Woke Racism

People of good will on both the left and the right are secretly asking themselves the same question: how has the conversation on race gone so crazy? We’re told to read books and listen to music by people of colour but that wearing certain clothes is ‘appropriation’. We hear that being white automatically gives you privilege and that being black makes you a victim. We want to speak up but fear we’ll be seen as unwoke, or worse, labelled a racist. According to John McWhorter, the problem is that a well-meaning but pernicious form of antiracism has become, not a progressive ideology, but a religion – and one that’s illogical, unreachable, and unintentionally neoracist. In this book, McWhorter reveals the workings of this new religion, from the original sin of ‘white privilege’ and the weaponization of cancel culture to ban heretics, to the evangelical fervour of the ‘woke mob’.