John McWhorter: observation

Transcript context

…As you know, there are some well-known black male conservatives. Thomas Sowell would be one, well known at George Mason. Why are there so few openly conservative black women? Gosh, I don’t know. That is something I’ve talked about with my friend Coleman Hughes. I don’t know why it’s always guys. Sometimes you start ticking off a list. Glenn Loury and I on Bloggingheads often tick off the list of people, and everybody’s a guy. There are some women, and what’s interesting about the women is that, for a reason I don’t know, they never wind up on the list. , as in they don’t end up doing it for 25 years, for 30 years. They don’t get fostered by the circuit. I can name some people. I’ll name one of them who I enjoyed a lot 10, 15 years ago: Star Parker. She was there, she was around. But for some reason — I’m not sure what the reason is that a non-male person is not on that list. It’s a short list, but still, I don’t know. Let me give you an argument. Tell me if you agree or not. The first claim is that racism is now becoming a larger problem again. We live in an age of NIMBY, where it’s very expensive to buy into good neighborhoods in a way it was not before. We live in an age of algorithms. Arguably, we live in an age where family background matters more, so injustices from the past may be more persistent. And even though people’s intentions toward other races may not be worse — possibly they’re better — but that still racism, in practical terms today, is a larger problem than it was, say, in the 1990s. True or false?…

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