John McWhorter: The Trickster Trips Up?
John McWhorter on Bill Maher talking about alleged “black fragility.” (Screen capture from video posted to YouTube.)
John McWhorter is so valuable to the enemies of Blacks that he has survived wishing the president were assassinated. Or has he?
I first heard of John McWhorter when the Daily Californian, a newspaper distributed on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, asked me for a comment on his book, Losing the Race: Self Sabotage in Black America. I said I read it twice in five minutes, because the book rehashes some of the arguments made by Shelby Steele in his book, The Content of Our Character. Steele is a better writer.
Despite the thousands of reports and studies that say otherwise, both claim that the problems facing Blacks result from their personal behavior or that racism is not as big a deal as a century or so of Black writers have claimed.
If I were ever inclined to succumb to such thinking, living in the Black Oakland inner city since 1979 set me straight. Though the neighborhood had been neglected by the city government, abandoned by absentee landlords and the police, red-lined, and beset by crack houses, which resulted in occasional gunfire, most of the kids on my block left the neighborhood for the middle class. Only when the neighborhood became gentrified in 2013 did conditions improve.
After he read my comments, McWhorter called my home and angrily promised to “wipe up the floor” with me in a debate. I arranged a debate on a popular Hip Hop show, “Hard Knock Radio,” moderated by Davey D. McWhorter backed out.
Because of his blame-the-victim book, McWhorter was invited to New York by the Manhattan Institute, which promises its fellows that their association with the Institute will lead to publicity. The Manhattan Institute was the originator of “Stop and Frisk,” which was declared unconstitutional after thousands of young Black and Hispanic men were stopped without cause. Black and brown women complained that the police used the measure as an excuse to molest them. [1] The Institute’s “broken windows” theory that physical or social disorder directly causes individuals to commit more serious crimes has been debunked. [2]
The Manhattan Institute is a recipient of funds from the usual right-wing sources, such as the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The two brothers supported the John Birch Society and helped to finance Charles Murray’s Eugenics book, The Bell Curve. Charles Murray’s ethnic group is Scots-Irish, whom Benjamin Franklin called “Christian white savages.”
When I finally debated McWhorter on Michael Eric Dyson’s show, I found him ignorant of the Manhattan Institute’s history. McWhorter didn’t know that it was founded by William Casey, Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief, who might have been indicted for Iran-Contra had he not died.
I’m also sure that when he defends Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, which argues that white people are smarter than the rest of us, McWhorter was probably not aware that the other outfit that picked up the bill for Murray’s book was the Pioneer Fund, a “race betterment” outfit which has Nazi ties.
Started in 1937 by textile magnate Wickliffe Draper, the Pioneer Fund’s original mandate was to pursue ‘race betterment’ by promoting the genetic stock of those ‘deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.’ Today, it still funds studies of race and intelligence, as well as eugenics, the ‘science’ of breeding superior human beings that was discredited by various Nazi atrocities. [3]
Odd that Andrew Sullivan endorsed The Bell Curve in The New Republic. In Nazi Germany, Sullivan, a gay man, would have been placed in a concentration camp like Clifford, the gay character in John A. Williams’ novel, Clifford’s Blues.
At one point in the Dyson program, McWhorter insisted that I be civil to him. I said I didn’t feel it necessary to be civil to a Nazi sympathizer. McWhorter has proposed that a serum might be necessary to make Blacks less violent and to bridge the I.Q. gap. [4] This is a dangerous idea since Blacks are still experimented upon without their knowledge. That includes the leprosy experiments on prisoners at Attica in the 1970s, funded by the U.S. Public Health Service. The University of Pennsylvania apologized for experiments on Black prisoners at Holmesburg Prison.
McWhorter became a professor at Columbia University and was hired at the New York Times, where The Bell Curve received a positive review, and where other writers embrace Eugenics, but none has suggested that Blacks should undergo gene editing. McWhorter has flirted with the idea. [5]
But at the NYT it’s convenient to put a Black face on the Eugenics theory. John’s. His job at The Times seems to be challenging the ideas of Black public intellectuals who claim that racism is still pervasive in American life, a job that doesn’t require much intellectual heft, or, as I have put it, every time we say tomato, he says tomahto.
A political shape shifter, he now calls himself a Democrat, but not many Democrats are into Eugenics.
Of course, when an outfit like the NYT hires a token, they receive immunity from rebuttal. The Times poses as a bastion of free speech, yet there is no Black columnist who is as left as McWhorter is right. Black columnist Jamelle Boule is a moderate.
McWhorter never forgot my comment about his book, and so I became an early target of his wrath when he wrote a self-pitying piece in Commentary, Feb. 2004, auditioning for the position of Black right-wing intellectual for hire. Journalist Jack White, the late Manning Marble, and I were the article’s villains. He also derided Congresswoman Maxine Waters.
For example, he doubted my experience with racial profiling. He said it never happened to him:
Not once to date have I had a nasty, intrusive run-in with the police, despite being no stranger to nightlife in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Oakland, and despite having driven a beat-up car in tony white neighborhoods on a regular basis when, as a graduate student, I earned extra money playing piano at parties. [6]
His denial of my experience must have drawn the attention of the Manhattan Neo-Con clique, former working-class radicals who turned right and publications like the New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly.
Reviewing Losing The Race in Commentary, a writer said that Blacks were “paranoid” when they make claims of racism. Something that Holocaust deniers have told Jews for fifty years.
