John McWhorter is a black liberal Ivy League academic, which makes his blistering criticism of the new “woke” “antiracism” rather stunning. He’s begun to release a series of installments of his new book, The Elect: Neoracists Posing As Antiracists And Their Threat To A Progressive America. Among his aims in discussing what he calls “Third Wave Antiracist” ideology, he says, will be “to argue that this new ideology is actually a religion in all but name,” “to explore why this religion is so attractive to so many people,” and “to show that this religion is actively harmful to black people despite being intended as unprecedentedly ‘antiracist.’”

He does this at some length, but we want to highlight the section where he lays out the self-contradictory “logic” of the supposed “antiracists.” He says, “The Third Wave Antiracist is deeply moved, for example, by a conglomeration of tenets which, stated clearly and placed in simple oppositions, translate into nothing whatsoever:”

When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt. BUT … Don’t put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you. They have dealt with too much to be expected to. …

You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people. BUT … You can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.

Show interest in multiculturalism. BUT … Do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it. Yet — if you aren’t nevertheless interested in it, you are a racist. …

“Black people cannot be held accountable for everything every black person does, BUT, all whites must acknowledge their personal complicitness in the perfidy throughout the history of whiteness.

He concludes, "The self-contradiction of these tenets is crucial, in revealing that Third Wave Antiracism is not a philosophy but a religion.” If it wasn’t clear, he doesn’t view religion kindly. But that perhaps adds weight to his condemnation of so-called “antiracism.”