Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America

This is a perceptive, courageous and thoughtful book from Columbia University Professor of Linguisitics, American Studies and Music History John McWhorter who has published extensively in highly-regarded newspapers and magazines and is the author of more than twenty books and is, incidentally, black. In this book, he takes on the recent fad of wokery for, in his view, undermining black students and youth (as well as the mature and well established). How does it do that? By inducing or pressuring them to favor manipulation of white guilt over objective truth and logicality. The result, for inductees, is the loss of intellectual self-trust and functional power. He goes on to expose the wokery of white people as the strategy of admitting one's inherited racial privilege along with the guilt of that . By thus embracing one's moral abjectness, one is in a paradoxically good position to pull moral rank on anybody not self-identified by these code words. Since the woke protect each other, it's safer to confess your power, privilege and the racism underlying it, just as a prophylactic measure. It's a pretend identification with the powerless and a pretend dissociation from the powerful. Not content with exhibiting the bad faith of this faddish response to current practical problems, at the end of his book McWhorter offers three well-reasoned policy proposals, each designed to address distinct disfunctions in the black community and repair -- rather than lament -- them.