What Is the Alternative to Woke?

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Woke is now a slur that's good and bad, but yes, it's a slur. Woke means the kind of person who has radical leftist ideas and is willing to be abusive about it. I can't say woke any more to just mean leftesly wise. It's very hard to change language. You have to see how the body politic is going to create something spontaneously. For now, when people said woke and you dot snapped their fingers or did fist bumps in 20 15, now we've just got the boring progressive that.

John McWhorter is an author, a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors, a Columbia University linguist, and a columnist for The New York Times. His latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, argues that we must understand wokeness, quite literally, as a religion.

In this week’s conversation, John McWhorter and Yascha Mounk discuss the nature of today’s social progressivism, whether it constitutes a religion, and how we can actually help to reduce racial disparities in the United States.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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