What's at stake in the "Conversation about Race" that I’ve been having with John McWhorter?
My tribute to John on his receipt of ACTA's 2022 Philip Merrill Award
Tribute
WHAT’S AT STAKE IN THE “CONVERSATION ABOUT RACE” THAT I’VE BEEN HAVING WITH JOHN McWHORTER?
My tribute to John on his receipt of ACTA’s 2022 Philip Merrill Award
Glenn C. Loury
Introduction
There are things that don’t—or can’t—get said when we talk about race in most venues in America. Those who have followed the 15-year-long conversation on this topic that I have been undertaking with John at The Glenn Show know what I’m talking about: whether it’s crime in black communities or out-of-wedlock birthrates; academic underperformance or the unbearable intellectual lightness of “anti-racism” agitation. In academia, in mainstream publications and media outlets, and increasingly in K-12 classrooms, what I’ve called “the bias narrative” holds sway: negative aspects of black life are attributed almost entirely to the nation’s history of racial oppression, which is said to begin in the early seventeenth century and to continue unabated to this day. We are said to be a bandit society built on genocidal plundering undertaken by unrepentant racists.
That’s one story you could tell. And if that story were just one of many circulating through our national discourse, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. But this “bias narrative” has become not just one of many stories. It’s now the only story – in newspaper opinion pages, in scholarly journals, and in educational materials disseminated throughout our schools. It’s the story told by the White House. It’s the story that ramifies out from the most elite precincts of our country and shapes ordinary conversations and relations between individuals. Its grip on so many areas of the public imagination has become so tight that anyone challenging it is viewed with suspicion and, often enough, outright contempt. If an alternate explanation for black underperformance is proffered, it’s not the explanation that gets challenged but the individual making it. For to challenge this narrative, ipso facto, proves that one is a racist, or a deplorable or, if the challenger is a black man, an Uncle Tom.
This situation is intellectually infantile and morally bankrupt. How we talk and think about race has consequences that can be measured not just in dollars and cents, but in stagnant lives and dead bodies. So, responding with ad hominem attacks to any account of our current predicament that is not rooted in bias isn’t merely unfortunate, it is actively damaging. The stakes are enormously high here and the hour is late. Candor, integrity and courage are in short supply. Name-calling and character assassination have largely replaced open debate, while naked emperors, pseudo-academics, and bombastic demagogues command the public square.
Enter John and Glenn—or, as I sometimes like to refer to our dynamic duo, enter “The WokeBusters”!
Remarks in tribute to John H. McWhorter, on the occasion of his receipt of the 2022 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education, bestowed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), delivered on October 21, 2022, in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, Washington, DC.
In Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Emperor's New Clothes,” two swindlers promise to provide an emperor with magnificent new clothes that will be invisible to those who are too stupid or incompetent to see them. Officials could plainly see that no clothes were being produced on the swindler’s looms, but none of them would say anything to avoid being thought of as a fool. So, when the emperor walked through the city in his new “clothes,” everyone could see that he was naked, but no one wanted to be the first to say it. Then along came an innocent child who, in his naïveté, was willing to defy this false consensus and to speak out.
The thing about the child in that story is not that he’s saying it. It’s not even that other people hear him say it. It’s that everybody knows that everybody else has heard him say it. The child has created a situation in which it becomes common, shared knowledge that the emperor has no clothes, in the sense that everyone now knows that everyone knows the truth.
German political scientist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann coined a term that describes this phenomenon: the “Spiral of Silence.” In a spiral of silence, when holding a certain view entails a stigma, then, for fear of being seen as having that view, most people stay silent. Thus, the masses believe they are alone or in a small minority of people with the stigmatized view, when in fact they are indeed in the majority, one of the masses.
In progressive-controlled areas of our society today, we are suffering from a spiral of silence when it comes to the topic of racial justice. A great many Americans don’t like it when Colin Kaepernick takes a knee at a football game and says, “I’m not going to stand for this national anthem,” or when a Black Lives Matter activist rises with his balled fist and says, “Burn this city down.” But they are afraid to be the only one in their community saying it, to be perceived either as racist, or as a supporter of racism, for holding mild views that, arguably, most of America holds—views such as the obvious fact that “White Lives Matter, too!”
There is a deeper point here. Though overt censorship is often spoken of as the leading threat to open discourse, the more subtle threat arises from the voluntary limitation of one’s own speech that creates a spiral of silence. As John Stuart Mill recognized in his masterwork, On Liberty, it is not the iron fist of state repression but rather the velvet glove of society’s seduction that constitutes the real problem.
Who, we must ask, will speak for compromise and common sense, when to speak in this way is seen to signal a weak commitment to “the struggle”? Who will insist that we speak plainly and tell the truth about delicate and difficult matters that we would all prefer to cover up or ignore, such as the despicable black-on-black violence now ravaging many of our cities? Who will declare “the emperor” to be naked? How can a nation sustain an elevated political discourse, when the social forces of conformity which enjoin silence threaten to usher in a dark age? In truth, no nation can.
However, with a simple choice, with just a little bit of bravery, YOU and I can choose to be like that child who spoke truth to the empire. That is, we can put an end to the gaslighting, the lying, and the willful blindness to reality on issues of race and social justice that are so characteristic of our time.
My friend and longtime conversation partner, Prof. John Hamilton McWhorter, IV—with his books, opinion pieces, and via his public ministry at The Glenn Show—has, for nearly a quarter-century, been pointing the way for us. It is now up to those of us who are committed to an honest engagement with this age-old American dilemma of race and social justice to follow his lead—if only we dare!
Thank you.
Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. As an academic economist, Professor Loury has published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of race and inequality. As a prominent social critic and public intellectual, writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, Professor Loury has published over 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad. Professor Loury’s books include One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (The Free Press, 1995); The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2002, reissued in 2021 with a new preface); Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK (ed., with Tariq Modood and Steven M. Teles, Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Race, Incarceration and American Values (M.I.T. Press, 2008). Glenn’s first essay for the Journal of Free Black Thought was our inaugural essay.
You gentlemen have performed an incalculable service to us all during a period--I'm talking about the last several years--when intellectual and ethical bravery was in very short supply. I've come to appreciate not just the space that the two of you hold down, but the moments when your views diverge, or surge with unexpected emotion. The dialogic space is cozy, sometimes, but then Dr. Loury steelmans a progressive claim--"Wait a minute, John. What would you say to somebody who argues that.....?" And John listens, volleys, thinks it through and occasionally revises on an as-needed basis. All the while, you're collectively modeling a kind of long-form inquiry that seems imperiled by the hot takes of social media and the cancel culture it feeds. I'm schooled in multiple ways every time you gentlemen get together, not least because you've been tag-teaming like this for a good long while and engaging deeply with earlier variants of these issues for even longer. So great that this recognition is happening now. Keep the faith!
Thank you Prof Loury for introducing us to the work of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's "Spiral of Silence" theory in your tribute article to John McWhorter. It provided an interesting context as to why false narratives are so pervasive among the woke contingency and its affect on those that do not share their point of view.
I can't begin to thank you and John enough for successfullly penetrating the cloud of woke smoke over the years with all of your thoughtful, passionate, knowledge delivered with the masterful precision of an intellectual olympian which has helped so many of us to breathe.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.