How to Deal with Woke Bullies: A Selection from John McWhorter’s Woke Racism (2021)

“The Elect, in terms of the combined effects of their warriors and their quiet supporters, are today a mob, pure and simple. They are unreachable for the simple reason that they are arguing from religion rather than reason, trying to foist their dogma into the public square out of a misguided sense that they are the world’s first humans to find the Answer to Everything.

The Elect must be othered. We must stop treating them as normal. . . . A person fully committed to Elect ideology is not amenable to constructive discussion. They will deny the charge, but what they mean by ‘discussion’ is that we will learn their wisdom. Think of the convert to, say, Mormonism who recalls being swayed by ‘talking to’ an elder. This is the kind of discussion the Elect may seek. However, they seek not conversation but conversion, which is why so many are so frustrated with the Elect. Attempts to break bread with them seem to do little but elicit their disgust with you.

It may feel natural to suppose that instead, it makes sense to ask the Elect to be more open to other views, to gently ask them to reconsider their dogmatism. Hence endless chin-scratching calls for them to understand the post-Enlightenment commitment to free speech and the like.

But to the Elect, this sounds like calling for pedophiles to be allowed their ‘diverse’ point of view. Most of us would say pedophilia is particularly abhorrent in how perniciously it acts upon another person. To the Elect, power differentials and their results are the same kind of ‘harm,’ and we cannot understand what we are up against with these people without fully comprehending that. This is why they are often so smart and yet opposed to others having opinions different from theirs. The conflict here is, regrettably, not as simple as one that could be resolved by telling the Elect to just listen.

You don’t ask a devout Christian why they can’t ‘consider’ reconceiving of Jesus as a man who simply passed away forever two thousand years ago, as all humans do, was never again sensate to human affairs of any kind, and thus did not and does not ‘love’ them now. In the same way, you cannot ‘discuss’ with an Elect whether they should prioritize logic and civility over their strain of antiracism. Their sense of priorities is fundamentally and unmovably different from those of someone unconverted to their worldview. . . .

The most charitable way of getting at what the Elect feel is that, from their point of view, to ask them to use sense or be nice on race issues is like asking a Birmingham protester being fire-hosed to the ground to use sense and be nice. To the Elect, their intransigence is, in a long-term sense, a form of being nice, because they think of it as a prelude to a more moral society.

Ask whether microaggressions merit the same response as physical assault and the Elect do not receive this as a challenging query. To them, it is splitting hairs to taxonomize assault in this way. There is even some reality on their side, in that psychological stress and trauma have undeniable physiological consequences. The Elect ask: ‘Upon what grounds do we specify that a person harmed by policies, or even just words, must respond more decorously than someone harmed by fists and weapons?’ Maybe it’s an advance to classify all harms on the same level, such that in a future world, people are hurt by neither objects nor words or abstractions?

Or maybe not—but it is highly unlikely that an Elect interlocutor will be able to entertain the possibility of there being any question about such matters. We cannot penetrate this kind of reasoning any more than we could teach someone out of faith in Jesus, because this is a religion. . . . As such, to ask, ‘Why are you decreeing that your opinion is the only valid one?’ is futile. The Elect don’t see themselves as having ‘opinions.’ They are arguing from gospel, even though they don’t call it that and are not consciously aware of it, which makes discussions with them even harder than ones about other religions. . . .

At a certain point, a discussion about religion can end peacefully with ‘On this, we’ll just have to disagree,’ with both sides understanding that at ‘faith,’ the two sides have nowhere left to go. In a discussion about racism, too often neither side understands that faith of the same kind is at issue. The Elect person thinks he or she is ‘simply correct,’ while the secular one actually supposes that they are engaged in an argument based on logic. . . .

The Elect are our Pharisees. In fostering antiracist ideas that actually harm black people, they are obsessed with the letter of the law rather than its spirit, and their prosecution of sinners contrasts with Jesus’s embrace of them. We see in them not the demeanor of someone smoking out something awful—think of unearthing bodies after a mudslide—but the demeanor of someone rejoicing in showing themselves to have smoked out something awful. Their social media posts tend to be the equivalent of someone posting a picture not of the covered-up body they dug out of the mudslide, but of themselves actually in the act of digging the body out, to show that they were the ones who did it. This is the kind of ‘work’ that the Elect are evangelizing America to do.

How about doing work motivated by something other than working out feelings of guilt and feeling superior to other people while enjoying a sense of belonging? The work we should do involves calling for the war on drugs to end, supporting phonics-based reading instruction, and celebrating every political move that helps dilute the conviction that all people need to spend four years living in a dorm before they start training for the workplace. That’s work enough, and it will help change the world.

But there will remain the Elect reviling you for, or at least lecturing you about, this slimmed-down version of antiracism, and telling you that supporting it makes you a moral pervert. Here’s what to do. . . .

What we must do about the Elect is stand up to them. . . . We must stop being afraid of these people, and once we do, there is something we need to steel ourselves against and get used to.

People often ask, ‘How can I talk to people like this without being called a racist?’

The answer is: You cannot.

That is, they will call you a racist, no matter what you do or say beyond what they stipulate as proper. Black people: Be ready for the alternate slam, that you are ‘self-hating’ and ‘betraying your own people.’ They will say this to and about you.