Twenty years later, McWhorter is still using a hackneyed formula. When Blacks complain about racist treatment, McWhorter still dismisses such claims as delusional. He doesn’t have to present facts. His dismissals are often flippant.
He disputed those who condemned Daniel Penny’s acquittal for the murder of Jordan Neely, a homeless Black man, as a racist act. I wish those describing Penny or his acquittal as racist might consider things from another vantage point.” [7]
On July 16th, he was still at it, this time defending the SAT Test in his Op- ed entitled ” A Test Isn’t Racist,” [8] contradicting a study published by the National Education Association that concluded otherwise. [9]
The editor of Commentary, where McWhorter’s audition piece appeared,was Norman Podhoretz, who, with his wife Midge, a homophobe, posed as advocates of the nuclear family. They earned money by criticizing the morals of non-wed Black teenage mothers when Podhoretz’s own morality was questioned by Theodor Soloratoff writing in The Nation
In the past year or two he had teamed up with Norman Mailer, the lead rebel, iconoclast and sensualist of the New York scene. The result was a hard-drinking, sexually liberated Norman who didn’t seem to spend many evenings at home. Our editorial meetings were often punctuated by phone calls from Mailer, who appeared to have open access to Norman. We always knew it was “the other Norman”–as Sherry referred to him, with her droll roll of the eyes–because the butch side of Norman would emerge as he responded to Mailer’s latest brainstorm or piece of gossip or plan for the night’s revels.10
Because I’m on to McWhorter’s hustle, I’ve been ridiculed in City Journal, the Institute’s publication. I was called an “old timer” for challenging the premise of the musical “Hamilton” that Alexander Hamilton, a slave owner, was “an ardent abolitionist.” The Times backed up my claim. [11] My reply was that if the Institute hadn’t taken tobacco money, maybe some of their subscribers would have lived as long as I have.
Hard on poor men who do squeegee services, the Institute hasn’t noticed that the CEOs of the tobacco companies that support the Institute lied about the effect of smoking cigarettes on lung diseases. Maybe McWhorter can write a tough love piece about them for the Times. But that would be beyond his assignment. His job is to scold homeless Black men who walk in the aisles of New York subways.
The Manhattan literati have been imposing tokens on Black writers for over one hundred years, but they usually mess up, as with Claude McKay, who challenged his sponsors’ emphasis on class rather than race. He found more sympathy for his condition from the Catholic Church than from socialists like Mike Gold. The Manhattan literari exiled James Baldwin, when he insulted Actors Studio’s Lee Strasberg in his novel Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. After that, according to Truman Capote, Baldwin was treated like “shit.”
I was instrumental in getting Baldwin two university appointments, yet he lied and said I called him a “cocksucker,” every time I encountered him. He betrayed me like he betrayed his other benefactor, Richard Wright. Chester Himes, one of those whom Baldwin had to step on in order to reach the top, said that Baldwin was ambitious.
Another token, Stanley Crouch, was admired by his Neo-Con sponsors when he bullied Black writers, but when he slapped Dale Peck, a white man, Crouch was exiled from Manhattan to Brooklyn, where he came to a pitiful end.
In 2024, McWhorter said that he wished someone would assassinate Donald Trump! Even though Trump, like McWhorter, endorses Eugenics!12 Lordy!
Columbia University, where he works, capitulated to Donald Trump. Trump now owns Columbia. They’ll probably give him an honorary degree like Harvard gave to mass murderer Andrew Jackson, a former president who most resembles Trump. An honor that outraged John Adams. Donald Trump owns McWhorter’s job.
McWhorter never apologized to Black Americans for the often nasty, sarcastic stream of insults aimed at the community at the behest of his sponsors, but he just about groveled on his hands and knees apologizing for his statement wishing that Trump were dead. Can you imagine the fate of a Black public intellectual of the left making a threat against the president? Wouldn’t he or she be visited by the Secret Service?
Yet McWhorter survives because he says what the enemies of Blacks say in private. For now.
Notes.
1 https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/nyregion/for-women-in-street-stops-deeper-humiliation.html
2 Criminologists and sociologists have largely debunked the Broken Windows Theory, finding little empirical evidence that physical or social disorder directly causes individuals to commit more serious crimes. Extensive research, including major meta-analyses like the Northeastern University School of Criminology and Criminal Justice study, has demonstrated that neighborhood disorder does not inherently escalate crime. The theory’s premise—that minor offenses act as a gateway to major crimes—does not hold up to scrutiny.
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund
4. Ann Brown, John McWhorter: Racial Equality May Mean Genetic Editing to Close Racial IQ Gap, Muguldom Nation, Feb 09, 2021.
5 https://fair.org/home/at-elite-media-scientific-racists-fit-in-fine/
6 John H. McWhorter. “Still Losing the Race?” A personal inquiry into why pessimism and victimology remain the key tenets of “advanced” black thought. February 2002, Commentary magazine.
7 McWhorter, John. “A Killing on the F Train,” New York Times, May 9, 2023.
8 McWhorter, John. “A Test Isn’t Racist.” New York Times, July 20, 2026.
10. Solotaroff, Ted. “Adventures in Editing: ‘Commentary’ Days,” The Nation, February 9, 2009 issue.
12. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/donald-trump-wants-to-make-eugenics-great-again-lets-not/
