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October 17, 2006

john mcwhorter: talking android

The first in an occasional series on black America's talking androids. UPDATE June 13, 2008: Hey Gawker friends. I wrote this piece in 2006 and since moved to a new publishing system, so if you'd like to leave a comment, you can do so here. Thanks!

Would you have any idea who John H. McWhorter was if, instead of being black, he was white?

The answer is obviously, unequivocally "no." McWhorter is an able linguist (The Missing Spanish Creoles is a nifty piece of work) but his entire portfolio as a racial pundit springs rather specifically from the combination (novel to some; useful to others) of his blackness and his neo-conservative inclinations. Without blackness to authorize his critiques of his brethren, McWhorter would be just another white neo-con competing with the already-entrenched Marty Peretz's of the world for the privilege of castigating the coloreds for fun and profit. Instead, the relatively young linguist has published a number of books, appears regularly in various media, and has landed a perch at the Manhattan Institute (the same think tank that initially sponsored, then thought better of, Charles Murray), from which he publishes largely self-evident books and newspaper essays.

Despite this clear indebtedness to racial status, McWhorter recently felt moved to sniff that Barack Obama has been riding some sort of racial tailwind to unearned, premature prominence:

The key factor that galvanizes people around the idea of Obama for president is, quite simply, that he is black. Other things about him don't hurt, but that's all -- they are not the deciding factor. Take away Mr. Obama's race and he's some relatively anonymous rookie [named Barrett O'Leary]. Barrett O'Leary, even if as cute and articulate as Mr. Obama, would have to wait at least another four years, and possibly six or seven, before being considered as a possible commander in chief.

What gives people a jolt in their gut about the idea of President Obama is the idea that it would be a ringing symbol that racism no longer rules our land. President Obama might be, for instance, a substitute for that national apology for slavery that some consider so urgent. Surely a nation with a black president would be one no longer hung up on race.

Or not. Mr. Obama is being considered as presidential timber not despite his race, but because of it. That is, for all of its good intentions, a dehumanization of Mr. Obama. We're still hung up. What Mr. Obama has done is less important than his skin color and what it "means." The content of our character is not exactly center stage here. We are a long way from Selma, but not yet where the Rev. King wanted us to be.[full story]

Maybe McWhorter is transferring some anxiety about the roots of his own career. Or maybe these comments are actually a poorly crafted act of solidarity, one black man obliquely warning another not to let the accolades soup his head up. All the same, McWhorter's strangely catty expression distaste for the Obama phenomenon is a bit like a porn star's complaint that a legitimate actress gets meaty roles just because of her "big tits." That may well be the case, but, big or not big, one of them puts food on the table by fellating men in print and on camera and the other doesn't. McWhorter further underscores the pettiness of his analysis by going on to make the bizarre claim that he's further disinclined to get on the Obama bandwagon because someday some hypothetical black lunkhead might reject our hero for being a tad too light-skinned:

Another reason for my lack of enthusiasm for Mr. Obama as symbol is that the racial healing many might see him as portending would not happen. Among a certain kind of black person and non-black fellow travelers -- roughly, those given to surmising that the levees near the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans were deliberately blown up -- the going wisdom would be that Mr. Obama was elected only because he is merely the kind of black person whites are "comfortable" with.

With his light skin, African father and white mother, and only faint hint of what I call a "black-ccent" -- the subtle vocal quality that makes most black Americans identifiable as black over the phone (yes, one can "sound black." It's been demonstrated repeatedly by linguistic analysis, and the "black-ccent" overlaps only partially with white Southern) -- Mr. Obama would easily be cast by these types as "not too black."

This is clearly a fantasy, McWhorter's "would not"s, "would be"s and "would easily"s untethered to even the pretense of reality, but it's interesting to note that his is a fantasy of revenge. Rather richly, Obama has been projected into a pickle that is most commonly the lot of the black conservative, McWhorter imagining that a man who is the most feted and buzzed-about black leader in two decades should be kept at arms length because he might, maybe, perhaps, someday be Mau Mau'ed by Spike Lee. Given that McWhorter himself could hardly be described as the brownest crayon in the box (in the interests of full, disclosure, I'm a "desert sand" myself), one can imagine the satisfactions such a fantasy might hold for him. Too bad all of that also has absolutely nothing to do with Barack Obama.

