We Are Witnessing the Birth of a New Religion: A Selection from John McWhorter’s Woke Racism (2021)

“I am not writing this book thinking of right-wing America as my audience. People of that world are welcome to listen in. But I write this book to two segments of the American populace. Both are what I consider to be my people, which is what worries me so much about what is going on.

One is New York Times–reading, National Public Radio–listening people who have innocently fallen under the impression that pious, unempirical virtue signaling about race is a form of moral enlightenment and political activism, and ever teeter upon becoming card-carrying unintentional racists themselves. In this book I will often refer to these people as ‘white,’ but they can be of any color, including mine. I am of this world. I read The New Yorker, I have two children, I saw Sideways. I loved both The Wire and Parks and Recreation.

The other is black people who have innocently fallen under the misimpression that for us only, cries of weakness constitute a kind of strength, and that for us only, what makes us interesting, what makes us matter, is a curated persona as eternally victimized souls, ever carrying and defined by the memories and injuries of our people across the four centuries behind us, ever ‘unrecognized,’ ever ‘misunderstood,’ ever in assorted senses unpaid. . . .

I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it actually is a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism. Language is always imprecise, and thus we have traditionally restricted the word religion to certain ideologies founded in creation myths, guided by ancient texts, and requiring that one subscribe to certain beliefs beyond the reach of empirical experience. This, however, is an accident, just as it is that we call tomatoes vegetables rather than fruits. If we rolled the tape again, the word religion could easily apply as well to more recently emerged ways of thinking within which there is no explicit requirement to subscribe to unempirical beliefs, even if the school of thought does reveal itself to entail such beliefs upon analysis. One of them is this extremist version of antiracism today.

With the rise of Third Wave Antiracism we are witnessing the birth of a new religion, just as Romans witnessed the birth of Christianity. The way to get past seeing the Elect as merely ‘crazy’ is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they are.

One thing that will discourage a general perception of them in this way is that they themselves will resist the charge so heartily. This is understandable. Early Christians did not think of themselves as ‘a religion,’ either. They thought of themselves as bearers of truth, in contrast to all other belief systems, whatever they chose to call themselves. In addition, in our times, it will feel unwelcome to the Elect to be deemed a religion, because they do not bill themselves as such and often associate devout religiosity with backwardness. It also implies that they are not thinking for themselves.

However understandable their objections, though, we must not let them distract us as we roll up our sleeves and fashion a way of living among people devoted permanently to this new, yes, religion. Their resistance will miss the larger picture, which is less about the Elect as individuals than about how we make sense of a way of thinking they share, one that seems so obsessive and hurtful from the outside. To make sense of it, we must understand them—partly out of compassion and partly in order to keep them from destroying our own lives. This can happen only if we process them not as crazed, but as parishioners. . . .

Whites flock and even pay to listen to Robin DiAngelo teach them the counterintuitive lesson that they are racist cogs in a racist machine, with societal change possible only when they admit this and shed their racism (which will make poor black people less poor how and when, exactly?). In this, because what she is teaching is religious thought, she is a traveling celebrity preacher in the vein of Aimee Semple McPherson. The Center for Antiracist Research that Boston University has provided Ibram Kendi with is, in focusing on Kendi’s religious approach to racism, a divinity school. It has been provided for someone whose formal credentials are those of a scholar but whose actual function in society is that of a priest. . . .

The Elect, then, have magic, clergy, and also a conception of original sin. Under Elect creed, the sin is ‘white privilege.’

To anticipate a question, yes, I do believe that to be white in America is to automatically harbor certain unstated privileges in terms of one’s sense of belonging. Figures of authority are the same color as you. You are thought of as the default category. You are not subject to stereotypes. Although these days, you actually are subject to one—that of the menacing, anal ‘whiteness’ monster the Elect tar you as—but we shall not quibble.

But the issue here is not whether I or anyone else thinks white privilege is real, but what we consider the proper response to it. The Elect are to ritually ‘acknowledge’ that they possess white privilege, with an awareness that they can never be absolved of it. Classes, seminars, and teach-ins are devoted to corralling whites into this approach to the matter. The Elect seek to inculcate white kids with their responsibility to acknowledge their privilege from as early an age as possible; as I write this, religion is being preached in one school after another nationwide, even to children who aren’t even reading chapter books yet. In other words, the Elect are founding the equivalent of Sunday school—except that, because they have penetrated actual schools, they get to preach at our children five days a week.

And oh, imagine the texts this publicly funded Sunday school approach will offer. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility seeks to convert whites to a profound reconception of themselves as inherently complicit in a profoundly racist system of operation and thought. Within this system, if whites venture any statement on the topic other than that they harbor white privilege, it only proves that they are racists, too ‘fragile’ to admit it. The circularity here—‘You’re a racist, and if you say you aren’t, it just proves that you are’—is the logic of the sandbox.

Yet the book became a runaway bestseller in 2020, ballyhooed as a seminal text by the Elect and bringing countless converts into their flock. The only coherent explanation for so many people treating such a blatantly self-contradictory text as worthy of such attention is superstition. Many who are reading this book picked up White Fragility and were baffled at its reception. You need not be: White Fragility is a primer on original sin, no more baffling than the New Testament. . . .

One is born marked by original sin; in the same way, to be white is to be born with the stain of unearned privilege. The proper response to original sin is to embrace the teachings of Jesus, although one will remain always a sinner nevertheless. The proper response to white privilege is to embrace the teachings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram Kendi, and Robin DiAngelo (and surely other prophet-priests by the time you read this and beyond), with the understanding that you will always harbor the privilege stain nevertheless.”—John McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021)