Friday, November 25, 2016

McWhorter: "We Need A New 'PC' That Includes White People"

I don't necessarily agree with every jot and tittle of this, but McWhorter's always reasonable and worth a read.

posted by Winston Smith at 10:27 PM

2 Comments:

Blogger The Mystic said...

Sheesh, I dunno.. I mean, I guess as far as a defense of unsound argumentation goes, that's pretty good, but lines like

"But we cannot make more than a hyper-educated sliver of white Americans see those facts as justifying a contemptuous view of themselves"

pretty much seal the deal for me. It's like a snob condescendingly feigning an apology. Repeatedly, he implies strongly without saying directly that it is right for white people to loathe themselves for their white privilege (see quote above, of course), but only a very very special few of the most highly educated white folk will comprehend this reality.

This is really just a smart-soundy way of saying "Look, we need to dumb it down for these asshats; they refuse to recognize their asshattery, so we need to just stop telling them what huge asshats they are all the time and try more gently to bring them about to an imperfect degree of understanding of which they are capable."

Lame. I think the timbre of the article is pleasant and reasonable and some of it actually does chip away at the effects of the rotten core of PC, but it seems to me prominently to grow from that same core.

10:49 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

Well, my assessment is more positive than yours, but I agree with your main criticism above--that was, in fact, my major gripe with the piece.

PC is *wrong*. It's not that it's right but we'll never convinced the masses. Knowing McWhorter's stuff, my guess is that he's pulling a rhetorical fast one to try to convince people who normally defend PC. But that may be too charitable.

10:54 PM  

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