Self-described “contrarian” John McWhorter is used to being at the center of controversy. So it’s no surprise his new book, “Pronoun Trouble: The Story of Us in Seven Little Words,” hits shelves as its subject makes constant, contentious headlines.
But that’s not how he planned it.
“I have a pattern, which is that often, if I write an angry book I want to write a fun language-nerd book afterwards, just to lighten things up,” the Columbia prof and podcaster tells The Post.
“Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America,” his 2021 bestseller, “was an angry little book that I needed to write. But after that’s over, you’ve got this ashtray-taste in your mouth.”
The New York Times — where McWhorter is a weekly columnist — complained just Tuesday that after President Trump “barred federal workers from listing their preferred pronouns in email signatures,” his “press aides have refused to engage with reporters’ questions because the journalists listed identifying pronouns in their email signatures.”
“Pronoun Trouble” has arrived at the perfect moment.
“Sitting on a sunporch in 2023, I was not expecting Trump to win again,” its author says. “I had no idea that a couple of years later, we would be caught up in these much-thornier debates about trans.”
He laughs, “I’m just trying to roll with it, but originally I was just trying to write a fun, happy book to offset the bitterness of ‘Woke Racism.’”
While that book won the linguist more fans and fame, progressives hated it — and McWhorter’s work for the center-right Manhattan Institute.
Conservatives won’t like his case for the singular “they” in “Pronoun Trouble.” But McWhorter is anything but a black-and-white thinker (no pun intended).
“Words are going to change sometimes. We all dealt with ‘Oriental’ became ‘Asian,’ and we are much less likely now to say ‘stewardess’ rather than ‘flight attendant,’” he says.
But the singular “they”: “That’s brand new. Very very sudden. The problem is when anybody from either side tries to propose an entire list all at one time. That’s what happened from the woke left in 2020 and 2021, and now we have something similar coming from what we’re beginning appropriately to call the woke right, which is, ‘Don’t use these words.’”
New names don’t mean new thinking, he points out.
“I understand why we’re being taught now to say ‘unhoused’ because ‘homeless’ has taken on a kind of a seamy air. But I’m also old enough to remember when ‘homeless’ was introduced because that sounded more humane than saying ‘bum’ or ‘tramp,’” he says.
“Homeless was a beautiful, elegant, humane term. But the thing is ‘unhoused’ is going to sound the same way ‘homeless’ does now in about 20 years. Really, what we need to change is how many people are ‘unhoused.’ So in general, the idea is to change thought and reality not to change the way people say things.”
Indeed, enforcing language is easier than working for real change, McWhorter says.
“It’s a lazy form of activism, whichever side it comes from. I think we need to get back to the idea of politics as going out and doing things and making a case for things rather than saying, ‘Don’t say that.’”
Pronouns’ ubiquity in progressives’ email signatures and social-media bios is yet another form of virtue signaling.
“That has become a way of quietly indicating that you are a certain kind of enlightened person,” McWhorter says.
“There was a time when men wore top hats to indicate membership in a certain group. Even today, the clothes that you wear, what radio stations you listen to, if any, what books you have on your shelf. So for example, in my world, it is very common to have a copy of Robert Caro’s ‘The Power Broker’ very prominently displayed on your shelf. And I’m not saying people haven’t read it, but you have a way of having that one in a place that everyone can see, and I would say that I’m not different. My copy of ‘The Power Broker” — and I did read it — is somewhere where anybody who walks in can see it. That’s a way of showing I’m a certain kind of educated person.”
Listing pronouns, however, is one signal McWhorter would never send. And that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez deleted hers from her Twitter bio after the 2024 election sends its own signal.
“It was showing that the major high wokeness of 2020-2021 is on the ropes,” he says.
Pronoun-listing “has a smell of the hard woke left. To the extent that Trump or Trump’s people had that nasty but truly clever sign, which was ‘Donald Trump is for you. Kamala Harris is for them.’ That’s nasty, but it’s also very effective.”
“It made sense” AOC dropped the “she/her” after the Democrats’ defeat.
“An era is over in terms of the worst of the woke left,” he concludes. “That’s a kind of person and ideology that will always be with us in some way, and I think it should be, but there’s an extreme that I think will pass.”
McWhorter’s tolerance of the woke left might be surprising, given his important work on its own intolerance. But he’s a John Stuart Mill-type liberal — open exchange is how human beings learn and improve society.
“We need voices from the hard left to expand our sense of what’s possible, to expand our sense of what should be possible, or what we might be thinking about,” he says.
“That’s how new ideas get out. What was inappropriate was that kind of person standing up at the table and insisting everybody go their way on the pain of being embarrassed in public and losing their job. That was not the way a mature society operates. But no, I’m all for the hard left being one of our voices, as long as the hard left listens to everybody else, just like everybody else listens to them.”
Would he say that about the hard right?
“Yes, definitely, as long as they just stay seated with everybody else,” he responds. “I grew up and I live in a context in which I’m trained to viscerally resist anything from the hard right, but then again, I also know intellectually that there are things from the hard right that make sense.”
Asked for an example, he pauses some time before answering — he can be careful that way.
“I don’t want to get in trouble,” he says with a chuckle.
“OK, somebody from that world might say that there should be no such thing in admissions or in employment as acknowledging people’s hardships and lowering standards at all. So even if it’s not about race, I would say if somebody has had obstacles, then you adjust for that when evaluating whether or not they should have a shot at Harvard, whether or not they should get certain kinds of jobs. I say that partly because it makes perfect sense to me. I say it partly because it’s all I’ve ever heard. I say it partly because I know it’s what I’m supposed to say.”
McWhorter grew up in Philadelphia and has degrees from Rutgers, New York University and Stanford.
“A person from the hard right might say that there should be no adjustments whatsoever, and that whole idea that you adjust — it starts in about 1966 — was a mistake, that it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” he continues. “Make it be about a test, as if we were in an East Asian country. And frankly, people who don’t do well will just get better at it, because there’s no other way.”
McWhorter shakes his head. “I find that heartless and unnecessary, but that is something someone should be allowed to say without being thrown out on the dirt because, really, a society might run more smoothly based on that.”
He’s on leave this year from Columbia, where he strongly feels anti-Israel protests have gone too far: “Jews are supposed to be able to suck up horrible things being said about them and Israel, day in and day out, because Jews are white.”
But he noticed a disturbing student trend earlier, post-COVID: the mumbling.
“It started when the masks finally came off. I had to start and I had to keep on asking people to repeat themselves, like, ‘What, what?’ And I thought, I’m not that old. My hearing is just fine. A lot of the guys mumble, and I think that the reason they mumble more than they used to is because they spent a formative period of time having their whole social life be online, where you don’t really have to speak up. And so they never learned how to do this. And so I am now prepared for the undergraduate males to sound vaguely like they’re speaking Swedish,” he says (talking to The Post in a Swedish café). “Girls are more precise in their speech usually.”
He can’t help but recall his own daughters, though, as he considers his two roles — academic linguist who chronicles changing usage without judgment and opinionated commentator.
“In listening to my 10- and my 13-year-old saying ‘like’ every five words, I must admit . . . I wish sometimes they wouldn’t use it so much. And I had told them, ‘If you’re ever in formal circumstances, like speaking up in class, you need to say ‘like’ less,” he reveals.
“Frankly, there’s a little bit of snobbery,” he confesses. “I’m thinking, ‘How dare they sound like other people.’ But I know that does not make any logical sense. So yeah, the humanity does slip out” from the academic in the ivory tower, he chuckles.
