Whatever Happened to ... ?

with John McWhorter

Twenty years from now, will we still be talking in the present tense about Ibram X. Kendi and other black public intellectuals who made their name (and more than a little money) waving the banner of “antiracism”? Or will we view antiracism as an historical phenomenon, a movement whose time and key figures came and went? In the course of our public lives, John and I have watched plenty of black intellectuals who were once ubiquitous, whose ideas circulated in the pages of magazines and on talk shows and conference panels, slowly and quietly slip out of view. They’re still out there somewhere—maybe they’ve got cushy academic posts or perhaps they’re still churning out books that few people bother reading—but they’re largely irrelevant.

In this excerpt from our most recent conversation, John and I discuss yesteryear’s black public intellectuals, some of whom we’ve squared off against in debates, some of whom we think quite highly of, and some of whom seem to take our very existence as a personal affront. A lot of those people are now tending their gardens rather than, say, appearing on Bill Maher’s show, as John did this week. If you had asked me back in the ‘80s whether I would still be doing my thing in the 2020s, I might have guessed I would have passed the torch to the next generation and stepped aside. But I’ve still got something to say, and so does John, and as long as people are listening, we’re going to keep saying it.

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GLENN LOURY: It strikes me that there's a market out there for your book, your Kendiesque book, “How to Raise a Mixed Race Baby.” 

JOHN MCWHORTER: “Anti-Antiracist Baby.” 

It's a whole industry. 

You know what, all power to him, but I've been around long enough—just long enough—and so have you. He won't last. We've seen this. There is a type who are big for about ten years, and then they've done all that they have. I sense that in him, it's not gonna be forever. He not going to be 50 and 60 and still being taken as a guru. He's now. It's gonna be like that. I can think of several people since I've been doing this.

I'm going to guess that you're thinking of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and the question in my mind is, what has ever happened to him? I haven't heard from him in a while. 

He's a good example. Or you can go further back: Touré. Remember when Touré was the big thing? 

Yeah, I do remember Touré.

And Touré's brilliant, et cetera, but he's not now. I don't have anything against Touré, but there was a time when one might have thought he was on his way to becoming a tippy-top, black leftist public intellectual, and that did not really happen. We don't need to tick off people like this, because I'm not saying that there's something wrong with it, but I get the feeling that who we're talking about is not gonna be Michael Eric Dyson, who always keeps on ticking. There are ones who kind of come and go, and I get the feeling [Kendi] is gonna be one of those people. 

That's an interesting observation. It's a set of observations, actually. An invitation to survey the black public intellectual scene. You know, the three name people and whatnot. What about Melissa Harris Perry, you could say. Then there are others that you could name.

You know, I didn't wanna say her.

What about the young Coleman Hughes, looking in the other direction instead of retrospectively looking forward? Do you think he has legs? And I'm not asking you to answer that question, because he's our friend and we don't want to dissect him in public. 

No, it's interesting you bring him up. Melissa Harris Perry is also someone who I think was making a bigger noise ten years ago than now, but it's easy to forget that she is now doing The Takeaway on National Public Radio.

I know. And she does a good job at it, too, if I may say so.

She's really good. I think she's fantastic. 

She's very good. And it's a hard thing to do. I mean, I could tell you as host of The Glenn Show, I would not want the responsibilities of doing that NPR show.

All the time. No, she is to the manner born on that show. She has held on. She's not the type who wants to write a book every two or three years. That's not what she does. But she's there. Oh, another one: Tavis Smiley. Big, big, big deal for a while. And now, not.

Well, he had a peccadillo. He had some stuff. 

He had a little of a #MeToo. 

Relationships on the job and stuff like that. And he also got on the wrong side of Obama, Tavis Smiley did. 

Yes. That took care of him. 

That didn't help, when Obama was president.

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It mainly was that. If he had not been against Obama, I think he, he might still ... yeah. And as for Coleman, I'm not just saying this because he's part of our posse, I really believe that in 20 years he will still be around because, frankly, he has a certain versatility. He's interested in a lot of things. I think he will be very open to watching the world change and adjusting to it instead of just saying the same thing over and over again. I think that Coleman with graying hair and on MSNBC, having his own podcast, I can see it very easily, because he has a lot of arrows in his quiver. So yeah, he'll last. 

That's interesting. I agree. I agree with your forecast. We'll see. Time will tell. Let's hope that I'm around to observe the trajectory of the great Coleman Hughes. And I agree with your assessment. The reason I agree with your assessment is because I think he's got a really good head on his shoulders. He's got a high IQ. He's smart, he's an intellectual, he reads books, and he thinks about them. He has interesting things to say about books.

