John McWhorter was the son of a college administrator and a professor of social work. James Lindsay is a mathematician. McWhorter is roughly my age and Lindsay was born the year I realized some strange ideas distorted reality for people.
Lindsay never lived before Alex Haley wrote Roots in St. Paul. Minnesota, rewriting Black History. He also wasn’t born before Minnesota authors Kate Millett released Sexual Politics, or Catharine McKinnon invented Sexual Harassment as a legal claim.
McWhorter had lived before all of these things.
I recently published two series on Women’s History Month and Black History Month and barely looking was able to find glaring gaps in the commonly accepted narratives of those “histories.”
Dr. Janice Fiamengo debunked the feminist origin story and a cursory review of source materials similarly found gaps in the common Black History Narrative.
I’ve switched back and forth between McWhorter’s “Woke Racism – How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America” and Lindsay’s “Race Marxism – The Truth About Critical Race Theory and Praxis.”
McWhorter is a more accessible writer than Lindsay.
This may be because McWhorter has written more books, is a trained linguist, or that as a Black man, he can more directly say that Black Critical Race Theorists were bull shit artists.
He can also state frankly that a certain percentage of Black people flat out lie about history because it suits them to do so.
Lindsay, by contrast, lays a deep foundation of the actual Critical Theorist texts (CRT, CGT, others) and uses the words of the Critical Race Theorists themselves from their books and landmark academic papers.
Some people will dismiss:
- McWhorter as an Oreo, Uncle Tom, a Huxtable, a race traitor or a coon.
- Fiamengo as an internalized misogynist, pick-me girl, a self-hating tool of The Oppressive Patriarchy.
- Lindsay as an ignorant racist.
McWhorter and Lindsay have different approaches to Woke_Race_Marxism but both write about it as a new religion.
I think this is an optimistic view.
My research indicates it’s a mind virus that binds True Believers into a The Mindhive (™). This set of beliefs exploits their biology, self replicates and blinds them to nonconforming realities.
The end result looks like a religion. Both of these academics identify it as a religion and the United States has limitations on a state religion.
Given the resultant taboos, ex-communications, speech codes, blasphemy charges, and histrionic enforcement of pseudo-narratives and quasi-realities, it’s easy to understand why the US Constitution has banned the establishment of such a state religion.
I hope this idea spreads to many young attorneys reading these books. While this can be argued as a religion it’s actually supra-religious and operates at a much deeper level on the human psyche.
Very few Americans ever cared about Critical Theory when it was merely Critical Gender Theory spreading throughout education, law enforcement, and the family courts. Only when Joe Biden overturned the previous administrations’ Executive Order banning Critical RACE Theory on his first day in office did the firestorm begin.
It feels good to believe your religion is helping people and the self-congratulatory rewards of signaling their luxury beliefs to other True Believers have helped spread this religion, or virus, unnoticed for decades, maybe even a century.
The unrest following George Floyd and President Biden’s Executive Order priorities finally made people pay attention.
McWhorter and Lindsay both tapped into the market with books about the same “something fishy” I’ve been smelling for years with Woke Racism and Race Marxism.
These books will do well and everyone should buy them and read them.
I’m not sure the market is yet ready for what Janice Fiamengo is telling them is actually rotting under the hood.
