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John McWhorter on Muck Rack

John McWhorter

New Jersey
As seen in: Lexicon Valley, The New York Times, Apple Podcasts, CNN, Forbes, MSN, The New York Times en Español, Estadão, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TIME, Aol and
Columbia linguist, weekly at NYT, biweekly Lexicon Valley podcast and Glenn Show. 9 NASTY WORDS and WOKE RACISM in 2022. Later this year: PRONOUN TROUBLE!
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Articles

As Darkness Approached, Black New Yorkers Found Some Light

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By John McWhorter
| The New York Times Verified
It’s easy to think that there was nothing vibrant about Black New York until the Harlem Renaissance came around. A captivating new book sets us straight on that: “A Moment in the Sun: Black Manhattan Before the Civil War,” by the historian Shane White (who is Australian, as it happens). He captures Black life in Manhattan from the 1820s through the 1850s, and pays particular attention to the copious court records of the period. It was a brief, shining moment.
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The Arday Tragedy: from Tokenism to Wokenism

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By John McWhorter
| City Journal Verified
For a long time, it was the view from the Left as well as the Right that tokenism was wrong. It was considered disrespectful of black people, i.e., racist, to place us in a position because of the color of our skin when we weren’t qualified for it, or when otherwise we wouldn’t have been wanted there, just for the sake of appearances. But one consequence of what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to recently as Woke 1 was an unspoken revision of this view: tokenism was now okay.
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How Academia Created Jason Arday

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By John McWhorter
| The Free Press Verified
How Academia Created Jason Arday Jason Arday speaking at the Times Higher Education conference in Birmingham on November 28, 2025. (David J. Colbran via Alamy) The plagiarism scandal at Cambridge is a symptom of a deeper problem: academia’s willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity from black scholars in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue. Jason Arday has a tell. Making what he considers important points, he holds his palms out and widens his eyes.
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