Columbia trained him well. 

Exactly. You can take pride in that, being Columbia faculty. He's got this thing that's coming up. What is he writing about? Colorblindness or something like that? I mean, he's got a book contract. There will be a book. It'll be his God and Man at Yale kind of statement early in his career, analogous to the great William F. Buckley. 

That is a good analogy. 

What he needs is a regular platform. He has his podcast, Conversations with Coleman, and he has his music enterprises and whatnot. You know, a place where he is regularly sounding off in a reflective way about the issues of the day. I agree. I'm bullish on him.

I don't expect to see him fade. It's been interesting to me to see the ones who were the ones to beat in, say, 2003 and then what's happened since. And I don't want anybody to think that I'm gloating or anything like that. It's interesting. 

Yes you are! I'm teasing.

I think to myself, wow, that's the person who would've always been on the panel with or against me in, say, 2005. Haven't heard a word from them since. Wonder why. As opposed to you. You and I did things back in the early 2000s, and here we are now. What's the difference? And I think part of it is that you and I have kind of a niche market. There are only so many people who take our positions. It's easier to stay around because we're dependables. So I'm not gloating. But in terms of who the people, especially on the other side, are, it's interesting, just what who lasts and who doesn't. Ishmael Reed, for example. Early 2000s, he wrote some books. He was on TV a lot. He was on the radio a lot. He was beating up on me. 

I like him. I think he's a great novelist. 

He may be, but he would not like your positions on race. And if you two ever appeared on a show together, he would be gratuitously abusive, as he was towards me.

I corresponded with Ish Reed back in the day, 25 years ago. He thought I was interesting. I mean, I'm sure you're right. He disagreed. He was in Oakland, as I recall, and was very integrated into the local activist scene. I like Reckless Eyeballing. That's his novel that I really, really admire. But there was another one that I also liked. He was a Stanley Crouch-era black intellectual, that is Ishmael Reed. I say “was,” I shouldn't use the past tense. Stanley has passed away, God rest his soul. But I assume Ishmael Reed is still with us. 

He is, yeah. He's getting to be lionized as the grand old man for his literary work. I bear no hate. It was a long time ago. But he was impossible towards me when I started. Told lies about me in public, on the radio, on Michael Eric Dyson's radio show, got into my family history, including my mother's slide into mental decline after the age of 50.

Oh no!

Uh-huh. He was mean. It was over the line.

That's way below the belt.

Ishmael thought I was this interloper who didn't mean what I said. And then after about '06, you stopped hearing from him in those settings. And he's very much alive. People come and people go in playing that particular role. He has a book called Another Day at the Front. I believe it's 2004. You can imagine what it's like. It's all full of typos. You can tell he wrote it very quickly and very angry, and it includes the lies about me. I don't know, Glenn, I'm surprised you and him ever had anything to do with each other. 

I think he thought I was interesting, and he reached out with this correspondence. Do we write like that anymore? I don't think we write like that anymore, letters to people that you don't know about ideas. It was a little bit like that. But I'm sure he thought I was a running dog lackey of the racist whites, a sellout Uncle Tom, you know, whatever. Adolph Reed also wasn't very fond of me. 

The way Adolph treated you is the way Ishmael treated me. Yeah, exactly. 

You know the story about Adolph.

That thing he said at that party. 

To my daughter. Asked her if she was part of the “mystery family.”

Right, right. That's unspeakable, that sort of stuff. You know how some of the feedback we get implies that we're the ones who start that stuff? There are people who think, for example, that we started jumping all over people like Coates and Kendi, when they don't realize that in both Coates's and Kendi's case, they started it. They're the ones who come out punching. Kendi has called me an embarrassment on Twitter, not too terribly long ago. People seem to think that we're just these nasty guys who are punching and saying all these terrible things.

I don't think a lot of people realize how mean everybody can be, like Coates. For example, I've noticed that a lot of people in the business, lot of white men in the business in particular, think of him as this courtly gentleman, and they have no idea of the way Coates wrote about me very often, long before I said anything about him. They really don't know, and they can't imagine it. They can't imagine that that sort of thing would ever have come from Coates. And now we're just talking about blog posts in the Atlantic that nobody reads anymore. They have no idea.

It's interesting to me. And so they're always surprised when I don't jump out of my seat and praise Coates. I think about all the names he called me and all that stuff. A lot of people don't know about this shit that goes on between a lot of us that doesn't make it into the pages of Harper's, or something like that. It's just something I've always been struck by. 

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