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John McWhorter

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John McWhorter
McWhorter in 2017
Born
John Hamilton McWhorter V

(1965-10-06) October 6, 1965 (age 59)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Occupation(s)Academic and Commentator
Academic background
Education
ThesisToward a New Model of Genesis (1993)
Academic work
Discipline
Institutions
Main interestsMusic, American history, Race relations in the United States

John Hamilton McWhorter V (/məkˈhwɔːrtər/;[1] born October 6, 1965) is an American linguist.[2][3] He is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University,[4] where he also teaches American studies and music history.[5][6] He has authored a number of books on race relations and African-American culture, acting as political commentator especially in his New York Times newsletter.[7]

Early life and education

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McWhorter was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father, John Hamilton McWhorter IV (1927–1996),[8] was a college administrator, and his mother, Schelysture Gordon McWhorter (1937–2011), taught social work at Temple University.[9][10] He attended Friends Select School in Philadelphia and, after tenth grade, was accepted to Simon's Rock College, where he earned an AA degree. McWhorter has described his upbringing as part of the Black middle class. He has also attributed some of his views to the Quaker school he attended as a child.[11]

He later attended Rutgers University and received a B.A. degree in French in 1985.[12] He obtained an M.A. degree in American Studies from New York University and a Ph.D. degree in linguistics in 1993 from Stanford University.[13]

Career

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Academia

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Early career

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McWhorter taught linguistics at Cornell University from 1993 to 1995.[14] He then became an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked from 1995 until 2003. He left that position to become a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.[14]

Columbia University

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Since 2008, McWhorter has taught linguistics, American studies, and classes in the core curriculum program at Columbia University. As Columbia's Department of Linguistics had been dissolved in 1989, he was initially assigned to the Department of English and Comparative Literature. The Program of Linguistics (including a revived undergraduate major as of 2021) is currently housed in the Department of Slavic Languages.[13]

Other teaching

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McWhorter is the instructor of the courses "The Story of Human Language";[15] "Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language";[16] "Myths, Lies and Half-Truths About English Usage";[17] "Language Families of the World";[18] "Ancient Writing and the History of the Alphabet" and "Language From A to Z"[19] in the series The Great Courses, produced by The Teaching Company.

Writing and commentary

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News organizations

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McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New York Sun, The New Yorker, The Root, The Daily Beast, Books & Culture, and CNN.

McWhorter was contributing editor at The New Republic from 2001 to 2014. He is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and, after writing op-eds for The New York Times for several years, became an Opinion columnist there in 2021.[5]

He hosts the Lexicon Valley[20] podcast for Slate from 2016 to 2021, and currently for Booksmart Studios.[21]

Books

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McWhorter has published a number of books on linguistics and on race relations, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why You Should, Like, Care, and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.[13]

Linguistics

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Much of McWhorter's academic work is concerned with creole languages and their relationship to other languages, often focusing on the Suriname creole language Saramaccan. His work has expanded to a general investigation of the effect of second-language acquisition on a language.

Regarding the various positions arising from the universal grammar debate, he describes himself as partial to the theoretical frameworks of Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff.[22]

Theory of creole

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External videos
video icon Presentation by McWhorter on What Language Is, August 9, 2011, C-SPAN

McWhorter has argued that languages naturally tend toward complexity and irregularity, a tendency that is reversed only by adults acquiring the language, and creole formation is simply an extreme example of the latter.[23] As examples, he cites English, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, and modern colloquial varieties of Arabic. He has outlined his ideas in academic format in Language Interrupted and Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity and, for the general public, in What Language Is and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.

The matter of Austronesian languages without affixes, and Homo Floresiensis

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The Austronesian family of languages makes an abundant use of prefixes or suffixes (which form new words by adding extensions either before or after root-words, such as [per-]form or child[-hood]); but languages from the center of Flores island, which belong to that family, are curiously devoid of prefixes or suffixes and are not tonal either (tones may make up for the loss or absence of affixes): keo, Lio, Ngadha, Rongga, Ende. McWhorter extends to those the hypothesis of language simplification by acquisition during adulthood. He links this with Homo floresiensis, the most recent individuals known dated from 12,000 years ago. Austronesians came to Flores from Taiwan in the west only a few thousand years ago. But current legends exist that tell of 'little people' or ebo gogo who lived among the ancestors of present Floresians until[24] as late as the 1500s[25] and possibly only 200 years ago, when the 'little people' were exterminated 'because they kept stealing'. These legends are most vivid in the middle of Flores island, their vividness decreasing as the distance from the center increases towards the west and they are entirely absent in the east.[24][26][27][28]

