Campus wokeism vs. corporate wokeism
#wokebusters
Here’s my exchange with John McWhorter, in which we discuss the absurdity of the notion that America’s elite educational institutions are rife with “systemic racism,” and the difference between wokeism in the private sector and wokeism on college campuses. I reiterate a point I’ve made before: that the witch hunt really gains traction once secondary sanctions—i.e., sanctioning not only the offender, but also those who fail to sanction the offender—are in place. We also coin the term “wokebusters.”
I just published a new conversation with John on The Glenn Show’s Patreon page. This episode will only become publicly available on Friday; if you want to see it now, and support the show, please consider joining our Patreon community.
Thank you.
LOURY: We know that these institutions, a Princeton or a Brown or a Columbia, are manned and womaned by people who are, on the whole, politically very progressive and sympathetic to the anti-racist cause.
The idea that there's "institutional racism" rife in an institution like Princeton or Columbia or Brown…
MCWHORTER: …is absurd.
…makes so broad a use of the institutional racism phrase—meaning that it's an institution where some Black people might be made to feel uncomfortable by some stuff. That's basically what they're saying.
A student club had a party where some statement was made.
Somebody hung a flag outside their window that offended their sensibilities.
Somebody chalked on the sidewalk "I'm a Trump supporter," and that has made me feel [uncomfortable].
The administration failed to make a strenuous denunciation of America after the George Floyd incident; it only issued a tepid denunciation of America.
The African-American studies program is not a department that can grant tenure, it's just a place where you have people with affiliations with other departments. We demand autonomy! We demand freedom!
It's absurd. It's completely absurd.
It ignores degree.
There's this tacit idea that a Black person is supposed to ignore the issue of degree. And if you have that tacit idea, what you're saying is that we Black people are cognitively challenged. If you think that we really can't understand gray zones and degree, then you think that we have less of a mentality, frankly, than sparrows, parrots, and orangutans, and some whales.
You're saying that we have the mentality of guinea pigs. And I find that deeply insulting.
I appreciate your point. I just wanted to add to that: none of this gets off the ground unless the students can anticipate a positive response from the administration personnel to the protests. These things are supporting each other in some kind of mutually reinforcing way.
The supply of outrage is in part a consequence of the correct anticipation of “peeing in the pants.” The outrage party and the quivering cowards are all in cahoots with one another.
Yes. It's a routine. It's a dance.
And it really needs to stop, partly because it is a routine within which Black people are thought quietly to be chimpanzees. And I really wish that these students and the professors who support them understand how dumb they are being considered.
Not how dumb they look, because then that becomes “Why are you so concerned with what white people think of us? Are we supposed to be respectable Negroes?” You know, respectability politics. No, that's not the point.
It's that these people are quietly thinking, "These people are dumb. And so we're going to approach them on their level." I don't know where people get the idea that that's Black strength or that it's progressive. People really need to get past that.
There's such a thing as a sensible Black protest. But if it's about something that doesn't make any damn sense, and you're making these demands that your school becomes an anti-racism academy along the lines of Maoist ideology, you have to understand that the people who give in to you think you are dumb as shit. And you have to understand that that is a problem. You've been condescended to.
But no, they don't get it. They just think that to stick your fist in the air and yell certain slogans makes you somebody of higher wisdom and makes you a person who is continuing the struggle of Dr. King. No, he would have had choice words watching some of these things these days.
I think a piece might be missing here. If you look away from educational institutions and into the private sector, it raises the question that I'm trying to put my finger on.
Because the educational institutions are one thing, there's a culture there. But the business world, the human resource departments in large corporations, whether it be in Silicon Valley, or the National Basketball Association, or Nike, or other such companies—we could give many examples—is a different story.
A big company might have thousands or tens of thousands of employees. They've got a complex marketing problem where they've got a segmented market of customers to whom they have to appeal to try to maintain their brand loyalty and whatnot. And they are in the private sector, in the human resource departments and the employment training area, in the corporate imaging and the advertising. They are also reflecting a woke sensibility, to some extent.
Boycotts are threatened against companies’ products if they get the wrong image on racial issues associated with themselves. Employees are in effect going on passive internal strikes of uprising against the corporate structure, because they feel that the company is on the wrong side of history with respect to this or that.
The logic of that phenomenon, wokeism in the private sector—a law firm that worries that it has to have enough Black partners, or a sports franchise that doesn't want to run into the problem of having its athletes disgruntled about the fact that most of them are Black and yet the team, the organization doesn't reflect "their values”—that's something, isn't it, a little bit different from what it is that we're seeing on the college campuses.
Yeah, and sometimes it's also just that there's an extent to which wokeism sells. And I would say often it's wokeism that is not excessive. I don't think that being woke is wrong, it's that there's a certain fringe that's now exerting a kind of influence.
