John McWhorter: belief

Transcript context

…But what’s the intuition that allows us to differentiate the fact that we’re not disturbed when Gershwin, a white man, writes Porgy and Bess, but when an all-white, or nearly all-white, cast puts it on — then it bothers us. What’s the difference in those cases? I increasingly don’t know because I think we’re at a point where we’re just beginning to see . . . and I know I’m ahead of time a little bit here, which is unusual for me. The browning of American culture since roughly 1995 is such that a lot of young white people today are more in touch with black culture, black speech, black ways of singing, black ways of moving than they would have been when, for example, I was a child. I’m fully aware of the existence of racism, fully. However, that does not belie what I just said. Such that it seems to me, take it another couple of generations afterward, and to say that if there was an Eminem, if there was an Adele, if there were people of this kind, can we really not have a white person playing a black person with it having a different meaning than it did when Tess Gardella was up on stage playing Queenie in 1927? I think we have to get there, and I can see it already in maybe the children of today’s children. It’ll start peeping through because we’re not really past race until that can be. I think we’re in a strange place where there was a great love for blackness that co-exists with a great hatred for other aspects of blackness. Now, it could be it just stays that way forever. However, if it did, that would be the first time in human history that things were that static. I think that even when it comes to race in America, things can move, and that would be one symptom of it. Today, should there be material reparations for African Americans?…

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