Glenn Loury
The Glenn Show
John McWhorter – The Post-Affirmative Action Class of 2028
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John McWhorter – The Post-Affirmative Action Class of 2028

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John is back for another installment of our ongoing conversation. The weather is changing and the fall semester has started. Perhaps that’s why I find myself in a meditative mood this week. I spent a lot of my summer talking about the past in interviews and conversations about my memoir, Late Admissions. And now I’m looking ahead to a new phase in my life, where the annual rhythms that have shaped my sense of time’s progression are about to shift. This is a moment to step back and consider where I am and where I’m going.

And speaking of changes, regular viewers will notice that I’m recording from my new studio set-up. It’s been a long time in the making, and it’s going to allow me to add some new features to the show. More on that in due time. In the first half of the conversation, John and I wrestle with one of the big issues: time. Nine months from now, I’ll be retiring from teaching after nearly a half-century as a university professor, and John is currently on sabbatical from Columbia. We’ve got time on our hands. How can we use it meaningfully? In the second half of the conversation, we talk about the first class of post-affirmative action college students. Between that, the public turn against DEI, scandals within Black Lives Matter, and a host of other developments, we may well be on the cusp of a new era in our racial politics. And finally, we end by considering the dispute between Thomas Chatterton Williams, the novelist Danzy Senna, and the New Yorker magazine.

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0:59 Glenn debuts his new studio

2:34 Life after academia

13:02 The challenge of having a lot of time on your hands

18:10 John’s new musical endeavors

20:20 Ground News ad

22:38 John’s forthcoming book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words

25:07 Glenn and John form an impromptu book club

29:43 The first class of post-Students for Fair Admissions college freshmen

36:22 Are black students being shut out of the upper echelons of American society?

40:33 The Supreme Court’s “indirect beneficial endowment” to HBCUs

46:42 Glenn: “The wheel is turning” on race politics in America

52:18 ACTA ad

54:26 Plagiarism in Robin DiAngelo’s dissertation

57:02 John: I don’t recognize the world that Danzy Senna and Ketanji Brown Jackson describe, even though I lived in it

1:04:07 Did Thomas Chatterton Williams really say what he said to Danzy Senna?

Recorded September 8, 2024


Links and Readings

The Rest Is History on Apple Podcasts

Preorder John’s forthcoming book, Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words

David Kaiser’s book, States of the Union: A History of the United States through Presidential Addresses, 1789-2023

David Kaiser discusses his book States of the Union on TGS

Sari Nusseibeh’s memoir, Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life

David Greenberg’s forthcoming book, John Lewis: A Life

Danzy Senna’s novel, Colored Television

Percival Everett’s novel, James

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir, Lovely One

John’s book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America

Michelle Obama’s DNC speech

Thomas Chatterton Williams’s book, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race


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Glenn Loury
The Glenn Show
Race, inequality, and economics in the US and throughout the world from Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics at Brown University and Paulson Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute