Quotation.Cloud - A repository of notable quotations from across time and space

   

Authors by Last Name


Authors by First Name



Quotations by John McWhorter
John McWhorterSaviors of black people - ...white people calling themselves our saviors make black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach black people to revel in that status and cherish it as making us special. I am especially dismayed at the idea of this indoctrination infecting my daughters' sense of self. I can't always be with them, and this anti-humanist ideology may seep into their school curriculum. I shudder at the thought: teachers with eyes shining at the prospect of showing their antiracism by filling my daughters' heads with performance art instructing them that they are poster children rather than individuals.

The burden of an assigned identity - ...on the question of "identity," [woke mob] ideology requires non-white people to found their sense of self on not being white, and on not liking how white people may or may not feel about them. No one would wish this self-conception on their child when laid out explicitly in this way. The idea of it as progressive is false. It sits as a gloomy, illogical, and pointless burden upon the souls of people whose spiritual energy ought to be directed elsewhere.

Schooling as a "white" thing - Is the reason black kids often think of school as white, that white people today don't like them, or that the system is somehow set against black kids learning? No: That analysis makes no sense, period. Only a heedless, numb kind of fealty, a quiet refusal to engage the actual individuals we are talking about, would insist that "racism" is why a black kid, decades after 1966, gives a black nerd trouble for studying hard. Racism sparked this problem originally, to be sure, but the solution today cannot be to wave a magic wand and "eliminate racism," because the teachers who exerted racism upon black kids three generations ago are now mostly dead.

The lessons of "woke" philosophy - On racism, [woke] philosophy teaches black people that cries of weakness are a form of strength. It teaches us that in the richness of this thing called life, the most interesting thing about you is that the ruling class doesn't like you enough. It teaches us that to insist that black people can achieve under less than perfect conditions is ignorant slander. It teaches us that we are the first people in the history of the species for whom it is a form of heroism to embrace the slogan "Yes, we can't!" [woke] philosophy is, in all innocence, a form of racism in itself. Black America has met nothing so disempowering -- including the cops -- since Jim Crow.

Coaching what a person should feel - ...get ready, this must be said, and, frankly, it’s better said by someone black: As often as not today, what the person "feels" is based on what they have been taught to "feel" by a paradigm that teaches them to exaggerate and even fabricate the "feeling." In other words, much too often, the person who tells you to accept and go from how they "feel" has been, as it were, coached.