Voice of Dissent
Berkeley professor and author of the controversial book Losing the Race, Dr. John McWhorter speaks to Black Issues about leaving the African American Studies Department, being a Black professor and his intense media coverage.
By Pamela Burdman
Dr. John McWhorter was little known outside the field of linguistics until the Oakland school board passed its controversial proposal on ebonics in late 1996. One of a handful of Black linguists, and the only one openly critical of the Oakland plan, McWhorter was for days a regular feature on network news shows. In his latest book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, McWhorter continues to be a voice of dissent among Black intellectuals. Since the cancer (racism) is basically eradicated, he says, African Americans should drop the chemotherapy-like policies of affirmative action that taint their achievements, though he supports affirmative action in some arenas. He urges Black people to stop seeing themselves as victims, stop espousing separatist visions and stop seeing intellectual achievement as the province of White people.
McWhorter’s academic specialty is language change and language contact, with a concentration on pidgin and Creole languages. He has written two books on Creoles and one on ebonics. His next book,
The Power of Babel, will appear later this year.
BI: You have said some Black people agree with your ideas, but they don’t think these things should be aired publicly? Why do you think it’s important to bring these ideas into public discussion?
JM: Residual racism is not an obstacle to success as much as we’ve all been told. We need to start discussing this openly, because these days the overt message we tend to send to new generations of Black students is Whitey’s out to get you and this is something that’s going to check your progress. The covert feeling that more and more African Americans have is that this isn’t really true. Unfortunately, if the overt message is what young people, in particular, Black college students, tend to hear, then I think we end up stanching our potential. And I also think, frankly, that we end up perpetuating racism as White people watch this kind of debate and become more and more disenchanted with the civil rights revolution.
BI: Yet, in analyzing the three “cults” you discuss in the book: “victimology,” separatism and anti-intellectualism, you call them products of history, a seeming point of agreement with some of your detractors. Why didn’t you emphasize that point more?
JM: A great many people have traced the roots of these things. This is not a book of scholarship. I have written several scholarly books. This is an informed editorial. There is a sense that many African Americans have taken too much to heart, that history is destiny, which is a tic that I see in a great many very smart and concerned African Americans. The statement is assumed to be that “this is because of sharecropping and segregation,” rather than “this is because of segregation and sharecropping, and here’s what we’re going to do to get beyond it.” It’s that second part that interests me more than the first part in the year 2001.
