We're All Sellouts

with John McWhorter

For forty years, I’ve been called a sellout. The first instance I can remember happened in 1984. I had just published my New Republic essay “A New American Dilemma,” which decried the conditions of the inner cities and the failures of black leadership. In response, the political scientist Martin Kilson—the first African American ever to receive tenure at Harvard—called me a “pathetic black mascot of the right.” He implied that I was an Uncle Tom, no more than a tool of a conservative movement that viewed me with amused condescension. In his eyes, I was either too foolish to see this or too enamored of my new notoriety to care.

Martin was wrong. I meant every word I said in that piece. It expressed ideas I’d been bouncing around for years, both in public and private. But there is a sense in which I was not speaking the whole truth as I saw it and in fact continue not to speak the whole truth. And it’s the same sense in which no public intellectual—left, right, or center—says precisely what they’re thinking. The fact is, if you want to get your point across, you can’t alienate your audience. And keeping your audience on your side sometimes means selecting which points you drive home with force and which you finesse, which positions you trumpet and which you pass over in silence. There’s no public intellectual alive who hasn’t thought, “I’m going to keep quiet about X issue, because going on about it will anger my audience, and Y issue is more important. I need to be heard on that matter, and I don’t want to distract from it.” One is always trying to calculate the potential for blowback, and at times you might soften a position you sense will get you in trouble, even if your true feelings are much stronger than you let on. (Well, maybe Norman Finkelstein doesn’t do that.)

In other words, we’re all “sellouts,” if selling out is conceived as strategic self-censorship and even a mild alteration of a position to make it easier for the public to take. A kinder and more accurate way to put is that you have to pick your battles. If I knew that each issue on which I opined would be dealt with individually and in good faith, I and everyone else would be more likely to remove the filter that we all apply to ourselves in public discourse. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world. We live in a world where ad hominem attacks can be used to delegitimize a speaker across the board: “Look what he said about Ukraine—why should we listen to anything he has to say?” In such an environment, refusing to bend to an audience’s demand that certain lines remain uncrossed can only result in disaster for the speaker. It makes small-H hypocrites of us all. We only become capital-H Hypocrites when we deny that these conditions exist.

Anyway, that’s what I truly think on the matter. You believe me, right?

---

This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

---

The Dispatch: Home for the Politically Homeless

Are you tired of sensationalized news that prioritizes outrage? Consider signing up for The Dispatch.

The Dispatch provides engaged citizens with fact-based reporting and commentary on law, policy, and culture—informed by conservative principles. More importantly, they created a community and forum for intelligent discussion among the “politically homeless”  that’s one of the more high-minded comments sections on the Internet. 

Join 400,000+ loyal readers and make The Dispatch your news home.

The Glenn Show readers: Claim your exclusive 30-day, all-access FREE trial today.

---

JOHN MCWHORTER: I have a question. The idea here, we're talking about sellouts, and it's something that you and I have both been accused of often. And I think both of us have made the case too often and too clearly for any reasonable person to really think that you and I are Uncle Toms. We mean what we're saying. We're not doing this in order to make money and buy new furniture, et cetera.

Have you ever known—and I mean in our times, not some of these people with three names in the 1850s. There were black people who actually helped slaves be recaptured, et cetera. There were such people. Not many, but there were. In modern times, have you ever known a black commentator who you would say was a sellout? Where, in the green room or something like that, the person openly says, “I don't really believe any of this stuff, but I'm going to get mine” and gives you a fist bump or something like that?

Because I've never met anybody like that. Every “black conservative” I've known—and they come in all stripes, as you well know—they mean it. They're not kidding. They're not a sellout. Have you ever met one? Because I don't always get around as much as maybe I should

GLENN LOURY: No, is my answer. I've never met anybody who was just blatantly “I'm in this for the fucking money. I'm gonna dance whatever tune gets me paid.” Never met that person. The people whom I know who are conservatives and African Americans are sincere advocates of a political philosophy or a social philosophy of conservative character and true believers of one sort or another.

What do we mean by a “sellout”? You betrayed your people.

And it wouldn't have to be that blatant. It has to be that you know you're lying, to get back to that theme. If you're going to be accused of it, you're betraying your people. It can't be just that you believe it, but actually it betrays your people. I always thought the idea was that the sellout knows. And maybe it would be somebody who might just turn around and say, “It's showtime” before the cameras are on or something like that. It wouldn't be openly saying, “I'm dancing to the white man's tune,” something that indicates they don't really feel it. They mean it in quotation marks. They think of it as a routine. I don't know that person.

