John McWhorter — The Past and Future of Black Political Leadership

For this week’s episode of The Glenn Show, we’ve upped our production game a little. In late August, John McWhorter and I met up for an all-too-rare in-person conversation in Manhattan, and the filmmaker Rob Montz and his crew were on hand to record it. It was wonderful to be able sit face-to-face with John, and Rob did a wonderful job capturing the energy in the room.

It wouldn’t have been possible to pull all of this together without the support of the subscribers here: Thank you! We’re hoping to create more special content like this in the future, so your contributions are greatly appreciated.

John and I begin by discussing his gig writing for the New York Times, in particular a recent piece about Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s Blues Opera. It’s never been produced, and John is assisting in trying to usher it to the stage. We move from the blues to matters that are just plain blue: The word “motherfucker,” which began as black vernacular and has since been absorbed into the English language at large. This naturally leads us to talk about the treatment of sex and money in the TV show Billions. From there we move to more serious matters: The New York City mayor’s race. John is not a fan of the probable winner, Eric Adams, and I press him as to why. We get into it over the squandered opportunities of the Obama years, and we really get into it over Al Sharpton. John is ready to forgive him for the deplorable behavior that defined the first half of his career, and I’m not. And finally, we look at the Jacob Blake shooting a year after the fact. What do we know now that we didn’t know then?

We had a lot of fun doing this one, and I hope you have just as much watching it. Let me know what you think here or on Discord.

Next week I’ll be posting a conversation with historian David E. Kaiser about the role of “racial justice” in the politicization of historical studies. If you’d like a preview, you can find a previous conversation of ours here.

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0:00 Some posh new (temporary) digs for The Glenn Show

1:08 The challenges and liberties of John's New York Times gig

5:24 John's efforts to help mount an unproduced black opera

14:45 The deracialization of “motherfucker”

16:58 The erotics and economics of Billions

20:58 Why John didn't support Eric Adams for NYC mayor

31:04 What undermined the potential of the Obama years?

43:22 Can Glenn ever forgive Al Sharpton?

55:16 Will Eric Adams be able to operate effectively as mayor?

59:58 The Jacob Blake shooting, a year later

Links and Readings

John's NY Times piece, "How 'Woke' Became an Insult"

John's NY Times piece, "Can White Men Write a Black Opera?"

John's book, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now, and Forever

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