John McWhorter

thumb|John McWhorter John Hamilton McWhorter V (born October 6, 1965) is an American linguist, author, and educator, currently an associate professor at Columbia University. Quotes We clap when our infants don't spill their food. We can afford to let go of clapping when exotic folks don't, when in our times, celebrating diversity is a shibboleth of moral legitimacy among thinking First World people, and considerably, if not comprehensibly, beyond. John McWhorter, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (Gotham Books, New York, 2008) p. 162 If your opinions never evolve, you’re either not paying attention or not genuinely interested. Reparations Should Be an End, Not a Beginning, New York Times, June 22, 2023 [T]here comes a point when a usage is so common that we must consider it not slovenliness but change. "Little Women" and the Art of Breaking Grammatical Rules, New York Times, April 4, 2024 Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue. Within this mental universe, Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. For real academics, having papers rejected is a virtual rite of passage and only makes their subsequent work better. But Arday characterized the rejection of his first article submissions as “violent.” For Arday, only racism could explain it; if his topic is racism, there can be no justified rejection. Ibram Kendi’s imperious pique at having his ideas questioned is in a similar vein. He can process the questions only as being aimed at him as a person (i.e., racism). The youngest-ever black professor at Cambridge properly should have been a physical education teacher who did some after-hours tutoring. A make-believe academic who misspelled paltry as poultry in the title slide of a keynote address instead scaled the heights of Britain’s Harvard because of his skin color and his exceptionally long dreadlocks. There is a certain mercy in the impression that he won’t perceive how those who elevated him saw him as a performing monkey. Still, it’s long past time for Anglophone academia to stop thinking that it’s immoral to evaluate black scholars on the basis of whether they are—get ready!—intelligent. Jason Arday and Academia’s Self-Seeking Pursuit of Virtue, City Journal, August 10, 2026 External links Columbia University biography page Category:Living people Category:1965 births Category:Linguists from the United States Category:Non-fiction authors from the United States Category:African Americans Category:Cornell University faculty Category:University of California, Berkeley faculty Category:Stanford University alumni Category:Atheists from the United States Category:Social scientists from the United States