REVIEW: John McWhorter’s ‘Woke Racism’

Woke Racism, the new book from social critic and Columbia linguist John McWhorter, has a simple thesis: Contemporary elite progressivism (aka “wokeness”) is a religion. “I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion,” McWhorter quickly clarifies. “I mean that it actually is a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.” This religion is bad, he argues, because it demeans both white adherents and black people generally; but this argument is ultimately secondary to his skepticism of its social influence as a religion.