All about the Beat: Why Hip-Hop Can't Save Black America
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Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Gotham (June 19, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1592403743
ISBN-13: 978-1592403745
 

Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America
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Paperback: 448 pages
Publisher: Gotham (December 28, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1592402704
ISBN-13: 978-1592402700

In his first major book on the state of black America since the New York Times bestseller Losing the Race, John McWhorter argues that a renewed commitment to achievement and integration is the only cure for the crisis in the African-American community.

Winning the Race examines the roots of the serious problems facing black Americans today—poverty, drugs, and high incarceration rates—and contends that none of the commonly accepted reasons can explain the decline of black communities since the end of segregation in the 1960s. Instead, McWhorter posits that a sense of victimhood and alienation that came to the fore during the civil rights era has persisted to the present day in black culture, even though most blacks today have never experienced the racism of the segregation era.

McWhorter traces the effects of this disempowering conception of black identity, from the validation of living permanently on welfare to gansta rap's glorification of irresponsibility and violence as a means of "protest." He discusses particularly specious claims of racism, attacks the destructive posturing of black leaders and the "hip-hop academics," and laments that a successful black person must be faced with charges of "acting white." While acknowledging that racism still exists in America today, McWhorter argues that both blacks and whites must move past blaming racism for every challenge blacks face, and outlines the steps necessary for improving the future of black America.
 

Defining Creole
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Paperback: 444 pages
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (February 3, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0195166698
ISBN-13: 978-0195166699
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches

A conventional wisdom among creolists is that creole is a sociohistorical term only: that creole languages share a particular history entailing adults rapidly acquiring a language usually under conditions of subordination, but that structurally they are indistinguishable from other languages. The articles by John H. McWhorter collected in this volume demonstrate that this is in fact untrue. Creole languages, while complex and nuanced as all human languages are, are delineable from older languages as the result of their having come into existence only a few centuries ago. Then adults learn a language under untutored conditions, they abbreviate its structure, focusing upon features vital to communication and shaving away most of the features useless to communication that bedevil those acquiring the language non-natively. When they utilize their rendition of the language consistently enough to create a brand-new one, this new creation naturally evinces evidence of its youth: specifically, a much lower degree of the random accretions typical in older languages, which only develop over vast periods of time. The articles constitute a case for this thesis based on both broad, cross-creole ranges of data and focused expositions referring to single creole languages. The book presents a general case for a theory of language contact and creolization in which not only transfer from source languages but also structural reduction plays a central role, based on facts whose marginality of address in creole studies has arisen from issues sociopolitical as well as scientific. For several decades the very definition of the term creole has been elusive even among creole specialists. This book attempts to forge a path beyond the inter- and intra-disciplinary misunderstandings and stalemates that have resulted from this, and to demonstrate the place that creoles might occupy in other linguistic subfields, including typology, language contact, and syntactic theory.
 

Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care
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Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Gotham (October 9, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1592400167
ISBN-13: 978-1592400164
Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches

Acclaimed linguist McWhorter (The Power of Babel [2002]) explores the social dynamics that have changed the English language since the 1960s and threaten to erode our intellectual prowess. Comparing past speakers from Abraham Lincoln to Mario Cuomo to more modern speakers, including President George W. Bush, McWhorter laments the loss of the art of oration, notwithstanding Jesse Jackson and the black preaching tradition. He traces the current emphasis on oral versus written speech across a variety of cultures and times. McWhorter focuses on the forces at work in the U.S. that have heightened the appeal of plain-speaking since the 1960s, including the influence of music, the breakdown of racial barriers, and the rise in immigration and technology. While he sees the trend toward emphasizing the oral over the written as "the celebration of the art in spoken language," he laments the impact on our ability to read, write, and critique. McWhorter's eloquent style and cogent analysis will appeal to readers concerned about trends in American education and communication.
—Vanessa Bush Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 

Authentically Black
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Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Gotham (January 27, 2003)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1592400019
ISBN-13: 978-1592400010
Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches

"McWhorter writes elegantly and covers plenty of turf . . . which ranges from rap music to reparations . . . [An] important book."
—The Wall Street Journal