The Language Hoax

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McWhorter is a vocal critic of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. In his 2014 book The Language Hoax, he argues that, although language influences thought in an "infinitesimal way" and culture is expressed through language, he believes that language itself does not create different ways of thinking or determine world views.[29]

Language proficiency

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McWhorter is proficient in English, French and Spanish, and has some competence in Russian and several other languages.[30][31][32]

Criticism of theories

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Some of McWhorter's fellow linguists, such as Mauro Giuffré of the University of Palermo, suggest that his notions of simplicity and complexity are impressionistic and grounded on comparisons with European languages, and they point to exceptions to his proposed correlations.[33][34]

Political views

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McWhorter has characterized himself as "a cranky liberal Democrat". In support of this description, he states that while he "disagree[s] sustainedly with many of the tenets of the Civil Rights orthodoxy", he also "supports Barack Obama, reviles the War on Drugs, supports gay marriage, never voted for George W. Bush and writes of Black English as coherent speech". McWhorter has stated that the conservative Manhattan Institute, for which he worked, "has always been hospitable to Democrats". McWhorter is biweekly guest on The Glenn Show, a commentary podcast hosted by Glenn Loury, a member of the Manhattan Institute and professor of economics at Brown University.[35] Political theorist Mark Satin identifies McWhorter as a radical centrist thinker.[36]

Views on racism

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In a 2001 article, McWhorter's discourse was that the attitudes and general behavior of black people, rather than white racism, were what held African Americans back in the United States. According to McWhorter, "victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community's response to all race-related issues", and "it's time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning as 'understandable' the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it".[37]

Racism and language

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In April 2015, McWhorter appeared on NPR and said that the use of the word "thug" was becoming code for "the N-word" or "black people ruining things" when used by whites in reference to criminal activity.[38][39] He added that use by President Barack Obama and former Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (for which she later apologized) could not be interpreted in the same way, given that among blacks the use of "thug" often connotes admiration for black self-direction and survival. McWhorter clarified his views in an article in The Washington Post.[39]

Racism and technology

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McWhorter has argued that software algorithms by themselves cannot be racist since, unlike humans, they lack intention. Rather, unless the human engineers behind a technological product intend for it to discriminate against people of a particular ethnicity, any unintentional bias should be seen as a software bug that needs to be fixed ("an obstacle to achievement") rather than an issue of racism.[40]

Race and education

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McWhorter has criticized left-wing and activist educators in particular, such as Paulo Freire and Jonathan Kozol.[41]

McWhorter has criticized both fearmongering and dismissal of concerns over the usage of critical race theory in education. McWhorter argued in a New York Times op-ed that "if critical race theory isn’t being taught to children—and in a technical sense, it isn’t—then it’s hardly illogical to suppose that some other concern may be afoot." McWhorter argues instead for continued concern over critical race influenced teaching, which McWhorter worries would be simplistic if taught to children and ineffective to produce nuanced discussion.[42]

McWhorter has argued that affirmative action should be based on class rather than race.[43][44][45]

Views on anti-racism

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McWhorter has posited that anti-racism has become as harmful in the United States as racism itself.[46][47] McWhorter has criticized the term "microaggression",[48] as well as what he regards as the overly casual conflation of racial bias with white supremacy.[49] As early as December 2018, McWhorter described anti-racism as a "religious movement".[50]

McWhorter criticized Robin DiAngelo's 2018 book White Fragility following its resurgence in sales during the George Floyd protests beginning in May 2020, arguing that it "openly infantilized Black people" and "simply dehumanized us", and "does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching [for residual racism by white people] is necessary to forging change in society. One might ask just how a people can be poised for making change when they have been taught that pretty much anything they say or think is racist and thus antithetical to the good."[51]

Woke Racism

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External videos
video icon Presentation by McWhorter on Woke Racism, November 2, 2021, C-SPAN

