From 2020: The Early Days of the Racial Reckoning

with John McWhorter

In this clip from a September 1, 2020 episode of The Glenn Show, John suggests that the backlash to Black Lives Matter has begun. He tells Glenn that he detects small pockets of resistance to Kendi’s, Coates’s, and DiAngelo’s brands of antiracism. Glenn points out that other indicators—like the NBA’s post-George Floyd boycott—suggest that the racial reckoning is still going strong. Here’s the full conversation.

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Editor’s Note: Glenn’s recovery from surgery is proceeding apace. He’s currently in a physical rehab facility, where he’ll stay for a few days more before heading home. He is reading the comments section though, and he deeply appreciates all of your well wishes. - Mark

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GLENN LOURY: We should not be talking about the domestic realm when everything is up in arms. We're in the middle of a presidential election. People call it a national awakening on racial issues. We are in the middle of rioting, we're in the middle of political violence, man. Political violence. And things feel very uncertain to me. I'm uneasy. I keep checking my retirement portfolio to make sure that it hasn't been zeroed out yet.

JOHN MCWHORTER: You know what? When I talk about my compass, part of what I mean is this. You talk about the racial reckoning. It's occurred to me that there's a certain crowd who think—and I don't think they're trying to force this—they actually think this is natural, that we're having a racial reckoning in the wake of what happened to George Floyd, and that what that racial reckoning means is that America is now responsible for toeing a radical leftist line on race that involves all of this recreational self-examination and this idea that every single field of moral or artistic endeavor needs to suddenly turn itself upside down to “observe diversity.” And also that people who don't toe a certain ideological or terminological line are not only to be criticized but also sanctioned in some way.

And already the meaning of the word “cancel” has changed so much in the past ten minutes that I won't say “cancel.” But the idea is that you are supposed to be beaten in the public square in some way. There's a whole crowd of people who think that the racial reckoning is not supposed to be what we maybe would have thought it was, say, a couple decades ago, when we had the national conversation on race. And even though all of that wouldn't have made sense to everybody, still, both feet were on the ground. You're talking about affirmative action in certain ways.

Now there's a group of people, and I wouldn't say that all of them are young, but the idea is that the racial reckoning means that we're supposed to conduct the country as if Robin DiAngelo, Ibram Kendi, and Ta-Nehisi Coates are the authors of, say, three testaments of a certain volume, and that is creating a lot of friction.

But this is the thing. I think there's a certain pushback against that, and the pushback is not saying we don't need to think about race at all. But I think that, without knowing it, this crowd has played their hand so obnoxiously—and they didn't know it. They really do think that their way is the only way of looking at things. But I think that, frankly, the rest of us being pushed into that corner, I think a significant number of people are saying, no, this is not what we need to do. And I'm beginning to enjoy seeing signs of that. Do you know what I mean?

I'm gonna make sure I'm following you. There's a national reckoning with race. It's different from the “conversation on race” that Clinton conducted in the '90s. There's a certain urgency of declaring yourself on the right side of history and a certain intimidation or force to enforce that urgency. But then there's a pushback against that, which you're heartened to see. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah. I don't feel like those people are going to take over. I know I was worried about that, say, six weeks ago. But I think I'm noticing that with normal people, there's a point at which people are beginning to be …

Say for example. Give me an example of what you're talking about.

Trader Joe's. For example, somebody started a petition against Trader Joe's because they had this little joke of naming some of their products, say Trader Jose's if it's some taco or Thai Joe’s if it's some Thai food. Actually, I never saw that one. But a person of this woke contingent started a petition, which got an impressive number of signatures, saying that Trader Joe's needs to stop that because it's racist.

Well, most people wouldn't consider that little joke to be offensive to anybody, including people who the joke was on. Many Latinos then said, “We never thought there was anything wrong with Trader Jose. If anything we found, we felt acknowledged.”

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And so Trader Joe's started to say, okay, and then there was a bit of a pushback, and then they reversed it. They reversed it. They said, no, we're going to keep the products. And it's not just that, but I'm seeing a bunch of little things and some slightly bigger things where I'm beginning to see that critical mass of people just may say, “Yes, we're going to have a reckoning on race. But we're not going to have Star Chamber Stalinist show trials and the things that these other people seem to genuinely think is progress.”