McWhorter, a linguistics professor, ventures again into his sideline as a black public intellectual as he did in his earlier work, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2000), this time examining the direction--or misdirection--of black leadership in America. His working assumption is that black leaders--wedded to the political left, the Democratic Party, and affirmative action--are out of step with the times. He argues that the civil rights era is dead, and appropriately so. The new battleground against racism requires individual rather than collective action. McWhorter criticizes the icons and issues of black leadership from Randall Robinson on reparations, to Jesse Jackson's shakedown of lucrative deals for his friends, to Al Sharpton for perpetuating notions of victimhood. McWhorter's criticism of this old vanguard of the civil rights movement is formulaic in the mode of the Republican right wing. However, his real contribution to the debate regarding new directions for racial progressiveness is his emphasis on the positives of black endurance and progress. Despite its partisan slant, this is a worthy book.
—Vernon Ford Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 

The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language
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Hardcover: 336 pages
Publisher: W. H. Freeman; 1st edition (January 15, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0716744732
ISBN-13: 978-0716744733
Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches

This book is not for those uncomfortable with change. McWhorter's main goal is to convey to laypeople what linguists know about the inexorable changeability of languages. He compares our popular understanding of language to Monopoly instructions--static and written as though "from on high." But whereas Parkers Brothers is not likely to revise the rules of its game, language is as transitory as a cloud formation. From this analogy, aided by parallels with natural evolution, McWhorter shows us how the world's many dialects arose from a single Ur-tongue. He emphasizes the idea that "dialect is all there is." What we call a "sandard language" is in fact a dialect that has been anointed by people in power and by cultural circumstances. All this becomes a tad academic in places, but McWhorter's use of analogies, anecdotes, and popular culture keeps the discussion lively. A worthy contribution to our understanding of the defining feature of human life. —Philip Herbst
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
 

Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English
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Paperback: 300 pages
Publisher: Perseus Books Group (January 23, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0738204463
ISBN-13: 978-0738204468
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches

A barbed rebuttal to the conservative view that popular culture is destroying the English language. Though there is a contingent of linguists who fight the fact, our language is always changing--not only through slang, but sound, syntax, and words' meanings as well. Debunking the myth of "pure" standard English, tackling controversial positions, and eschewing politically correct arguments, linguist John McWhorter considers speech patterns and regional accents to demonstrate just how the changes do occur. Wielding reason and humor, McWhorter ultimately explains why we must embrace these changes, ultimately revealing our American English in all its variety, expressiveness, and power.
 

Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America
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Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: Free Press (August 18, 2000)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0684836696
ISBN-13: 978-0684836690
Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1 inches

For the past two decades, an academic cottage industry has developed to analyze--and some would say overemphasize--the social and educational problems of African Americans. Such writers as Dinesh D'Souza, Shelby Steele, Armstrong Williams, and Ken Hamblin have all contributed in this area; now add to that list John McWhorter, a Berkeley linguistics professor and the author of Word on the Street, an examination of Ebonics and Black English. The baic idea he presents in this occasionally insightful if flawed book is that African Americans are not advancing socially as a result of victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism.

According to the author, victimology "has become a keystone of cultural blackness to treat victimhood not as a problem to be solved but as an identity to be nurtured," while "separatism encourages black Americans to conceive of black people as an unofficial sovereign entity, within which the rules other Americans are expected to follow are suspended out of a belief that our victimhood renders us morally exempt from them." Anti-intellectualism is a belief that "school is a 'white' endeavor." McWhorter suggests that only blacks embrace such opinions, placing most of the blame on them while underemphasizing the institutional racism that facilitates such views. Needless to say, McWhorter has no love for the likes of Al Sharpton, Hazel Carby, June Jordan, or Patricia Williams and their ilk. His chapter on Ebonics, his specialty, is the most nuanced, though certainly not the final word on the matter. And though some readers will be turned off by his use of tired anti-affirmative-action, right-wing clichés, anyone interested in the education of African Americans in the post civil rights era will find Losing the Race a worthy read. —Eugene Holley Jr.