Despite being billed as an expert on racial dynamics, McWhorter is resolutely unwilling to address the obvious about race's role in Obama's aura, which is that many people believe his race, instead of offering mere symbolism, might also be an asset in the actual conduct of the American presidency. Blackness might offer a president access to unique experiences and points of view (unique for American presidents, at least) and might also lend novel forms of moral authority to his policies and pronouncements. One can legitimately debate the value to a leader of any such categorically expressed and experientially derived asset - lessons drawn from military service, for example, or from faithfulness - but for McWhorter to create fantasy color-caste conflicts and ignore a genuine point of interest is a kind of non-fiction malpractice. It's also an act of profound disingenuousness on McWhorter's part, as categorically expressed and experientially derived insight and authority happen to be the very foundations of his own practice as a pundit.

In so much as working black conservatism could be said to have a job description, it involves being an authentic, biologically-confirmed Blackman/Blackwoman who also echoes the right's policies, assessments and solutions vis-à-vis the problem of persistently restive, self-owning negroes. McWhorter has ably fulfilled these duties for almost a decade, lending a resolutely understated, youngish, and slightly effete face to an enterprise usually marked by bare-knuckles and bloodletting. (Just ask Clarence Thomas, or Michael Steele, or any other poor sap who has woken up in the morning to find their mug p'shopped to a lawn jockey.) As McWhorter points out in the New York Sun, this isn't the kind of gig from which millions are made, but it certainly does pay the bills. Although their author is handicapped by a vocal and presentational style that seems deliberately designed to tranquilize undergraduates (no racial charisma or rabble-rousing here! Just tendentious psycho-babble passed off as racial ontology!) McWhorter's books are widely reviewed, his essays regularly appearing in a range of venues. He himself presents as an intelligent, introspective gent, so one would imagine that he'd not only understand his race's particular use-value to the policy/opinion machine, but that he might even find some ironies there to savor. Instead, McWhorter, in classic, talking android style, refuses to admit that his race has afforded him any unique opportunities beyond a front row seat to black perfidy. Arguing that his success in the racial punditry racket was a matter of accident, good-fortune and right-place / right-time-ism, he explains in I'm black, I work for the Manhattan Institute, and I'm proud that, sometimes, shit really does just happen:

For eight years after I got my P.h.D, I was a professor of linguistics. I first found myself involved with the media in 1996 when the Ebonics controversy hit. I happened to be the black linguist working closest to Oakland where the issue arose (I was at UC Berkeley), and so the media called me. As the result of a series of chance developments afterward, I wrote a book questioning the leftist orthodoxy on race. Somehow it got national attention, and I started to be asked to write and speak on the topic.

This included writing for and speaking at the Manhattan Institute think tank in New York. A few years ago, I decided that I would be able to do my second career as a race commentator better by working for the Institute full-time in New York and doing linguistics research and writing independently (and, still, obsessively).

That's my story, a mundane one, really. I do two things. First, one of them put food on the table. Now, the other one does.

Nothing to see there, right? Except for perhaps the language. Take notice of the obsessive linguist's preference for verbiage that paints his transit from the academy to the punditocracy as a matter of imponderable happenstance. He found himself involved. Chance developments (whatever those are) had him writing a text questioning leftist orthodoxy. Somehow or another that book got national attention. Although the facts force McWhorter to make a feint towards the obvious racial foundation of his notoriety - i.e., that the only reason anyone wanted to talk to him in the first place was that he was the black linguist working closest to Oakland - he's careful to depict his racially-dependent coming-out party as a surprise that came looking for him, perhaps as he reclined languid and reasonable in the faculty lounge at Cal. Again, that's likely true enough, but the fact that it then must have taken plenty of drive, choice and will on McWhorter's part to so thoroughly capitalize on that initial incident is conveniently left out of his right-wing Horatio Alger story. Like a wingnut Lana Turner claiming she "just happened" to be discovered by Matt Drudge while sucking down a soda-pop in Schwab's Pharmacy, McWhorter pretends that his being a black man predisposed to espouse a predictable set of propositions was neither asset nor attraction, that the length of his neo-con gams had no bearing on his ability to play the sultry ingénue from the wrong side of the tracks during the Oakland Ebonics fracaso. This is all, of course, a fairy tale, but McWhorter sells it with an impressively effective soft-pedal. The militance of his affection for understated banalities, the signature underwhelming-ness of his rhetoric, ends up being deployed as the main proof of his tall-tale's honesty and guilelessness, contrasting as it does with the loud, angry, indignant, Machiavellian, like, blackness that is McWhorter's favorite straw man.

