"Linguistics No Longer Loves Me”

with John McWhorter

As John McWhorter sometimes notes, he and I are “weird.” The ordinary pressures that prevent dissenters from saying what they truly think about race-related issues don’t stop us from speaking up. We have unpopular positions—at least in the academic circles in which we travel—but whether due to quirks in our character or a dedication to speaking the truth as we see it or even (in my case) the love of the fight, we state them anyway. We’ve both been doing so for a long time—we’re not about to stop now.

Both John and I know there are people in our fields who agree with us on the “racial reckoning” of 2020, DEI, and affirmative action but who nevertheless remain silent. While I wish these silent partners would start talking, I understand why they don’t. Even with the protections offered by academia, saying the kind of things John and I say can carry consequences. True, we probably won’t lose our jobs, but there are costs: lectures we aren’t asked to deliver, honors we may deserve but that we will not receive, esteem withheld, and the subtle erasure of some of our scholarly achievements.

In this excerpt from one of our recent conversations, John laments that his public positions on race post-George Floyd have had just these consequences for him. As he says, “I love linguistics, but linguistics no longer loves me.” On the one hand, I think it’s a sorry state of affairs when a scholar as accomplished as John finds himself shunned by his field for saying things that millions and millions of Americans say to each other every day. On the other hand, John’s insistence on sticking to his guns despite the cost to his scholarly reputation demonstrates just how much integrity he has. Maybe that makes him “weird.” If so, his colleagues could do with some more weirdness. One day they may find that they need guys like John who are willing to say what’s necessary. When that day comes, I hope for their sake they won’t have chased all of the weird ones away.

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JOHN MCWHORTER: I'm in bad odor among certain linguists these days. Everything changed once you and I started screaming in the summer of 2020. There's now a young cadre of linguists—it's not very many people—but who have decided that I'm one of the field's public enemies number one because I am anti-woke and talk about wokeness in such a contemptful way that they feel insulted and they don't want me representing them and they don't like that I represent linguistics to the world and the United States to the extent that I do.

And that's fine in itself, but it's meant that, for example, the Linguistics Society of America stripped me of my publicity committee headship because of the demands of this particular group. The idea being that I'm just too radioactive to head a committee. And you know, the sad thing about this is that it's because of how I feel about these issues as opposed to grammatical analysis and the things that linguists study. There's nothing that sociolinguists think or do that I've ever had any problem with. It's that I'm just not cool.

And as you can imagine, none of these claims make a dent in me. They're wrong. It's as simple as that. But it does mean that, I used to host something called “Five Minute Linguist,” where it's this game show for linguistics. I was the person who would MC it, and to be honest, I'm good at that kind of thing. It was a good event. And no one ever said anything outright, but I no longer host it. They've got somebody else who's much more correct than I am doing it. I've had to let my membership lapse, and I haven't been public about it. I didn't make any big noise, but I'm no longer a member of the Linguistic Society of America, and it's because of how I feel about George Floyd and reparations and cultural appropriation and the theatricality of wokeness.

Now, my career is not affected. I'm not gonna lose my job. But I was going through all these books, and I was thinking, wow, not only am I never going to have the place in academic linguistics that I had before. But, I thought, Creole studies is completely choked by wokeness teaching that you're not allowed to say certain things. You're not allowed to say that Haitian Creole is a complex language, just like any language, but because it's new, it's not as complex as French. You're not allowed to say that. And if you do say it, you're a pariah. And I thought, I've been studying Creole languages now for 34 years. I am frankly one of the world's maybe 100 experts on those languages. And once again, I'm not an absolute pariah. I'm the book review editor of the leading journal in pidgin and Creole studies. I get invited to the occasional Creole thing, but that's actually only from my posse. I'm not invited by anybody else. And in general, most people in the Creole studies field think of me as somebody who is clever but who is just not with the program.

