"Let’s make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on the path to a good job."

"Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges."

"I haven't been a black conservative since 1995..."

Glenn Loury talks about people he's known for 40 years who won't say hello, who won't look him in the eye because he USED TO BE a black conservative. USED TO BE! John McWhorter talks about those who think "it would be wrong to even print my name. They think of me as Satan. And that's just how it's been."



Much later in the diavlog, Loury and McWhorter weigh in on the affirmative action case that's pending in the Supreme Court. "Would you think it was a good thing if the Supreme Court outlawed racial preferences as we knew them?" McWhorter takes the "not nuanced" position that racial preferences should be proclaimed "obsolete." (Loury disagrees.)

"People like Obama, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, and Tony Blair can talk you into anything."

"I sort of prefer the square, stilted politicians like Romney, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore. "

To me, they seem more "real," because most normal people would not be very adept at convincing a nation of hundreds of millions that "I'm basically like you; we want the same things." Most ordinary citizens who tried to run for president would probably come off as wooden and unhip. The candidate who can connect with most people is actually unlike most people.

"[T]he quiet succor Obama gave to black homophobes with his 'evolving' line on gay marriage was always just as ugly as it was unnecessary..."

... writes John McWhorter article in TNR.

[P]lus, for someone of his demographic and biography, it was more than a little fake. (Did the Harvard Law Review Editor hugging Derrick Bell in that 1991 video really think two men shouldn’t be allowed to get married?)

I love the totally gratuitous homoeroticism McWhorter allowed into his question by having the men hugging.

"Someone of his demographic and biography" is an unusual phrase. Who else has Obama's biography? McWhorter speaks as if this is the sort of person we just know, from experience. But Obama is unique in the history of the world. Who knows who the authentic Obama is? I've read his autobiography, and I got the impression that he himself could never figure it out, and I'm deprived of the actual answer to the question whether he was conning us, and I barely have a guess whether he knew if he was.

If Obama believes in same-sex marriage... what does that even mean for someone of his demographic and biography? Of course, if you go to Harvard Law School and merge/mingle with the elite you get the message of what you're supposed to think, but then... do you really think it? Do you lose touch with what you really think? Of does even that question disguise the real question which is whether there's a real you at the core who thinks anything at all?

(And I'm saying that as a lawprof who has lived amidst the lawprof liberals for more than 3 decades now and who willingly admits that I lost track of what I really thought for myself or whether there was a true self that thought anything at all.)

"Herman Cain Played the Race Card, But Liberals Are the Ones Who Dealt It."

John McWhorter:

Liberals have not only failed to acquit themselves well with their self-righteous deployments of race allegations—they have encouraged conservatives to follow their lead. Conservatives, unsurprisingly, have acquitted themselves equally poorly. The clip of Clarence Thomas making his “high-tech lynching” claim looks worse by the year. The one from last week of Cain on Fox News—when asked whether racism is behind the charges, all he came up with was “I believe the answer is yes, but we do not have any evidence to support it”—now joins it as a quintessential demonstration of flabby reasoning and sociopolitical cynicism.

Read the whole thing.

"A conversation with an imagined young black flash mobber."

Glenn Loury is struck by what Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter had to say.

Birtherism and racism.

John McWhorter and Glenn Loury talk it out. The diavlog begins with McWhorter asserting that birtherism is not about race:

A professor is forced to resign after making a racist remark: Is he more likely right-wing or left-wing?

"A political science professor at Murray State University has resigned after telling an African American student that she didn't show up early to class because slaves were always late."

I see that the first commenter there says: "Another asshole, undoubtedly a Republican/TeaPartier."

My guess is exactly the opposite. What would possess a professor to say something like that? From my long experience with  professors, I think it is the left-wing professors who: 1. Feel confident in their own goodness on racial issues, 2. Analyze events in terms of race, 3. Think up "critical theory"-type explanations that explore ideas about racial difference, 4. Imagine that it's clever to express these ideas out loud, and 5. Are capable of making the mistake of thinking that the students will know that they are good people who do racial critique that is supposed to be understood as an attack on white people.

A "Republican/TeaPartier" is much more likely to be strongly committed to color-blindness. Ironically, that's something that, in academic circles, can quite easily get you called a racist. (Try asking a lefty lawprof about Chief Justice Roberts's statement that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.")

Anyway, the professor in this incident is named Mark Wattier. The school is Murray State University. I haven't checked into what his actual political propensities are or what he really had in mind when he said whatever he said that is being reported the way you see it in the linked article. My motivation to write this post was the commenter's reflexive assumption that Wattier displayed right-wing ideology. That is absurd.

***

I noticed that story because John McWhorter and Glenn Loury are talking about it on Bloggingheads. Their discussion centers on whether the student is "lowering" herself by requesting an apology.

Obama sounds "corporate and airy."

"He's ethnic but nonthreateningly ethnic — and so this is the Obama thing again."

John McWhorter, musing about the presidential potential of Marco Rubio.

(Via Insta.)

"People have been seeing too many Blaxploitation movies and kind of enjoyed Shaft..."

"... and they like the idea of this true black man... getting angry on television."