In his 2021 book Woke Racism, McWhorter argues that the anti-racism ideology has been elevated into a religion: "I do not mean that these people’s ideology is 'like' a religion... I mean that it actually is a religion... An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism."[52] McWhorter expands upon his previous views and argues that "third wave anti-racism" is a religion he terms "Electism" with white privilege as original sin. McWhorter likens the books White Fragility, How to Be an Antiracist and Between the World and Me to sacred religious texts. He argues that this hypothesized status as a religion explains the behavior of its adherents, whom he calls "the Elect". He advises that since the faith (like all faith) is not open to discussion, arguments with its adherents should be avoided in favor of pragmatic action against racism. McWhorter advocates three programs: ending the war on drugs, teaching reading by phonics to children lacking books at home, and free vocational education, promoting the idea that not everyone needs a four-year college education to succeed.[53] McWhorter has expressed qualified support for reparations for African Americans, particularly those descended from victims of redlining.[54]

Personal life

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McWhorter separated from his wife in 2019. He has two daughters.[55] He plays the piano and has appeared in musical theater productions.[56] McWhorter is an atheist.[57]

Bibliography

[edit]
External videos
video icon In Depth interview with McWhorter, March 2, 2008, C-SPAN
video icon Presentation by McWhorter on Losing the Race, August 18, 2000, C-SPAN
video icon Presentation by McWhorter on Losing the Race, March 20, 2001, C-SPAN
video icon Booknotes interview with McWhorter on Authentically Black, March 2, 2003, C-SPAN
video icon Presentation by McWhorter on Doing Our Own Thing, October 28, 2003, C-SPAN
video icon Presentation by McWhorter on Winning the Race, April 3, 2006, C-SPAN
video icon Presentation by McWhorter on All About the Beat, June 17, 2008, C-SPAN
video icon Washington Journal interview with McWhorter on All About the Beat, July 8, 2008, C-SPAN
video icon Presentation by McWhorter on Words on the Move, December 7, 2016, C-SPAN
video icon Presentation by McWhorter on Talking Back, Talking Black, April 19, 2017, C-SPAN
video icon Presentation by McWhorter on Nine Nasty Words, April 30, 2021, C-SPAN
  • 1997: Towards a New Model of Creole Genesis ISBN 0-820-43312-8
  • 1998: Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a "Pure" Standard English ISBN 0-738-20446-3
  • 2000: Spreading the Word: Language and Dialect in America ISBN 0-325-00198-7
  • 2000: The Missing Spanish Creoles: Recovering the Birth of Plantation Contact Languages ISBN 0-520-21999-6
  • 2000: Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America ISBN 0-684-83669-6
  • 2001: The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language ISBN 0-06-052085-X
  • 2003: Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority ISBN 1-592-40001-9
  • 2003: Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care ISBN 1-592-40016-7
  • 2005: Defining Creole ISBN 0-195-16669-8
  • 2005: Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America ISBN 1-592-40188-0
  • 2007: Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars ISBN 0-195-30980-4
  • 2008: All About the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America ISBN 1-592-40374-3
  • 2008: Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English ISBN 1-592-40395-6
  • 2011: Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity: Why Do Languages Undress? ISBN 978-1-934-07837-2
  • 2011: What Language Is: (And What It Isn't and What It Could Be) ISBN 978-1-592-40625-8
  • 2012: A Grammar of Saramaccan Creole (co-authored with Jeff Good) ISBN 978-3-11-027643-5
  • 2014: The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language ISBN 978-0-199-36158-8
  • 2016: Words on the Move: Why English Won't – and Can't – Sit Still (Like, Literally) ISBN 978-1-627-79471-8
  • 2017: Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths about America's Lingua Franca ISBN 978-1-942-65820-7
  • 2018: The Creole Debate ISBN 978-1-108-42864-4
  • 2021: Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever ISBN 978-0-593-18879-8
  • 2021: Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America ISBN 978-0-593-42306-6

