"Not a Philosophy but a Religion"

"Third Wave Antiracism is losing innocent people jobs. It is coloring, detouring and sometimes strangling academic inquiry. It forces us to render a great deal of our public discussion of urgent issues in doubletalk any 10-year-old can see through. It forces us to start teaching our actual 10-year-olds, in order to hold them off from spoiling the show in that way, to believe in sophistry in the name of enlightenment."

Persuasion provides an excerpt from John McWhorter's The Elect: Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and their Threat to a Progressive America.

"It Is Disproportionate to the Actual Threats Facing Police Officers, and It Has Risen Significantly in Recent Years Without Apparent Justification"

"The measure of a society is not how it treats its most elite people, but how it treats 'the least of these.' None of us wants to live in a society where racial minorities are killed without regard for the law by the supposed enforcers of the law. But beyond the obvious problem in this social inequality, it is worth reiterating that, even with a large racial bias, black Americans still make up a minority of police killings: non-Hispanic whites make up half, and other minority groups make up the remainder. Black Americans are facing a uniquely severe case of a problem that afflicts us all, and their protests against police violence should be regarded as the canary in the coal mine on this issue."

Lyman Stone at Public Discourse investigates police violence.

As does John McWhorter at Quillette.

"Hopefully a Transitional Stage Along the Way to Something More Genuinely Progressive"

"People loved Coates's article not as politics, since almost no one thinks reparations are actually going to happen. But belle-lettristic concerns weren't the key either: Coates is hardly the only writer out there who has a way with the words. People were receiving 'The Case for Reparations' as, quite simply, a sermon. Its audience sought not counsel, but proclamation. Coates does not write with this formal intention, but for his readers, he is a preacher. A.O. Scott perfectly demonstrates Coates's now clerical role in our discourse in saying that his new book is 'essential, like water or air'—this is the kind of thing one formerly said of the Greatest Story Ever Told."

John McWhorter, in a 2017 Daily Beast article, says that "Antiracism" is a relgion.

"A Consuming Obsession with Sin"

"Given the right’s religious base, it’s not all that surprising that conservatives focus on moral transgressions—whether they violate God's divine law, America’s founding ideals of liberty, '50s-style norms of sexual behavior and good housekeeping, or other codes of conduct. But the left can be prudish and judgmental about the evils it holds in special contempt, too. On college campuses in particular, activists often take an almost religious approach to politics, rooted in a belief—sometimes stated, sometimes implied—in the irredeemable sin of America and its mainstream. Their work on vital issues gets diverted from real-world objectives and takes on the character of a church revival, with rituals to express its believers' sin and salvation, and a fundamentalist attention to language and doctrine.
"The late American philosopher Richard Rorty famously argued in his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, that this inward-looking dogmatism and zealotry was a major problem for the left. To a self-destructive degree, activists rejected dissent and criticism of their hallowed principles. They alienated the uninitiated with their join-us-or-else self-righteousness, undermining public support for the important causes they cared about. They turned away with disdain from any whiff of political power, elitism, or national pride, thus depriving themselves of some of the tools they needed to bring about tangible changes to policy."

Victor Tan Chen at The Atlantic criticizes "the cultural left."

Erased Errata

"My interest is not in people it’s just fun to dump on, but in people who have had a decisive impact on black lives and thought in general—and so no Dennis Rodman or Wesley Snipes. I am also thinking about true uniqueness, i.e. people whose essences and trajectories were idiosyncratic enough that if they hadn’t come along, chances are no equivalent person would have filled their shoes (so, no Dennis Rodman or Wesley Snipes!).
"I find that a list like this, if it’s really about impact on black people, cannot even be limited to black people."

John McWhorter in The New Republic laments the impact of ten men and women on black history.