Why do people want Barack Obama to get angry? Do they? I guess the lefties do. If only he'd fight harder to make people see things his way and just force his will on us. I think the conservatives get off the hook for that particular version of racism.

"I don't think you like the man."

Something "really bothered" Glenn Loury about "all that adulation," but....

"Eddie Long ... should openly admit what he did, disavow his antigay positions..."

"... and serve as a beacon to a black community that needs to get beyond an unthinking prejudice especially unseemly in a group positioning itself as a standard-bearer of America’s moral advancement."

Says John McWhorter, who thinks Long "would do himself and his own race a massive favor if he, shall we say, had a conversion here."

“Got the call,” to put it in language familiar in his realm.

I'm for overcoming homophobia too, but I'm squeamish about the suggestion that a religious leader should present a moral argument as if he'd heard it from God... unless he sincerely believes he heard it from God.

"Acting White" — a dialogue between 2 men who "remember their Urkel days."

And here's the book they're talking about: Stuart Buck's "Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation."

Sarah Palin makes an analogy.

"That's kind of like getting out there on the playground with a bunch of kids ready to fight, and one of the kids saying, 'Go ahead and punch me in the face, and I'm not going to retaliate. Go ahead and do what you want to me.'"

More grist for John McWhorter's theory that Sarah Palin is childish.

John McWhorter found Sarah Palin childish for using the "distancing" word "that," so what would he have to say about Abraham Lincoln?

Yesterday, we were talking about the way the linguist John McWhorter analyzed Sarah Palin's speech. He found her childish for using the word "that" in phrases like "forge that peace," because it was a "distancing gesture," as if the peace were "way over there" and not something she's genuinely involved with. He wrote:

That peace? You mean that peace way over there — as opposed to the peace that you as Vice-President would have been responsible for forging? She’s far, far away from that peace.

Now, check out the Gettyburg Address, with added boldface:

... Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. 

You mean that nation way over there — as opposed to the nation you're supposed to be President of.

We are met on a great battle-field of that war.

That war?!!! It's your war, Mr. President. Come down out of the clouds you fluffy-headed fool and join the reality that you have a helluva lot to do with... or perhaps you haven't noticed!

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field....

That field! You are here on this field, where so many have died. Wake up from your crazy dream world, man!

... as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. 

That nation?!!! It's our nation, Mr. President. Not some nation way over there! How did this dangerous child of a man become President?!

"[Sarah Palin] speaks very much from the inside of her head, as someone watching the issues from a considerable distance."

John McWhorter analyzes Sarah Palin's speech from a position of remarkable superiority:

The there fetish, for instance — Palin frequently displaces statements with an appended “there,” as in “We realize that more and more Americans are starting to see the light there...” But where? Why the distancing gesture? At another time, she referred to Condoleezza Rice trying to “forge that peace.” That peace? You mean that peace way over there — as opposed to the peace that you as Vice-President would have been responsible for forging? She’s far, far away from that peace.

... The issues, American people, you name it, are “there” — in other words, not in her head 24/7. She hasn’t given them much thought before; they are not her. They’re that, over there....

What does it mean to use words that suggest that you see abstractions in your mind in a spatial way? If McWhorter were writing about someone he liked, I'll bet he would posit intelligence. But he concludes that it means that Palin has the mentality of a child:

This reminds me of toddlers who speak from inside their own experience in a related way: they will come up to you and comment about something said by a neighbor you’ve never met, or recount to you the plot of an episode of a TV show they have no way of knowing you’ve ever heard of....

It reminds you of that, eh? Exactly why does it remind you of that? A child talking about something he doesn't realize you don't know and Palin talking about ideas as if she visualizes them in an abstract place — those 2 things pop up together in your head. Do you see how easy it would be for me to portray you as childish for jumping from something about Palin to something about toddlers that it reminds you of?

ADDED: I apply McWhorter's theory of childish distancing to the Gettysburg Address.

"Why Sonia Sotomayor Came Out Okay Despite the Height of the Building She Grew Up In."

Despite that headline, John McWhorter doesn't really answer the question. He raises a lot more questions. Uncomfortable questions.

"It seems to me that if I say a whole system must be upset for me to win..."

"... I am saying that I cannot sit in the game, and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it."

John McWorter quotes Zora Neale Hurston and W.E.B. Du Bois — "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not" — to side with the plaintiffs in Ricci v. DeStefano:

[T]he International Association of Professional Black Firefighters tells us, "Cognitive examinations have an adverse effect upon blacks and other minorities." Du Bois crowed, "Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable numbers to master a modern college course would have been difficult to prove," and proudly documents 2,500 black college graduates. Imagine Du Bois listening to a rep from the black firefighters' association now sneering that the promotion test merely measures "the ability to read and retain"--i.e. engage in higher-level thinking processes! O tempora, o mores.

This will not do: People like Du Bois did not dedicate their lives to paving the way for black people to be exempt from tests. Sure, the tests may not correlate perfectly with firefighters' duties. But which falls more into the spirit of black uplift that you could explain to a foreigner in less than three minutes: teaching black candidates how to show what they are made of despite obstacles, or banning a test of mental agility as inappropriate to impose on black candidates?

Oh, Glenn Loury is not allowed to say that.

"We're not a group, African Americans... We're not a people."



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