John H. McWhorter Quotes

Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.

The black conservative is responsible for making people question an idea that racism must be extinct before black people can overcome. Understanding that our goal is to thrive despite racism rather than fetishizing it is, in fact, the central ideological plank of people deemed "black conservatives." This is a coherent position, but that can be hard to perceive, given the way that race has been discussed in our land over the past 40 years or so.

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

If you took away the color of Barack Obama's skin, nobody right now would be paying him any attention.

English, however, is kinky. It has a predilection for dressing up like Welsh on lonely nights.

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

No longer can we measure compassion by how much we spend on poverty but how many people we help to lift out of poverty.

A person you excuse from any genuine challenge is a person you do not truly respect.

Barack Obama's said some very nice things and he says them well. But if you ask me, the reason that we're looking at somebody who is such an inexperienced senator, who has said some very pleasant but not especially sterling or innovative things, the reason that he's considered such a big deal is simply because he's black.

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

Frankly, Barack Obama is a standard issue leftist that you would expect of somebody with his particular experience, and he doesn't exactly hide it.

We must neither behave as children by resisting honesty, nor allow ourselves to be treated as children by having honesty withheld.

Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

I don't think that we really know a whole lot about Barack Obama at all that you would really call distinctive.

Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.

Politics is work. Hiphop is music. The idea that hiphop, because it makes the body feel good to move to it and it makes the soul feel good to hear out angry young black men, can be transmuted into changing the world is narcotic but nonsensical. Wherever hiphop is ever "going," we can be sure it will not be in a constructive direction, anymore than fashions in the color of cars. And it shouldn't "concern" us in the least.

The only way that residual racist feelings could affect legislation, in my opinion, is through a lack of priorities, from not doing things.

Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.

Obama is seen as very, very cool. I think a lot of people find him sexy.

I think what Obama does more than his amazing speaking ability is he's able to connect with voters. And it's that hope that he brings out in American citizens that we are all hungry for, that people get excited about Sen. Obama.

I think even in today's America, there's a sense that there's something vaguely sexy about cigarettes.