Voice of DISSENT - John McWhorter - Interview

Black Issues in Higher Education, May 10, 2001 by Pamela Burdman

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.

BERKELEY, CALIF.

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 its 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.

BI: But didn't you ever feel the instinct to dwell on the first part?

JM: Well, if you're a Black teen-ager who grew up with a social worker mother who did not like White people very much, then naturally you're going to start falling for that line. What made me feel differently was simply the empirical evidence. You live a life, you watch White people, you see the things that happen to you, you read your history, and you realize there is something very different about the world I live in than the world people were living in even 30 years ago.

There are mainstream things in life that I love very, very much just as themselves. One of them is foreign languages. I love old movies. The Black ones are nice, but really what first hooked me was Fred and Ginger. I have loved dinosaurs since I was a child. There's nothing Black about that. Developing that oppositional Black identity means that you have to give those things up, and I couldn't do that. I'm too much of a nerd.

BI: You say Black students consider school a "White thing" to the extent that you have never had a student who wasn't African American "disappear without explanation or turn in a test that made me wonder how she could have attended class and done so badly." I know some professors at Berkeley dispute that experience. How have students reacted?

JM: Since I left the African American Studies Department, I don't have as many Black students as I used to have. A couple of Black students have approached me on campus dismayed. A couple have approached me agreeing with me. I hear there are students who despise what I have written. I am working now, rather closely, with three Black students here, and as far as they're concerned, it's not really an issue. They are pretty much exceptions to what I talk about; I hate to say it, partly because we no longer have racial preferences here, and so the Black students are here for the very same reason everybody else is.