John McWhorter

When a Racist Joke Does Not Merit Cancellation 

There would seem to be a sincere commitment across America these days to try to listen to one another across divides. To engage nuance rather than pretending that everything is, as it were, black and white. To address discrimination without devolving into the Jacobinesque routines of cancel culture…

What Will Smith and Joe Biden Have in Common

President Biden’s gaffe about Vladimir Putin and Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony were demonstrations of a single phenomenon. Let me explain. Saturday, in Warsaw, addressing Putin’s war in Ukraine, Biden departed from his prepared remarks with this coda: “For…

Up in Arms Over a Pronoun

Feedback on my newsletter about the embrace of “they” as a gender-neutral pronoun referring to a single person — Joel is wearing their green shirt today because it matches their pants — has been, well, pointed. It seems that quite a few people have a major problem with this change in pronominal…