In his bestselling new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio), New York Times columnist and Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that the ideas of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and the Times' 1619 Project sharpen racial divides while drawing attention away from actual obstacles to improving quality of life for black Americans.
McWhorter first explored his idea of anti-racism as "Our Flawed New Religion" in a 2015 piece for The Daily Beast and continued the theme in a series of articles for Reason in 2020. "I think something is really distracting people in my world lately into supposing that they're supposed to fall for a kind of purposeless extremism in order to be good people," McWhorter says.