References

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  1. ^ McWhorter, John H. "Lexicon Valley". Slate. The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. (Listen to McWhorter's pronunciation of his own name at the beginning of each podcast.)
  2. ^ "John McWhorter". Google Scholar. Retrieved October 3, 2024.
  3. ^ "John McWhorter – Who You Calling a Sellout?". The Glenn Show. 2:50. Retrieved October 2, 2024.
  4. ^ "John H McWhorter". Columbia University Department of Slavic Languages. Archived from the original on November 9, 2021. Retrieved November 9, 2021.
  5. ^ a b "NY Daily News- Articles By John McWhorter". NY Daily News. Retrieved November 29, 2014.
  6. ^ "CNN Profiles - John McWhorter - Linguistics scholar, Columbia University". CNN. Retrieved October 17, 2021.
  7. ^ "Sign up for John McWhorter". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 19, 2023.
  8. ^ John H. McWhorter V, Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of a Pure Standard English, Perseus Publishing, 1998.
  9. ^ Miller, Jason Philip (2006). "McWhorter, John". In Gates, Henry Louis; Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks (eds.). African American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acref/9780195301731.013.38982. ISBN 9780195301731.
  10. ^ Michael L. Ondaatje, Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010, p. 174.
  11. ^ McWhorter, John (September 3, 2021). "Opinion | We Know How to Teach Kids to Read". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 19, 2023.
  12. ^ "John McWhorter". simons-rock.edu.
  13. ^ a b c "John H. McWhorter | Center for American Studies". americanstudies.columbia.edu.
  14. ^ a b "View Expert". Manhattan Institute. Retrieved June 10, 2020.
  15. ^ "The Story of Human Language". thegreatcourses.com. Retrieved June 28, 2022.
  16. ^ "Understanding Linguistics: The Science of Language". thegreatcourses.com. Retrieved June 28, 2022.
  17. ^ "Myths, Lies and Half-Truths About English Usage". thegreatcourses.com. Retrieved June 28, 2022.
  18. ^ "Language Families of the World". thegreatcourses.com. Retrieved June 28, 2022.
  19. ^ "Language From A to Z". thegreatcourses.com. Retrieved June 28, 2022.
  20. ^ "Lexicon Valley". Slate Magazine. July 23, 2019.
  21. ^ McWhorter, John (July 27, 2021). "Lexicon Valley". www.booksmartstudios.org.
  22. ^ McWhorter, John (September 14, 2016). "The bonfire of Noam Chomsky: journalist Tom Wolfe targets the acclaimed linguist". Vox.
  23. ^ McWhorter, John (2007). Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 5–18. ISBN 978-0-198-04231-0.
  24. ^ a b McWhorter, John Hamilton (April 30, 2019). "Flores Man vs. Sulawesi. A linguistic mystery in the Lesser Sunda Islands" (audio). slate.com. Lexicon Valley. Retrieved June 10, 2024. He cites the languages devoid of affixes at 7'40 in the audio; at 10'15 he mentions that these languages are not tonal either.
  25. ^ Peter ten Hoopen, curator. "Ikat from Ngadha, Indonesia". ikat.us. Online Museum of Indonesian ikat textiles. Retrieved June 8, 2024.
  26. ^ McWhorter, John Hamilton (2011). "8. Affixless in Austronesian: Why Flores is a puzzle and what to do about it". In McWhorter (ed.). Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity. Why Do Languages Undress?. Language Contact and Bilingualism, vol. 1. De Gruyter Mouton. p. 223.
  27. ^ McWhorter, John Hamilton (October 2019). "The radically isolating languages of Flores: A challenge to diachronic theory". Journal of Historical Linguistics. 9 (2): 177–207. Retrieved June 10, 2024.
  28. ^ "Affixless in Indonesia: The Abnormality of Flores". indoling.com (Workshop on the Languages of Papua 2). February 11, 2010. Retrieved June 10, 2024.
  29. ^ "The Language Hoax". YouTube. June 20, 2016. Archived from the original on December 12, 2021.
  30. ^ Dreifus, Claudia (October 30, 2001). "A CONVERSATION WITH/John McWhorter; How Language Came To Be, and Change". The New York Times. I speak three and a bit of Japanese, and can read seven.
  31. ^ McWhorter, John (February 3, 2014). "Let's Stop Pretending That French Is an Important Language". The New Republic. When I was a teenaged language nerd in the seventies and eighties, it was the tail end of a time when kids of my bent knew French first and foremost, and then likely dabbled in other Romance languages, plus some German and maybe a dash of Russian.