Although he is Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the list of the things that McWhorter is not includes sociologist, educational policy expert, historian, child psychologist and music critic, so the bulk of his punditry must therefore rely not on research or expert knowledge, but on the chiaroscuro produced by contrasting his own thinking on a given issue with that of a deluded, leftist and largely hypothetical black consensus. Take his career-making assertions about black middle-class laziness in Losing the Race, as summarized in a 2001 San Francisco Chronicle profile:

In his book, McWhorter uses observation, personal anecdotes and others' research to support his conclusions. He describes how a band of black kids tormented him for being a good speller when he was young and moves on from there.

In one of the most disturbing sections of the book, he tells story after story of black UC undergraduates he has taught who had spotty attendance records, disappeared without explanation, avoided research, were generally disengaged or flunked out.

". . . In my years of teaching, I have never had a student disappear without explanation, or turn in a test that made me wonder how she could have attended class and done so badly, who was not African American," he writes.

He is convinced that black people think of school as a "white" thing: "The sad but simple fact is that while there are some excellent black students, on the average, black students do not try as hard as other students. . . . All of these students belong to a culture infected with an anti-intellectual strain, which subtly but decisively teaches them from birth not to embrace schoolwork too wholeheartedly." [full story]

McWhorter, of course, offers little to support these highly prejudicial generalizations beyond personal observations of a few students at one school, in the process passing off the only thing he can say for sure - that he was unable to motivate or inspire respect in his black students - as an insight or profundity about race. It never occurs to McWhorter that he himself might have been the problem, that he might, for some reason or another, be constitutionally or temperamentally ill-equipped to teach certain black students. By his own admission he had very little in common with those students beyond skin color: "[t]hroughout the '90s, I found that I never seemed to agree with most black people I knew about any race event that came up [...] I felt like I was on a different planet than most black people." And yet hailing from a different planet or failing spectacularly to teach an entire demographic is apparently no barrier in conservative circles to becoming a paid, expert-witness on education and undergraduate psychopathology. In any other realm of professional endeavor, folks would intuitively understand that such an "expert" could only have gotten where he is thanks to some form of nepotism, affirmative action, secret-handshake, or ulterior motive on the part of his patrons, but McWhorter persists in carrying himself as if he were the world's last honest black man facing down dusky, cynical hordes.

Typical of the talking android, McWhorter both rejects blackness and relies on blackness (or at least relies his biological association with it) to guarantee him professionally. Extra-planetary or no, at the end of the day McWhorter's only professional qualification is that he's a black man who can be relied upon to write about his people to the satisfaction of certain classes of white folks, his race validating an endless stream of negative anecdotes at the level of accuracy. Consider the role McWhorter's blackness plays in this rather pedestrian depiction of public misbehavior among some Harlem yout':

Not long ago, I was having lunch in a KFC in Harlem, sitting near eight African-American boys, aged about 14. Since 1) it was 1:30 on a school day, 2) they were carrying book bags, and 3) they seemed to be in no hurry, I assumed they were skipping school. They were extremely loud and unruly, tossing food at one another and leaving it on the floor.

Black people ran the restaurant and made up the bulk of the customers, but it was hard to see much healthy "black community" here. After repeatedly warning the boys to stop throwing food and keep quiet, the manager finally told them to leave. The kids ignored her. Only after she called a male security guard did they start slowly making their way out, tauntingly circling the restaurant before ambling off. These teens clearly weren't monsters, but they seemed to consider themselves exempt from public norms of behavior--as if they had begun to check out of mainstream society. [full story]

Leaving aside the built-in absurdity of John McWhorter politely masticating ghetto chicken while the teenagers at the next table tighten his psychic knickers into a knotty bunch, it becomes obvious fairly quickly that this dispatch from the heart of darkness hinges not on the expertise or insight of its correspondent but on his mere blackness. Turning "Unruly Teenagers!" into a meaningful lead would test the powers of wordsmiths more skilled than McWhorter, but "Black Man Attests to the Slow Collapse of Civilization in Harlem!!!"? Now that's a lead. The color of the source is clearly the entire game here, as the actual reports - from "unruly teenagers" to "hip hop: bad" to "black students: lazy" - are not only common caricatures, but in McWhorter's hands they're ineptly drawn caricatures.

