Bravo! As a white person, these are the thoughts I would share with only a very few carefully chosen friends. I think of the “tenets” McWhorter listed as the Rules of the Game; and as he shows, it’s a crooked game. McWhorter left out the broad rule about who gets to characterize, discuss and (intentionally or unintentionally) insult whom. In his passionate rejection of black disempowerment, which he attributes to the “white savior complex,” McWhorter seemed to attribute the idea of black people as super-victims (absolutely on target, that) to white people. Surely, it’s a joint effort. Ta-Nahisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi would presumably identify themselves as black; Robin DiAngelo, given her Italian name, is presumably at least part white. The intellectual firepower behind their popularizations, built as it is on the fertile ground of incomprehensible French theory and neo-Marxist analysis, may have “white” origins, but the popularizations are a multiracial endeavor. I agree completely with McWhorter that the trope of the black as super-victim denies black people agency and responsibility.

As someone who does not automatically or categorically dismiss the value of religion either to individual or society, I would agree with McWhorter on the quasi-religious nature of “wokeness,” but nuance his claim. I think of “anti-racists” as Puritans, or maybe neo-Puritans, ever on the alert for the stain of a sin which damns the whole person, ever active to eradicate sin from self and society. In this context “The Elect” as a term of art fits perfectly. But while it is easy to imagine an anti-racist Jonathan Edwards casting sinners into the hands of his angry god, it’s as easy to imagine a Maoist struggle session, devoted to bringing to bear all the pressures of shame and guilt to force confession and re-education on anyone who diverged from the party line. Real religion has often had a positive impact on this country, rarely more so than when the energy of the Second Great Awakening flowed into the movements for abolition and women’s rights. A milder form, a more generous call, came from Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. So while it is conventional on the left and in the academy to scorn religion, or at least Christianity, the picture should have more nuance. Years ago I read an analysis of letters written home by Union soldiers in the Civil War that argued that these soldiers’ sentiments of duty and obligation to country expressed an American civil religion. I would argue that today’s neo-Puritan “Elect” are trying to impose a new civil religion on the country. Unfortunately, it’s one that admits of no redemption.

On a personal note: I live in Philadelphia, a city with a 50 percent black population, many of whom are desperately poor. The more anti-racism permeates the cultural space, the harder I have to work not to feel like I’m walking a knife edge whenever I interact with a black person. The more anger I carry around at the pronouncements of a Coates, the harder it is to remember that it’s the people I see on the street, in the doctor’s office, in the classroom who matter, not the ideologues, and that the ideologues make it harder, not easier, to see them. Because I believe economic inequality underlies much that is ascribed to race, it troubles me that anti-racism alienates other people, many also poor and underserved, from joining in a movement to claim rights due to all as citizens, including the positive right to good public education, healthcare, a safe home, and clean environment. The left has accomplished a lot since the sixties, and it has a lot to answer for.

On a further note: anyone who finds humor a welcome release from the pressures of cultural righteousness is encouraged to look for the Twitter feed of Titania McGrath, creation of the Northern Irish satirist Andrew Doyle. Doyle has drawn a deadly accurate bead on the righteous left. Many of his satirical flights, like a denunciation of Mary Poppins for wearing blackface in the chimney sweep scene, have later appeared as straight news in publications like the New York Times. Cheers?