So my response to that would be, okay, we're seeing some pushback because there's absurdity and excess. But the main thrust is very much deeply embedded in this politically correct narrative about antiracism. And I give the sports arena, the athletes, as an example of that. The NBA didn't play games. They boycotted. And some of the things that were said around that, like, “The country doesn't deserve our talent,” is almost what the athletes were saying. We shouldn't have to perform like monkeys for these people who nevertheless will not affirm the value of black life.

It's pretty extraordinary, isn't it? Because Black Lives Matter is not exactly the Salvation Army or the Red Cross or something like that. It's political. Whether you [hate] them or love them, they definitely have content. They're coming from a particular ideological, philosophical posture. It's political. It's on the left. It's black nationalists in a certain kind of way.

Anyway, and as you can tell from the tone of my voice, I may not be entirely on board with the Black Lives Matter view of the world. I may have to push back against the Black Lives Matter view of the world. But to see the National Basketball Association with shirts with the slogan on it, with the thing along the side of the court when they're playing the game, the players all in the post-game interviews being interviewed, making their statements, the coaches. Then you see Doc Rivers, who's a coach of the LA Clippers, made a very passionate statement—he used to coach the Boston Celtics—that I saw online somewhere, and I thought, my God, how very interesting. Because these things are political. If you transport that to another business, can you imagine another line of business, where the very content of it would be shrouded and infused with the iconography and the mythology of the political view of a particular part of the partisan spectrum?

So that I think is indicative of a sign of our times. Also, by the way, if you're a white player and you like your flag? Suppose you're a good old boy, you're a NASCAR lover, that you're a white guy from Alabama and you play football. Are you going to say anything to the contrary of what these guys are saying, man? You're laughing, man. You'd have your head handed to you on a platter.

Yeah, you're right. And you're making me clarify. What I mean is, as always, the hardest nut to crack is the one about the cops. That is always the center of our racial tensions, whether people say it or not. And it's been that way, in particular, since the early 1960s, if not before. And so I talk about the pushback. Black Lives Matter is becoming a nebulous concept, but I think we would both agree that the reason that they exist is because of the idea that the cops kill black people out of racism. That needs to stop.

Now it's getting to the point where Black Lives Matter has associated itself with a general leftist point of view. And so you say Black Lives Matter, and you start thinking about Ibram Kendi's books, et cetera. But those athletes are responding to things like what happened in Kenosha. They're thinking about George Floyd. They're thinking about men like them who get shot by the cops and the idea that the cops shoot men like them but would not kill their white equivalents.

Now, you and I have talked about how that is a very debatable proposition. And that's putting it politely. I don't think either one of us believe that the evidence suggests that the cops kill out of even subconscious racial animus. But that's an argument that people like us make that gets read by a certain crowd. It feels counterintuitive, frankly. And so if that's going to start having an effect.

It's almost sad that the highest up I've heard it have an effect is from the jackass's mouth, Trump, who actually said it happens to more white people. And I was thinking, oh God, he got that from the sort of thing that we write. But it's not going to get around beyond that too much. And so I don't blame those players for laboring under that illusion and protesting it. That's not going to go away for a long time.

However, everything else about race, everything outside of that central circle, it seems to me that people are more empirically grounded in it. And I think that there is room in this country for white people who are not saying, as they would have said 50 years ago, “I don't see that there's a race problem at all,” but just that we need to not go overboard and pretend that critical race theory is somehow the Bible. Which is what these new people are trying to make all of us say.

But no, there's always going to be, at least for the foreseeable future, this general idea that the cops walk around killing black men when they wouldn't kill white men. That's going to be a really tough one to get through to people, especially people who don't read Slate and Commentary and watch this, which is, let's face it, most people. So yes, you're right about that. That's not changing. That can make it look like nothing is happening. But I think beyond that, there is some sort of sea change happening, compared not to 2015 but to say May [2020]. I think that here as we get into September, we've seen a certain shift. Talk about how fast things are going.

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