Blackness is such a foundational element of McWhorter's shtick that it consistently authorizes him to pontificate on topics on which he has demonstrably limited grasp. The above KFC tableaux, for, example leads into an attack on hip hop that is not only ill-informed on basic, uncontroversial points of musicology (the so-called "origins of the hip hop ethos," for example) but that is also arbitrary in its assessment of historical import, as in the place of honor given Ice-T's "Cop Killer," or the breathless overstatement that attends dramatic readings of Schooly D rhymes.

Consider also, his more recent essay on the Survivor racial casting controversy which not only completely misstates objections to the tactic ("segregation!" wasn't the rallying cry so much as "exploitation!" and "cynicism!" and "pointless!"), but also indicates McWhorter and his editors have little appreciation for way racial conflict is used across the board in reality teevee to stoke viewer interest. Indeed, on such nuances of the popular culture McWhorter is reliably tone deaf. His takes invariably either received or frozen in amber, McWhorter seems to have missed much of the last twenty-five years, his ability to play black Trivial Pursuit likely no better than the average white conservative's, which is to say, no better than his editors'. As I noted in my review of Authentically Black McWhorter's relationship to any form of contemporary black culture seems to have ended with his graduation from junior high school, his love for the new no doubt beaten out of him by the same toughs who, as he incessantly reports, objected to his "talking good" as a child. This would all be problem enough, but in editorial environments where McWhorter is likely (and no doubt profitably) the only black man in the room, his ignorance becomes practically impossible to address. Setting aside the intuition that most of these essays are acts of politically-motivated hackery, the editors of City Journal or The Sun imported McWhorter to interpret black talk for them in the first place, so they can't be expected to meaningfully assess the merits of his interpretations beyond how well they conform to general conservative principles. Take away the epidermal guarantor of McWhorter's blackness, though, and the above essays would fall apart even for their editors, crumbling to dust like undead things exposed to sunlight.

For a man who regularly complains that African Americans are coddled and forever mired in a kind of unexamined and self-created mediocrity, McWhorter is a kind of object lesson in what it means to be the member of an underperforming yet protected class. One has the impression reading McWhorter's prose that somewhere deep down he understands this. A typical McWhorter essay is a horrorshow of powerfully neurotic transferences and recoils, his sensitivities to unruly children, loud voices, vulgar lyrics, strident drums, angular movements and so on as much evidence of a delicate, traumatized constitution as they are indications of distinct neo-conservative cultural politics. If there is a victim cowering at the heart of any McWhorter piece, it is invariably "John McWhorter," who is written of as being constantly under some form of largely sensory assault by uncouth, angry black folks. Indeed, from Losing the Race on, McWhorter's primal scene remains an incident of schoolyard abuse endured at the hands of a group of black kids. Not a book is written, no interview is given, without McWhorter offering ritually masochistic testimony to what he has been forced to endure just for the crime of being John McWhorter:

When I was four--and this is my very first memory--a group of black kids in the neighborhood stopped me and asked me to spell a word. When I did, one of them directed his little sister to hit me repeatedly. I later watched a friend of mine treated similarly for answering such questions as, "How far is it from New Jersey to Florida," and I'll never forget being asked by one of his tormentors, "Are you smart?" in the menacing tone you'd use to ask, "Did you steal my money?"[full story]

We have admittedly now left the frame of legitimate criticism, but there is a sense in which McWhorter has never recovered from the shame and trauma of having been beaten up by a girl when he was four. His entire politic can be read as one long act of revenge against that girl and her brother, that incident growing into a life-long prejudice that quite literally colors his every argument. (One can only imagine what it was like to look like that girl or her brother and to be in one of McWhorter's classes.)

What McWhorter doesn't understand is that everyone - quite literally everyone - has a story like his, a singular, massively dense event against whose pull one struggles in order to eventually (hopefully) become oneself. McWhorter has obviously chosen to become "John McWhorter" by orbiting around that moment, ensuring his abuse by those children remains eternal, implacable, and total, but he could have easily gone another route and still been true to the hurt and injustice of that moment. There is a powerfully troubling and potentially instructive conundrum to be found in the realization that one lives (at four!) in a society stratified by race and where your co-ethnics can nonetheless hurt you worse than any racist ever could. That conundrum is among the deepest things one could ever confront, and writers from Toni Morrison to Gayle Jones to Albert Murray to Richard Rodriguez have all wrestled with it in their own way and to their eternal credit. John McWhorter, though, has little in common with the folks listed above beyond a bit of brown. He would rather wrestle with children.

Posted by ebogjonson in talking androids, on October 17, 2006 11:45 PM