When John McWhorter, professor of Linguistics and American Studies at Columbia University, described “antiracism” as America’s “new flawed religion.” In 2015, few could have imagined just how prescient that description would prove to be.
McWhorter actually gives this advice to all ethnic and racial groups in America. His specialty is analyzing how the use of language can undercut reason. The roots of this approach famously go back to the coinage of the word “ideology.” After The Great Terror of the French Revolution, the revolutionaries tried to figure out how did they go so wrong by leaping into mass murder instead of Freedom, Equality, and Humanity.
Destutt de Tracy, a French Enlightenment supporter of the Revolution, thought that the analysis of idols’ power to blind and distort the emotions might have something to contribute, but he didn’t like the word “idol” because it implied God, someone whom Tracy didn’t believe in. So, to substitute for the word “idol” Tracy coined the word “ideology,” which was later made famous by Marx. The philosopher hoped to provide a tool by which “overpowering emotions” could be conquered and mass hysteria prevented.
So, one could absorb McWhorter’s prescient analysis of the Anti-Racism hysteria as a secular kind of “Idol” analysis, a sort of laying on the couch of the sobbing, hysterical, ranting, raving anti-racism racists. However, McWhorter has little optimism that the patients can be cured. But he is optimistic that authentic justice and equality can progress if the sane don’t get distracted. This is the true anti-racism tradition of America, something that all parties, races, gender identities, and faiths can agree upon as a baseline.
JOE HOLLAND