The coping strategy, therefore, must be not to try to avoid letting them call you a racist, but to get used to their doing so and walk on despite it.

Specifically, on top of all else we are required to manage, enlightened Americans must become accustomed to being called racists in the public square.

We must become more comfortable keeping our own counsel, and letting our own rationality decide whether we are racist, rather than entertaining the eccentric and self-serving renovated definitions of racism forced upon us by religionists.

When that type calls you a racist—and I mean white ones every bit as much as black ones—you need not walk off, ‘doing the work’ of wondering whether your accuser was right. You are Galileo being told not to make sense because the Bible doesn’t like it.

Does this seem a lot to ask? I ask no more than the Elect, who demand you suspend your disbelief and commit yourself to a worldview on social justice focused more on virtue signaling than helping people. If you are going to do ‘work,’ as we put it these days, wouldn’t you rather do some that actually makes a difference beyond making innocent people cry? . . .

Wherever you are in a position to give an Elect the experience of calling you a dirty name and finding that you do not back down, you can contribute to a groundswell needed to put these people back in their place. . . .

The idea is not to muzzle the Elect. We need the hard left to point us to new ways of thinking. However, we need them to go back to doing this while seated, with the rest of us, rather than standing up and getting their way by calling us moral perverts if we disagree with them and calling this speaking truth to power. We must disabuse them of the idea that the race discussion after George Floyd’s death somehow revealed the morally incontestable necessity of America bowing down to the KenDiAngelonian religion. . . .

Standing up to this performance art will be easier if we always keep in mind that Elect philosophy is actual religion, pure and simple. We must exert the mental exercise of imagining them meeting in their own churches. University buildings now are all but indistinguishable from such churches. The Martian anthropologist would readily note that what we title educational institutions double as cathedral complexes for our intelligentsia’s religious commitments. Widespread beliefs founded in transparently irrational assumptions, fiercely held by otherwise empirical people, for ulterior, transcendent reasons, are religion.

When we understand that the Elect are a religious body, we understand that their adherents have no business being the final arbiters on our school curricula or what is exhibited in a museum, on what subjects people choose to study or the conclusions they draw from them, or on what kind of morality is expected of our populace. . . .

‘Precision is white.’ ‘Whites dating black people must be racist deep down.’ ‘Silence is violence.’ ‘Unequal outcomes mean unequal opportunity.’ Insights of this kind are ideas, and many of them deserve consideration of a sort. But none of them are any more appropriately imposed by fiat on the general public than would be a prohibition against consuming alcohol, or, more to the point, against abortion, or a requirement that one not mix milk and meat. These are matters of private choice.

The Elect are welcome to their private choices, such as forbidding interracial romance, discouraging black people from being specific, and teaching toddlers to think of themselves as members of races in an oppositional relationship. (Note that the Elect are indeed a sect, through and through!) But beyond their meetings, if the Elect are to insist on being an evangelist kind of religion, they must learn to try to spread their philosophy via civil and gradual suasion. The Pentecostal makes no converts knocking on people’s doors and calling them Satanists. Or, if they did, we would know there was something they were scaring, rather than talking, people into.

The Elect object here that they are different because this is about racism, as if what they preach is self-evidently logical. But let’s recall what they mean by that with a last look into what’s in the little book they would be carrying if they knocked on your door:

1. When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt. Don’t put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you. They have dealt with too much to be expected to.

2. Don’t assume that all, or even most, black people like hip-hop, are good dancers, and so on. Black people are a conglomeration of disparate individuals. ‘Black culture’ is code for ‘pathological, primitive ghetto people.’ Don’t expect black people to assimilate to ‘white’ social norms, because black people have a culture of their own.

3. Silence about racism is violence. Elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.

4. You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people. You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.

5. Show interest in multiculturalism. Do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it.

6. Support black people in creating their own spaces and stay out of them. Seek to have black friends. If you don’t have any, you’re a racist. And if you claim any, they’d better be good friends—albeit occupying their private spaces that you aren’t allowed in.

7. When whites move away from black neighborhoods, it’s white flight. When whites move into black neighborhoods, it’s gentrification, even when they pay black residents generously for their houses.

8. If you’re white and date only white people, you’re a racist. If you’re white and date a black person, you are, if only deep down, exotifying an ‘other.’

9. Black people cannot be held accountable for everything every black person does. All whites must acknowledge their personal complicitness in the perfidy of ‘whiteness’ throughout history.

10. Black students must be admitted to schools via adjusted grade and test-score standards to ensure a representative number of them and foster a diversity of views in classrooms. It is racist to assume a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences, and racist to expect them to represent the ‘diverse’ view in classroom discussions.

The above is church; it has no place in state.

If you need perspective, talk to anyone you know from a formerly Communist country. A great many of our immigrants from Russia and China are mystified at how readily so many smart Americans are rolling over in the face of rhetoric these immigrants recognize as what they escaped or what their own parents and relatives had their lives ruined by. . . .

We must say no to these people, in quest of a result: An understanding will gradually coalesce among them that they need to step up their game, or, better, step it down. A communal realization will set in, after a while even explicitly acknowledged by its unofficial leaders, that shaming isn’t working anymore.”—John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021)