There's something phony, insincere, dishonest in the characterization of a sellout, I think. If it just so happens that you have a set of views that turn out to be remunerative, having those views gets you invited to give speeches, hell, that's true about a lot of people on the political spectrum. That's true about people in the Democratic Party, people on the left, people of the three names that we're sometimes fond of criticizing. They get paid. They get paid for what they say.

Are they saying what they really believe or are they saying what they think people wanna hear? Do they trim their sails? Do they edit themselves in order not to run afoul of a certain set of sensibilities? Of course they do. Maybe they don't say what they really think about the transgender issue. Maybe they don't say what they really think about abortion. Maybe they take a line on crime, on immigration, on the economy that is tailored to maintain their viability within the system, make sure they keep getting invited back to Bill Maher or whatever. Are they sellouts?

The idea is supposedly that they have the right views. They're on the side of the angels, and so it doesn't count as selling out. But I see what you mean. If somebody like that edits their views because they know that the left would throw them over, are they a sellout?

I guess the idea though is that overall what they're doing is correct, because they're calling attention to the operations of racism. And in the meantime, they may craft their message, but that's different from telling people that we're exaggerating the effects of racism and there's a such thing as individual human dignity. That's a moral stain, and we're not supposed to believe that. We couldn't really believe that.

I know people who consider themselves people of the left who edit in that way. And I don't think anybody would call them a sellout. I don't want to name anybody, but there are people like that.

My point is, in a way, everybody does this editing. Everybody does a little bit of protecting of their brand by managing their presentation in public so as to sustain their popularity and so on. There's nothing wrong with a concern about the opinion of others and a management of the way you present yourself so as to not run afoul of it.

I wouldn't want people to think I'm an antisemite. So I could have a thought about the complex and controversial issues of the day having to do with Zionism or Jewish influence in American public life or whatever it is. I just give this as an example and not say exactly what I think, because I don't want people to get the wrong impression. I might be really mad about thuggery in black communities, but if I want the Black Lives Matter crew to take me seriously, I would be very careful about how it is that I allow that anger to express itself. And there are a lot of examples like this. When MeToo was all the rage, a lot of people thought, “That's over the top. You're going to ruin somebody's life for something they did 30 years ago?” But not that many people were prepared to say all of that out loud.

And again, I could continue to produce these examples. “I think the Ukrainians are losing that war with Russia and it was predictable that they were going to lose it all along,” he says hypothetically. I'm not expressing my opinion, I'm just giving that as an example, because if I thought that I'd be very loathe to say so in public, because I don't want anybody to think I'm Putin's puppet. And I could go on and on.

So we're all sellouts, in the sense that we all edit how we present what we say to maintain our viability in one social setting or another.

---

---

I think many people's response, though, would be that in actual usage the term refers to, do you believe that we need to stop thinking so very much about structural racism, societal racism, institutional racism, and move on to a different way of looking at things because a lot of time has passed? That's considered a really evil message among some. The idea among many seems to be that if you're black, you couldn't possibly really believe that. And so if you're putting forth that kind of message, it must be because certain whites like to hear it, and we'll pay you for it. When I think the truth is, you might genuinely believe that. And not out of naivete. You might actually make arguments that hold up. There's the confusion.

Yes, Clarence Thomas is included here. Armstrong Williams, Larry Elder—I know he's technically a libertarian—Thomas Sowell, all those people. I've never met one who seemed to be putting on an act. And I just think it's interesting that, social media, sometimes you still find people like us called that, not to mention the others.Thomas Chatterton Williams: “sellout.” No, never met that person. Coleman Hughes is not a sellout. He's intelligent. It's just one of those things.

Have you met one, by any chance? If you really look back? Ward Connerly, he was not a sellout.

These people that you're naming, like Larry Elder, Armstrong Williams, the late Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell—still with us, the great economist—these are serious people. They're conservatives. And by the way, they happen to be black. The idea of the sellout, in the case of people who comment on race issues, seems to be grounded in a presumption that the identity of the person has with it some kind of moral imperative that they take a certain intellectual/political position. And when they don't, when they violate the expectation that they're going to be freedom fighters in the spirit of the revolutionary whatever and instead they end up being conservative—they like capitalism, they think America's a great nation, they like the family, they're religious and they're overt about it, and so on like that—they somehow are taken to be disloyal to the group. And I think that's the root of the claim that they've sold out.

