FAIR Los Angeles Book Club #07 – Mar. 29, 2023

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

The FAIR LA Book Club will return in March 2023 with a discussion of John McWhorter's bestselling 2021 book Woke Racism. The discussion will be led by FAIR Los Angeles member Anne Chomyn. McWhorter is on the FAIR Board of Advisors and is linguistics professor at Colombia University. McWhorter describes himself as a "Black liberal of about 1960," but he argues that the cultural left has led companies and institutions down a path of so-called "anti-racism" that looks more like actual racism than not. He points to the election of Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin in 2021 as an indication that even many traditional liberals don't support the reductionist view on race promoted by "woke" activists, and he criticizes the political trend of "pious, unempirical virtue signaling." Written largely in response to the watershed events of summer 2020, John McWhorter, using a metaphor, suggests that the woke should be warded off the way swimmers would ward off an approaching shark: simply by "bopping it on the nose." With his impeccably polite demeanor and eloquent words, McWhorter gives a gentle "bop on the nose" in this unapologetic reality check, which he bases on objective facts and examples and reasonable analysis.