John McWhorter: evaluation

Transcript context

…Hi. I was wondering what advice you’d give to young African Americans today? You’ve clearly been through a lot of culture war stuff. You’re a veteran. It can often feel like there’s this strong downward pressure on African Americans, and you feel you’re the last in a long marathon. There’s a baton being handed off to you, and if you slow down, you might drop it. You might waste four centuries of hard work. Now, obviously, you want to be intentional. You want to be a smart, rational person, but the pressure of that baton is always at your back. So I want to know what you would say, even to your daughters, who are growing up in a time when people like Rosa Parks seem like ancient dinosaurs, but they were around only a few decades ago. Yeah, it’s funny. My older daughter the other day, said very innocently — she’s eight — because of school activities, she said, “I’m getting tired of Martin Luther King.” [laughter] So I took her aside, and I said, “Do you actually know what he did?” And they had actually taught her pretty well, but I could tell that, to her, that was like listening to something about the French and Indian Wars. It was 400 years ago. This is my real answer. People talk about singing — well, no, people don’t always talk about this, but they should. If you’re trying to hit a high note, one way that you hit the high note is you look up at it, and you go ahhh [singing], and you think of it as an effort. If you have a really high note, what a good singer does is imagine themselves looking down on it. That’s how you hit a high note — ahhh [singing]— like that. In the same way, if you’re thinking of being black as a burden, and I don’t know what your personal circumstances are, but often you’re taught that you’re working against all of this flak from the outside because people are leveling microaggressions at you, et cetera. And, you know, they are. But as far as I’m concerned, and I think this is the way someone thought before about 50 or 60 years ago — talk about the culture wars and how you can forget that you’re making assumptions rather than dealing with truth — is that, if somebody throws a little something like that at you, you look down on it. And if anybody tells you that that makes you arrogant, well, then, frankly, I guess it does. But keep being arrogant because I have never understood the idea that some person calls me nigger, and I’m supposed to fall down crying and run to the diversity coordinator because that hurt me, when, frankly, it didn’t. Really, I’m better than the person who said that. That’s the way I always felt, and somewhere past 30, I realized, “Oh, that’s supposed to make me cry.” I inculcate that in anybody I know because it’s the way I always felt. And to be honest, with the way both of my daughters act — they’re going to hear this one day — the way both of them act, I can tell that I’m not even going to have to teach them. The idea is, if anybody gives you any of that, well, they messed up and you have a lot to live for, and life is never perfect, and think about the good dinner we’re having tonight. That’s not a bromide. Be a little snobbish. Don’t let people tell you that you’re supposed to bend yourself down to the insults that other people lob at you, especially when they’re subtle and abstract. You’re better. You’re just better. And I know that that’s not what I’m supposed to be saying to you as a 54-year-old person with a certain responsibility, but I think I’m right. And I guess that means that I’m arrogant, but then again, in that sense most black people were arrogant in about 1950. Be like old people. [laughter] Next question.…

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