And of course the worst thing about things like this is that nobody who thinks that of you actually reads your work because they think it wouldn't be worth it to put forward the effort. But I haven't said half of the things that they think I say. I entered this field in my late-20s thinking of myself as studying something interesting and trying to make a little bit of noise. In a way, it was a failure, because here I am in this subfield where it's considered the good thing to roll your eyes at the mention of my name. And I've done a lot of work, I've written books, I've written articles. I'm proud of them. I think everybody thinks of me as somebody who has a certain solidity. But I'm just wrong, according to say, nine out of ten of them. The simple fact is I'm not, and there's nothing I'll ever be able to do about it.

I think you're better than me on this because you wouldn't think this about your economics. Like there's some black economists who don't like you, but the field in general has great respect for you. Linguistics, people over 70 get me, because they're not as affected by these politics. It's the people who are getting on, if I may. But in general, I will probably never again be invited by a linguistics department to give a talk on my work. That has dried up after 2020 completely. It's only Europe now, where I'm more exotic. And I am kind of thinking, I love linguistics, but it no longer loves me. And it never will.

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GLENN LOURY: Thanks for sharing, my brother. I feel you, and I feel for you. Now, politics is no stranger to linguistics. I mean, I'm thinking of the case of the great Noam Chomsky, the father of universal grammar and, I gather, the theoretician who gives a foundation to [Steven] Pinker's speculation about the inherent nature of linguistic facility in humans.

Mm-hmm.

But he had a politics. Or has [a politics]. He's still with us, Noam Chomsky. He's got a sharp-elbow politics, but they don't mind him.

Well, they don't mind him because, of course, he's hard, hard left. So he's just “correct,” as opposed to Pinker and me, who are centrist empiricists, and therefore we're not gonna drink the Kool-Aid, and that's considered a problem. Another one is George Lakoff, who has never been as big a name as Pinker. But once again, his politics are classic, almost old left. And so he doesn't offend anybody with his politics, as opposed to we contrarians.

Well, I don't suffer the same fate. No, I am appreciated by my colleagues. But when the American Economics Association puts out a recommended syllabus for reading on race and inequality, do you know that your humble servant's life's labor, with article after article in the top five journals and with books to boot, IS somehow not mentioned by the association, because the committee to whom was delegated the responsibility to draft that syllabus is dominated by the usual suspects of the DEI brigades. Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury have no place within their halls of of canonical reference.

Damn. It's not right. That's really just not right. We can complain mutually.

But not for long, folks. We're not gonna do this all program.

Black English is the same thing, in terms of teaching the public about why Black English is cool. I've now played a major role at this point. And yet I read things written by people on Black English, both pop and not, and you can tell that they cringe to ever mention my name, despite the fact that now I've got kind of a stack of writings about it, because I am bad.

They should like your position. If I understand your position, it's that it's a language. It's got a lot of complexity and nuance to it. It's not mistaken or broken English. It has its own inherent dynamic.

Not good enough, because I don't understand societal racism and therefore I'm bad and therefore even the work that they agree with, they don't want to spread it around too much because they don't want to call attention to my name.

We are in the presence of a major scholar in his field, everybody. He's not tooting his own horn, but we should pause for a moment.

One other thing I want to get in. Economics values you for what you do because of its quality. I doubt that even if I were considered a wonderful person with the politics of a rose that linguistics in general would evaluate my work on the level that yours is. So I don't want to make it sound like I just assume that I am this top-level linguist who would be getting all these accolades. The issue is that I get none at this point, that I don't get anything. Whereas I watch people who, frankly, have not produced as much or had as many ideas, as you say—and sometimes they've had even longer than I have to prove it—getting these basic accolades, whereas I get nothing. And that nothing is a statement at this point.

Are you a fellow of the American Academy?

Of the what?

American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Nobody would ever put me up for that, at least not from my own field. That's the sort of thing that I mean. So yeah, it wouldn't happen.

You're worthy of that honor, John. Columbia University's provost's office should have a functionary whose job it is to maximize the number of honorific societies to which their faculty members get appointed. I know Brown University has one. I know a lot of places have them, because these society things help to contribute to the prestige. Somebody ought to put a process in motion.

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