McWhorter Meets The Folks

Professor John McWhorter visits “Red” America:

In a way, I don’t live in America. My world is the minority one of NPR and kalamata olives. This week, however, I’m writing from a cruise ship, and America this is.This is the America of USA Today, sausage links and “Rumor Has It.”

These are also the people who Blue Americans are given to thinking of as “scary” hordes, ever on the brink of returning America to the heartless Social Darwinism of the Gilded Age.

The idea is that because of this, we enlightened folk are to craft our public statements so as to hold off this eternal threat.When I put an American flag sticker on my windshield after September 11, a friend of mine of this type actually ripped it off, an action she meant as something between a joke and a protest. In her eyes, there were so many people “out there” who might take the sticker as a call for ignorant jingoism that it was irresponsible for a college professor to have the sticker on his car. About every fourth letter in my mailbag is from someone who says that they agree with my often right-of-center comments on race, but “worry” that people “out there” might misinterpret me as suggesting a return to Jim Crow,or leaving ghettos to fester unattended.

This week the people so often referred to as “out there” are right “in here” with me on this boat. Do these people “worry” me? Frankly, no.

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