John McWhorter has a new book out called “Woke Racism: How a New Religion has betrayed Black America” which is exactly what it sounds like. Basically, McWhorter is making an extended argument that for all intents and purposes wokeism operates as a substitute faith for a lot of its adherents. Today, Politico published an interview with McWhorter in which he talks about one aspect of that idea, the suggestion that certain people have become the high priests of this new faith.

“It’s not about how it’s wrong to be woke,” McWhorter told me. “It’s about how a certain subset of ‘the woke’ these days are hurting Black people in the name of something that they’re calling anti-racism.”

He adds the “clergy,” which include academics like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, have gained too much influence. As he sees it, the idea that racism is baked into America’s social structures is actually an impediment to advancing racial issues today.

There are a bunch of names you could add to that list but taking them on, especially for someone like McWhorter who is black and progressive but not a fan of wokeism, means some will challenge the idea that he is really black enough. So he says up front that there’s some truth to this idea that some people are culturally blacker than others but also that he’s part of that culture:

I think there is a tacit sense that some people are Blacker than others. And you know what? It’s true.

And some people … will say that ‘He shouldn’t be listened to when he writes a book like this, because he’s not rooted enough in the Black experience.’ That would not be a crazy thing to say. And I wanted to address it.

…I think that if people have an issue with the views that I address in the book, I want them to address the substance of it. And not to say … ‘Well, he’s not really Black anyway.’ On all levels, I am.

Getting back to the priests, McWhorter noted that they’ve already made it clear how they feel about him:

Ta-Nehisi Coates and I are not friends and it goes way back. He does not respect me. And as far as Kendi … he has nothing but the deepest contempt for me, which you can see by [viewing] some of his tweets.

So you have to understand that the priests in question are not open to other ideas, they don’t think of somebody like me as having a challenging viewpoint. They think of me as a heretic. So they’re not gonna talk to me. There’s bad blood.

He goes on to say that while he gets the heretic treatment because he’s black, many others simply get labeled racists for daring to oppose anything these priests say:

There’s been a vast over-swing of the pendulum. We have this reign of terror, where people are getting fired, people are pretending to agree with things, people are watching their children being mis-educated in certain ways. All because everybody is afraid of being called a racist on Twitter by articulate, over-educated people…

They’re going to keep on calling people racist and create a society of rampant mendacity where most people look on this sort of thing, realize there’s something wrong, but let it pass because very few people are up for being called a racist. Most people would rather fake it than endure that. That’s not the society I want to live in. And so I’d like us to go back to roughly 2010.

This certainly jibes with my own experience. I haven’t been directly accused of racism too often but I have been blocked by many of these folks on social media. Best I can recall, I once pointed out (politely) on Twitter to a writer who is now mining this same territory for a major news outlet that something he’d claimed in print about the Michael Brown shooting was false. I suggested he should correct it because he’d made a big point about it in a piece he’d written. He took great offense at that. How dare I, a nobody blogger, try to correct him. The fact that I clearly had a point didn’t matter. You’re not supposed to challenge the priests, even if you do it respectfully.

There’s more to the interview including McWhorter’s take on why wokeism ultimately isn’t going to work. You can read the whole thing here.