John McWhorter has written an important book – a heretical book, really, because in today’s America, black men are anathema if they believe what he believes, or write what he writes. McWhorter knows the bounds within which he is expected to live, but will not suffer the faux righteousness disseminated by the Elect of the Establishment Church of Wokeness. We will come to this church’s relationship, if any, to the Christian churches shortly; but supposing some linkage, we might, with respect to its understanding of race in America, be tempted to invoke Rom 1:22, and say of this new religion: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.” Woke Racism is McWhorter’s account of its foolishness.
Why can men like John McWhorter not have a place in the ghoulish world The Elect has constructed, a world in which the necessary separation between politics and religion has collapsed, a world in which a self-assured and disconnected elite does immense harm to black America while professing to help it? Consider the term, diversity, one of the articles of confession of this new religion. In a country with an historic but never fully realized commitment to pluralism, diversity sounds like a noble idea. It is not. Diversity presupposes that persons must be treated in terms of their purportedly essential group identities. These group characteristics are monovalent. To be a woman, you must be a feminist; to be black, you must vote for the Democratic Party and shun conservative ideas, etc.
“Pluralism demands that all voices be heard on account of their personhood; diversity demands that purportedly innocent victim groups be heard and ranked according to their victimhood”
Diversity claims to make visible those persons who heretofore have been invisible. It does that—at the cost of making invisible those persons who cannot in principle exist within the groups it purports to make visible: traditional women, black conservatives, etc. Pluralism demands that all voices be heard on account of their personhood; diversity demands that purportedly innocent victim groups be heard and ranked according to their victimhood. Those who have no standing as victims must be silent; victims alone may speak; victims alone count. The early 20th century toyed with eugenics schemes that ranked races according to their strength; in the early 21st century, the Elect of the Establishment Church of Wokeness toy with a spiritual eugenics scheme that ranks identity groups according to their victimhood. The higher the ranking, the less its members are held responsible for caring for themselves and the more they stand in need of a state-funded army of ‘helpers’ to make them feel safe, supported, and celebrated.
There should be little wonder that transgenderism is the leading edge of the outreach missionary work undertaken by the Establishment Church of Wokeness; it represents the maximal case thus far discovered of a purportedly monovalent innocent-victim identity group in need of a state-funded army of helpers—medical, psychological, and legal. The AMA, APA, and ABA have been the vanguard of missionary zeal for its cause. So much for our once-vaunted independent guilds.