They have, instead of doing the dignified, honorable thing, which is holding up a banner, they've gone over to “the other side.” And I think that entire argument is wrong. The idea that because you're black and an economist, you have to be for reparations and you have to be an advocate of the structural racism narrative. And if you're Thomas Sowell and you're a classical liberal and you're in the conservative school of Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and all this kind of stuff, then you've sold out. You're not in touch with your roots, with your authenticity. Your voice is inauthentic because it's a black voice, but it's talking “white.” And I think that whole argument is stupid.

I taught at Berkeley from '95 to '02, and I've had reasons to reflect on that time over the past few months and about how long ago it was at this point. I “came out” there, so to speak. I went to Berkeley thinking of myself as having the same leftist views about race as I was supposed to. I tried so hard to, but with the dissolution of racial preferences and the way people talked about it, I just couldn't make sense of it without going public with the fact that I just did not have the views that I was supposed to have. And I'll never forget—I can't blame anybody—but it's so assumed that you're going to think one way. And not just out there.

I don't think this was “Berserkly.” This is academic culture. This is the intelligentsia. People would come and literally lean on my doorframe and start talking about things, and it was just assumed that I had certain views. They're giving the nods. It was never considered that I might feel differently about all these controversies about race on campus than they did.

And I'm thinking about white people. I remember one person saying, “As far as I'm concerned about racial preferences, we should just keep them until the composition of the student body is exactly that of the composition of California.” Now, I get that argument. I know where she was coming from. But a little simplistic. And no, I don't agree with that. That's not how I felt about how racial preferences were done in the UC system until the middle of the 1990s. That's not how I felt at all. She just assumed.

And then that same person, let's say that conversation was probably in '96. Then in ‘04, I got an angry email. Unfortunately, it's the last time I heard from her, and she's no longer with us. She was an esteemed professor of linguistics and anthropology. I got a nasty email from her saying that she's been hearing that I keep on being a no-show at linguistics conferences and she doesn't like it, because she wrote a letter for me for tenure and she's disappointed to see me showboating around and being in the media rather than doing what I set out to do as an academic.

Now, this was completely wrong. There were exactly two things that I did not do during that time for reasons that had nothing to do with being on TV and that, frankly, weren't very important. How she would have heard about both of them, I don't know. I'm not a conference no-show. I love going to conferences, and I loved it even more back then—linguistics conferences. But she immediately assumed that if I'm doing anything else, there's something a little suspect about it. Now, if I had been a good, black, hard leftist, She would have been just fine with me missing conferences in order to go out and preach the proper leftist Berkeley gospel. But since I wasn't doing that, it was wrong of me.

And she was basically calling me a sellout. This is a white woman who at that point is of a certain age. That was the sort of thing that I used to get a lot. Less now. But over the years, I've started to think, has there ever been a person like that? Did she ever know a black dissident figure who was going out and being famous just for the fun of it? And I'm thinking she didn't. I'm not sure that person exists.

And yet, Randall Kennedy—and I'm not saying he's a sellout—he's written a whole book called Sellout, which shows the power of this epithet, that you can explore it at such length. And I think it's about a mythical figure.

I like Randy, but I don't like that book. And Clarence Thomas, of course, is public enemy number one in Randy's vision, in terms of selling out.

I didn't mean to criticize Randy, but yeah, I guess I would agree with you on that one. Yeah, he really has this animus against Thomas in particular.

I'm fascinated by how it's so selective in terms of the left-right thing. If you're on the right and you're a black and you make some money, you've sold your soul to the devil. This is Clarence Thomas, the grifter. If you're on the left and you make some money ... I don't know what Eric Holder is doing right now, but something tells me he's making seven to eight figures a year as a partner in one of these big firms in New York or Washington. I don't know, we could look it up.

He must be

But I'd bet a lot that he's doing okay. So who's a grifter? It wouldn't even occur to you to say of someone like that that he's a grifter, even though he's doing very well indeed. And in part he's doing that based upon the public career that he's cashing in on.

Is he a grifter? I don't take that kind of argument very seriously. It's very tendentious. I take it as a partisan jab. I don't know what the Supreme Court is getting paid these days. My guess is it's under a half-million dollars a year. That's chicken feed compared to what these movers and shakers out there of all stripes are making. That's one night’s speaking fee for Barack Obama.

---