Episode Details

As I mentioned at the start of our latest subscriber-only Q&A episode, John McWhorter recently received the 2022 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education, bestowed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. According to the ACTA, the award honors “individuals who have made an extraordinary contribution to liberal arts education, core curricula, and the teaching of Western Civilization and American history.” Perhaps I’m biased, but I can think of no one who more richly deserves such recognition, and so I was proud to be asked to deliver some remarks in tribute to John at a ceremony, which I offer below. (I’ve also recorded an audio and video version for those who prefer to listen and watch. The audio is available now, video will uploaded tomorrow.)

Next month will mark the fifteenth anniversary of my first recorded dialogue with John. Since that first episode, the two of us have experienced much. The beginnings and ends of marriages, the loss of loved ones, the birth of children and grandchildren, not to mention changes in political orientation and new career paths. Through all of that, John and I have kept talking to each other. I think those conversations are important for the reasons I state below. But equally important to me is the friendship that has allowed us, despite our differences, to keep the dialogue going. Without that bond, we may have been able to continue the conversation, but it would not have meant nearly as much to me as it does.

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There are things that don’t—or can’t—get said when we talk about race in most venues in America. Those who have followed the 15-year-long conversation on this topic that I have been undertaking with John at The Glenn Show know what I’m talking about, whether it’s crime in black communities or out-of-wedlock birthrates, academic underperformance or the unbearable intellectual lightness of anti-racism agitation. In academia, in mainstream publications and media outlets, and increasingly in K-12 classrooms, what I’ve called “the bias narrative” holds sway. Negative aspects of black life are attributed almost entirely to the nation’s history of racial oppression, which is said to begin in the early seventeenth century and to continue unabated to this day. We are said to be a bandit society built on genocidal plundering undertaken by unrepentant racists.

That’s one story you could tell. And if that story were just one of many circulating through our national discourse, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. But this “bias narrative” has become not just one of many stories. It’s now the only story on newspaper opinion pages, in scholarly journals, and in educational materials disseminated throughout our schools. It’s the story told by the White House. It’s the story that ramifies out from the most elite precincts of our country and shapes ordinary conversations and relations between individuals. Its grip on so many areas of the public imagination has become so tight that anyone challenging it is viewed with suspicion and, often enough, outright contempt. If an alternate explanation for black underperformance is proffered, it’s not the explanation that gets challenged but the individual making it. For to challenge this narrative, ipso facto, proves that one is a racist, or a deplorable or, if the challenger is a black man, an Uncle Tom.

This situation is intellectually infantile and morally bankrupt. How we talk and think about race has consequences that can be measured not just in dollars and cents but in st