Black Columbia Professor John McWhorter’s Woke Racism’s explanation of Critical Race Theory describes it as an academic fad which is not constrained by evidence and reason: “It is a fragile, performative ideology, one that goes beyond the passages above to explicitly reject linear reasoning, traditional legal theorizing, and even Enlightenment rationalism. We are to favor an idea that an oppressed race’s “story” constitutes truth, in an overarching sense, apart from mere matters of empirical or individual detail.” The lack of cognitive constraints facilitates the targeting of anyone who can be accused of politically incorrect thinking or speaking. Why this matters for the civil rights of the stigmatized disabled is that it has ushered in an era of heightened self-righteous moralism. Not only can any difference from the conventional wisdom be characterized as utmost sinful heresy, McWhorter gives example after example of extreme punishment of anyone singled out for wrongthink. If such wrath can be visited on virtually any Ivy League student or professor who exercises freedom of speech, it creates a fear society which increases the pariahdom of a disabled minority which is already marginalized.
McWhorter gives many examples of extreme punishment which performative virtue signaling exacts for anything that can be construed as adverse to a race, gender, or sexual orientation:
“Thus, an obscure legal theory now feeds directly into a modus operandi that leads to indefensible suspensions, firings, and shamings nationwide.” Examples: “Is it necessary that the president and board chairman of the Poetry Foundation be forced to resign because the group’s statement in allegiance with Black Lives Matter after the Floyd murder was not long enough?” “Is it necessary that when, in 2018, a woman attended a party thrown by a Washington Post employee and wore blackface in ridicule of a recent comment by Megyn Kelly, she was not just called aside but cast into unemployment as a revolting heretic unworthy of civilized engagement? The blackface was unwise, to be sure—by the late 2010s it was no longer within the bounds of most educated people’s sense of humor to wear blackface even in irony. But still, the offender clearly intended it as signaling allegiance to the barrage of criticism against Kelly. Only in the late 2010s could this clumsy goof-up qualify as grounds for unemployment, with her callers-out claiming that she had made the party’s space “unsafe,” as if she had simply walked in corked up and saying she was Oprah. A few people at the party not only hounded her out but dedicated themselves to getting her fired from the newspaper for her transgression of etiquette. They succeeded, after even going as far as strong-arming the host of the party into revealing her name to them so that they could pursue her persecution.”
As in the case of the witch hunt that ensued when it was discovered that Virginia Governor Northam had appeared in blackface in a youthful peccadillo, responsible liberal voices might ask, “Where’s the path to redemption?”
“She had made the party’s space ‘unsafe’” (by appearing in blackface). There are people whose bigotry against disability makes them “offended” when, for instance, they encounter someone with a cleft. Could this justify their complaining to management that they should not have to labor in a “contaminated, offensive” workplace?
McWhorter describes: “Kangaroo court inquisitions, … psychological torture sessions seeking to purge people of improper thoughts, … obsessive policing of language.” That’s not an environment that bodes well for people considered “misfits” because of a birth condition.
McWhorter’s opening chapter: “As I write this in the summer of 2020, Alison Roman, a food writer for The New York Times, is on suspension. You might wonder just what a food writer could do to end up temporarily dismissed by her employer. Roman’s sin: In an interview, she passingly criticized two people for commercialism, model and food writer Chrissy Teigen and lifestyle coach Marie Kondo. Roman was Twitter-mobbed for having the nerve, as a white woman, to criticize two women of color. Teigen is half white and half Thai. Kondo is a Japanese citizen. Neither of them are what we typically think of as people of color in the sense of historically conditioned and structurally preserved disadvantage. However, in 2020, the mere fact of a white person criticizing not just one but two (apparently the plurality tipped the scales) non-white persons justified being shamed on social media and disallowed from doing her work. Roman, as a white person, was supposedly punching down—i.e., “down” at two people very wealthy, very successful, and vastly better known than her. Her whiteness trumped all, we were told. Roman, now typical of such cases, ate crow with an apologetic statement about how she had reflected and realized her error. Teigen even said that she did not think Roman deserved to be sanctioned. But no matter—a kind of fury, passed off as being “antiracist,” now has a supreme power in our public moral evaluations, and this required that Roman be pilloried in the town square. Her Wikipedia entry will forever include a notice that she was deemed a racist, billboard style, despite that most Americans likely see that she did nothing that remotely deserved such treatment, and despite that she would not have been treated that way as recently as a few years ago. She later left the Times permanently. What kind of people do these things? Why do they get away with it? And are we going to let them continue to?”
It is a short path from hair-trigger, self-righteous woke antiracism to a heightened readiness for ableist attacks on America’s largest minority. Social performativeness increases the “social tyranny” John Stuart Mill warned against in his classic study of liberty. It is bad for democracy, it is bad for the pursuit of happiness, it turns the land of the free and the home of the brave into a fear society.
