Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John H. McWhorter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John H. McWhorter Joe Bartzel John H. McWhorter, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2021) Linguist and commentator John McWhorter contends that contemporary US antiracism is a religion—not just “like” one, but “actually … a religion” (23). As Woke Racism’s subtitle suggests, this religion—Electism, he calls it—harms black Americans. McWhorter has equated antiracism with religion before—first in a 2015 article at The Daily Beast—and many critics of the US American left have also since noted its purported parallels with religion.1 As one of McWhorter’s [End Page 155] fellow heterodox liberals, I opened Woke Racism wondering what insights his book-length treatment of the provocative antiracism-as-religion thesis would yield. McWhorter and I agree on much: Contemporary antiracism too often emphasizes performative gestures that do not substantively improve black Americans’ lives. Many of the radical leftist views that infuse antiracism are more dubious, and less widespread among black Americans, than antiracist discourse suggests. In their zeal to show solidarity with black suffering, antiracists often conflate that suffering—to the near-exclusion of other human experiences—with authentic blackness. Too many antiracists discount black America’s diversity, construing blackness in monolithic terms—ideologically and otherwise—that many black Americans find constricting. And there are practical measures to improve black Americans’ lives that a broad coalition of US Americans could support even while rejecting antiracism’s more radical tenets. This review, though, highlights two shortcomings of Woke Racism: McWhorter’s account of religion remains underdeveloped, and he misreads the moment to which his book speaks. Woke Racism invokes multiple theories of religion. In the chapter “The New Religion,” McWhorter describes features that, on his view, qualify Electism as a religion—e.g., superstition (25), clergy (28), and a concept of original sin (30). (Notably, the features he highlights characterize Christianity rather than religion[s] generally.) A family resemblance approach seems operative here: Electism shares many (though not all) characteristics with other social phenomena categorized as religions (60); on the basis of those shared characteristics, Electism should count as a religion too. Elsewhere, though, McWhorter writes in essentialist terms evocative of New Atheist interpretations of religion, as the acceptance of “suspensions of disbelief … inherent to a religion” (25), or placing a “bar on matters of logic” (56). Religion, “true to [its] nature,” cannot be reasoned with (60). It consists of “widespread beliefs founded in transparently irrational assumptions” (175). McWhorter also suggests some functionalist definitions of religion, invoking Émile Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence (69) and Sigmund Freud’s theory of religion as psychological inhibition (70). McWhorter offers no argument that these disparate theories of religion cohere, yet his haphazardness is not my primary concern. Beneath McWhorter’s slapdash account(s) of religion lies a concern not with religion per se but with bad [End Page 156] religion. In this regard, McWhorter’s aims seem little different from the inscription of boundaries between good and bad religion that, Robert Orsi argues, lies at the foundation of religious studies in the US academy.2 In his 2015 Daily Beast article, McWhorter labels antiracism a “flawed” religion; in Woke Racism he continues to construe it in such terms, unwittingly recreating just the sort of rigid insider-outsider boundaries that he associates with the antiracism he criticizes (35). Throughout Woke Racism, McWhorter specifies what variety of bad religion he takes Electism to be: fundamentalism (22, 34). Like fundamentalists, he contends, Elects resist reason, demanding that others adopt their worldview. McWhorter commits a common colloquial mistake when he describes these features of Electism as “medieval,” though (19–20, 59). Fundamentalism is neither a monolith nor a medieval (or, for that matter, ancient) phenomenon. Despite fundamentalist Christians’ insistence that biblical inerrancy, for instance, only preserves beliefs received from the Bible’s ancient authors, fundamentalism is distinctly modern. It arose as a response to various challenges of modernity— especially the emergence of Darwinism and historical biblical criticism. Categorizing antiracism as a variety of fundamentalism is potentially fruitful, but only if McWhorter sees the argument through. The comparison would benefit from a...