But you think about something like Roseanne Barr, the actress and comedian whose career just ended because she said that Valerie Jarrett looks like an ape. It was that one thing. And she said that on Twitter, and that took care of her TV show—it's now been running a few seasons without her, because she can't be on it—and that took care of that, based on one comment. And I remember thinking at the time, nobody who's telling her to clear out her dressing room and refusing to ever have her on television again thinks that one tweet is a justification for somebody's whole career being over. But the idea is that it doesn't sell to have backed somebody like that.
That’s right. I’ve said that before: secondary sanction.
Roseanne Barr offends, so we're going to sanction her. The message is, don't do business with her.
Now, somebody breaks that agreement and does business with her—produces her TV show, invites her onto their stage, gives her an audience, or whatnot—that person has to be punished. In order for the overall regime to work, you have to not only sanction the offenders, you have to sanction the people who themselves fail to sanction the offenders.
That's where the action is. That's how the witch hunt actually gains traction.
And so we are in 1250 in France among the Scholastics. Yes, that is really what this is like.
And I just hope that under this new administration, if we really are having a racial reckoning, we can rethink our way back to the sensible—for me, it would be the sensible left.
I'm not saying that there doesn't need to be change, but this business of the inquisition based on things that simply don't make logical sense from A to B, where everybody just bows down, this is a scourge. This is religion taking over in the public square in a country where we were supposed to be past that. And language is awkward, we don't use the word “religion,” but that's exactly what's going on.
And to be honest, that's what I try to get across in this book that I wrote. Many people seem to think I'm writing a study of the parallels between religion and excessive wokeism. I'm not writing anything that boring. Nobody wants to read an analysis like that for 300 pages. I'm writing about the danger that this proposes to this country. (And Glenn and I did not set this up to be an ad for my book. It's just that that seems to have come up again.)
We didn't set it up that way, but that's the way it worked out, and it's all good. [laughing]
So as you see Glenn, I'm mad about this stuff. And it's happening against me, much—there's a story I'll tell you in about a month—but I really worry when I see so many people refusing to make sense. It bothers me.
Well, this is a conversation that should be continued. I don't know what the future is going to hold, but I'm not optimistic about how the advent of the Biden administration will affect this phenomenon that we're talking about. I think the sensible left on race is not coming back. I think the loony left on race is going to be empowered.
I mean, Joe Biden is obviously not going to be personally reviewing all of this stuff, so who are going to be the people—in the Department of Justice, in the Department of Education, in the White House—who are going to have the portfolio to deal with these issues? Who is going to be called in for advice? Who is going to be in the meetings? And the political strategy team that has to factor in the "Black vote," who are the brokers going to be in those meetings, where the impact of the administration's policy is being assessed for it's compatibility with the electoral strategy going forward?
Biden is supposed to not be running for re-election. Kamala Harris is the heir apparent. How is that gonna work, exactly? I don't see any good in that, in terms of anti-wokeness.
You know, we should call ourselves the Wokebusters. We’re the people who say Ibram X. Kendi is an empty suit, who dare Nikole Hannah-Jones to come on the program to debate us, who think Ta-Nehisi Coates is vastly overrated, et cetera, et cetera. Who you gonna call when the diversity and inclusion team comes for your head? Who you gonna call? Wokebusters.
You just set up a hashtag. I can see it.
That's what it's all about. We're in the social media business now, John.
Speaking of corporate wokeism (huh, my spell check ain't woke), I just tuned in to Netflix's new docudrama series Age of the Samurai. If you've seen the show, you'll have recognized the format; narrated reenactments of significant or representative historical events, interspersed with commentary by experts in 16th century Japanese history.
I myself do not aspire to wokeness, however I am tuned to recognize and understand non sequiturs. In this case, I wonder why we see the history of 16th century Japan told almost exclusively by white American and English men.
In the hour long first episode, eleven white, native English speaking academics, writers and historians divide 69 appearances interspersed between action scenes. Whether these represent a particularly distinguished collection of Japanese scholars, I cannot say, although I don't regard that as the main question.
Keio University Prof. Kazuhiro Marushima and UC Berkeley visiting Prof. Tomoko Kitagawa were the two other commentators. Of the 71 commentaries spaced out between dramatic scenes, each made a single, brief appearance. Should they have played more prominent roles? I think so, but again not the main question.
Is is necessary, or even a good idea that white people dominate the historical commentary of a highly visible media event involving 16th century Japan? I doubt Netflix knew or cared that they had, although you can bet the question would have been addressed had the story, for example, been about the history of the Zulu kingdom during the 19th century. In that case I would side with those who would point out that there are many highly qualified African scholars to comment about African history, just as there are many, many Japanese authorities on 16th century Japanese history.
The Age of the Samurai confirms that corporate wokeness is both selective and in accord with mass appeal, rather than a demonstration of independent reasoning or enlightenment. It also points to the disparate treatment of and sensitivity to Asian Americans, who receive very little consideration as people of color in America.