John McWhorter: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why? Because, one, you have to think about what we mean by racism. It seems that you can creep from it being about personal bias to being about societal discrepancies, which could be traced to racism. But there’s a difference between tracing it to personal biases and an assumption that the discrepancy means that the racism exists, and leaving it abstract as to what we mean by the racism. I worry that that latter version is what’s often meant. More to the point, even if what you were saying were true, and I’m not saying that it’s not, but let’s say that were true. The question is how decisive the effect is. I would say that we tend to suppose — and I’m not sure what the answer to this is; I really am not sure what the answer to this is — we tend to suppose the conditions in a certain post-industrial society — starting in the late 20th century after the death of Christ, that particular time, and then going into the early 21st century — that somehow conditions then made it uniquely impossible for a certain group, the descendants of several generations past, of African slaves, to succeed. That their problems had to have been due to something that we call racism, with the implication that it’s discrimination, with the idea being that if it wasn’t discrimination, then just the fact that there was the discrepancy means that there was racism, and if somebody puts it that way, you give them a National Book Award. I’m not quite sure what the justification for that view is. I know that the problems black America has are not black America’s fault, and I’ve tried to write about that. It’s not that somebody’s lazy. It’s not that somebody’s a poverty pimp. It’s not that somebody’s lining their pockets. It’s a complex cocktail of socio-historical factors that have put it in this place. But to say that racism is the main problem — Not the main problem, but that —…

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