal of what we do is solitary. I'm also a writer. Writing is alone. I wouldn't say that I've been around a lot of great leaders.

I've sat around in faculty lounges and- Can I amend the question? Can I amend the question? We talked about friends. I'm curious and not having, what do you look for in a friendship with another person? What qualities do they need to have in order to say, like, yeah, I want to hang out with them. Yeah, I want to see them again. Yeah, I'm going to look, I look forward to my time seeing it.

A wry sense of humor. And I hate to say that's a way of saying smart because Rye and I. irony are seeing layers number two and three. What's wrong with saying that you want your friends to be smart? Because it sounds elitist, especially if you're black. But yeah, but it's what you think, right? Of course. Okay. Yeah. I don't think it's bad to say I like smart people, especially a guy like you who's smarter than just about everybody. That's another, that's another problem. I have a pompous demeanor. And so I think people are going to hear it as, well, you've got to. And I don't mean that. But yeah, I mean somebody who can see beyond level one.

I like that. And I like it to express itself in humor, too. I love sarcasm and irony. And, you know, especially over about the past 15 years, not before that. I need somebody who can understand that to not have the MSNBC take on race doesn't mean that you're a bad person. It has to be somebody who understands that there are other ways of looking at those things that are neither about evil nor naivete. Is this why I need that? Bill Marget along so well?

Yes, for example. Yeah. And there's an informal collection of people. It's not the, what is it? The dark web. It's not the intellectual dark web. That's a distraction. That's a certain small number of people.

But there is these days coalescing an assemblage of people who I don't think have a name yet, kind of the heterodox crowd, who are people who vote Democratic, but are extremely impatient, with the idea that we are white supremacists for not being leftist radicals. I guess with a lot of us, all of us like coherence and just can't stand the new mood. Bill Maher is of that kind of thought. And so, yes, that is what that is. And there are great many people who are part of this. In 20 years, it'll be looked back upon.

It's a group of people who now regularly socialize here in New York City and in Los Angeles. that, yeah, people who understand that you can not be a right winger and yet not agree with the woke agenda and that that doesn't make you a bad person. One more question. You are with students a lot. You've taught a lot of students. You're like a coach, a mentor to them, I know. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you give to somebody who's about

23 to 25 years old? Yeah. for one thing, don't get a degree in law unless you really want it. Choose something that you want to wake up and do in the morning. To the extent that you can follow your passion, you might not be able to do exactly what you'd like to do. But don't just go to law school because your friends did. You really decide that's what you want to do,

especially at that age where that often beckons because they've been working in some soul-crushing job for two years. And they're thinking, well, what's the next thing? I had that. And I did not go to law school. And really, as corny as it's going to seem, follow your own gut. Don't just sit around agreeing with other people because it's the easier thing to do. Go with your own mind and stand up for your own views to the extent that you can. It makes for a much richer adulthood to do so.

If you don't stand up for your own views in your 40s, you're going to start to realize that you want to. weren't. So definitely say that too. Well, John, this has been awesome. I'm very grateful for your time. The book that I encourage people to get is called Woke Racism, How a New Religion has betrayed Black America. It's a New York Times bestseller for a reason. I really appreciate the care and thought that you put into this conversation, John. And I feel a lot better now 56 minutes later than I did before. And so I'm just, I'm grateful for that. I just want to say thank you so much. And I would love. to continue our dialogue as we both progress. Good, Ryan.

Yeah, definitely. After this book tour, when I've been able to basically sleep for about six months, definitely, you know. You're in New York City, right? I'm in New York, that's right. Awesome. Okay.

Well, thank you again, man. I encourage people to get the book, and this is fantastic. Thanks, Sean. Thank you, Ryan. You could probably tell that I was nervous at moments throughout this conversation with John McQuarter, and I certainly was before I hit record.

But I'm so glad that we did it. I'm so glad and grateful that this platform of The Learning Leaders Show provides the opportunity for me to speak with such a thoughtful leader like John McWhorter. I hope you got a lot out of it. I hope you enjoyed it. I found him to be just a delight. And I loved the way that he thinks and the care behind everything that he says. You can tell it's well thought out.

and I really enjoy speaking with people like him. A few takeaways from my notes. The advice he said, he got to allow a certain amount of noise. If you choose to do anything of significance, there's going to be some people who don't like it. And I admire this quality in John. I sense a real, real comfort in his own skin,

a lot of work being done, the fact that he is a critical and deep thinker. And that, I think, provides him with confidence. And I'm striving to get to that place. And then when I asked him about how he's developed such a skill to change people's minds, if you watch the YouTube version of this conversation, you'll see as he looked up and he paused for a second. He said, nobody's really asked me that before. And I could tell that he was really curious to dive in.

I wouldn't be surprised if we have further conversations about this. But he said, you've got to listen to people. Don't assume anyone's crazy or evil. Try to understand where they're coming from and their perspective. And I think we all would probably be better if we approached people in this way. And then the three programs, he recommends the pragmatic action against racism. That's an end to the war on drugs, teaching reading bifonics to children lacking literate households, and promoting the idea that not everyone needs a college education to succeed.

These are the practical ways that he thinks we could. I think take in actions against racism. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to support me and for spreading the message saying and telling others, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with John McQuarter. I think his perspective will help you become a much more effective leader. And because you continue to do that, and because you continue to write reviews on Apple Podcast and rate the show,

hopefully five stars, you are giving me the opportunity to do things like this, to have these in-depth conversations with wildly fascinating people that I find endlessly curious. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can we?