  32. ^ Khodorkovsky, Maria (October 9, 2015). "7 Questions To A Linguist: John McWhorter Scales The "Mt. Everest" Of Russian". ALTA Language Services. these days I am trying to teach myself Mandarin, and I am just wallowing in finally getting a feel of the inner workings of a language that isn't all about prefixes and suffixes and isn't related at all to European languages ... One language that I failed to ever really crack was Japanese, simply because it seemed that mastering the writing system would be so difficult that it wasn't worth trying if I wasn't doing it for any real reason. But these days I am climbing that mountain again with Mandarin and finding that with some quiet, semi-obsessive dedication, learning to read on the level of a child isn't impossible.
  33. ^ Ansaldo, Umberto; Lisa Lim (2015). Languages in Contact. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. pp. 194–195. ISBN 978-0-521-76795-8.
  34. ^ Giuffrè, Mauro (2013). "Review: Linguistic simplicity and complexity". LINGUIST List. 24.1461. Retrieved August 20, 2016.
  35. ^ McWhorter, John (January 25, 2011). "Frances Fox Piven, Jim Sleeper and Me". The New Republic. Retrieved November 29, 2014.
  36. ^ Satin, Mark (2004). Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now. Westview Press and Basic Books, p. 10. ISBN 978-0-8133-4190-3.
  37. ^ McWhorter, John H. (December 13, 2015). "What's Holding Blacks Back?". City Journal. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  38. ^ All Things Considered (April 30, 2015). "The Racially Charged Meaning Behind The Word 'Thug'". NPR. Retrieved November 25, 2015.
  39. ^ a b McWhorter, John (May 1, 2015). "Baltimore's mayor and the president said 'thugs'? Let's not get too bent out of shape". The Washington Post. Retrieved November 25, 2015.
  40. ^ McWhorter, John (September 12, 2016). "'Racist' Technology Is a Bug—Not a Crime". Time. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  41. ^ McWhorter, John (March 5, 2010). "Taking out My Eraser". The New Republic.
  42. ^ McWhorter, John (November 9, 2021). "Opinion | If It's Not Critical Race Theory, It's Critical Race Theory-lite". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 19, 2023.
  43. ^ McWhorter, John (December 13, 2015). "Actually, Scalia had a point". CNN. Retrieved December 3, 2016.
  44. ^ McWhorter, John (January 28, 2022). "Opinion | It's Time to End Race-Based Affirmative Action". The New York Times.
  45. ^ McWhorter, John (July 4, 2023). "Opinion | On Race and Academia". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 4, 2023.
  46. ^ "Has Anti-Racism Become as Harmful as Racism? John McWhorter vs. Nikhil Singh". Reason.com. November 30, 2018. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  47. ^ Gillespie, Nick (November 9, 2018). "Debate: 'The Message of Anti-Racism Has Become as Harmful a Force in American Life as Racism Itself'". Reason.com. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  48. ^ McWhorter, John (March 21, 2014). "'Microaggression' Is the New Racism on Campus". Time.
  49. ^ McWhorter, John (November 29, 2016). "The Difference Between Racial Bias and White Supremacy". Time. Retrieved November 20, 2019.
  50. ^ McWhorter, John (December 23, 2018). "The Virtue Signalers Won't Change the World". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 25, 2020.
  51. ^ McWhorter, John (July 15, 2020). "The Dehumanizing Condescension of 'White Fragility'". The Atlantic. Retrieved July 18, 2020.
  52. ^ Jilani, Zaid (October 26, 2021). "John McWhorter Argues That Antiracism Has Become a Religion of the Left". The New York Times.
  53. ^ McWhorter, John (2021). Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. New York City: Penguin Publishing. ISBN 978-0-593-42307-3.
  54. ^ McWhorter, John (June 22, 2023). "Reparations Should Be An End, Not A Beginning". The New York Times. Retrieved June 28, 2023.
  55. ^ "Glenn Loury & John McWhorter". The Glenn Show. March 23, 2021. Retrieved August 3, 2022.
  56. ^ John McWhorter (November 30, 2021). "Stephen Sondheim wrote my Life's Soundtrack". The New York Times. Retrieved February 21, 2022. Way back, I ... played the lead in a small production of 'Merrily We Roll Along,' and I have played piano for productions of 'Funny Thing' and 'Into The Woods.'
  57. ^ McWhorter, John (October 18, 2014). "John McWhorter on Twitter". Retrieved May 28, 2019.
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