All right, John McWhorter is with us right now. He teaches linguistics, philosophy, and music history at Columbia University. Author of a brand new book, Out This Week, Pronoun Trouble, the story of us in seven little words. And Professor, great to see you.
I know you take it off. This is a sabbatical for you, right? Yeah, this is my leisure time.
But here we are. Normally at Columbia. Yeah, you must be so glad to be away from the chaos. Honestly, it's not a fun campus to be on right now. You know, and I love my institution. But yeah, it can be a sad place these days. Right, but you also told me that it sounds like the faculty interacts a lot, right?
No, I wouldn't say that. It's just that I happen to be in an eccentric situation, as always in my whole life, where linguistics is me and one other full-time faculty. We're kind of holed up in a building, a little bit off campus. And so neither one of us have to interact with that many faculty. That's just by chance.
The faculty themselves, they interact plenty, and they're having a very different experience than I've had. So you love language. I love language. Where'd that come from? I'm crazy. I mean, basically, when I was a little kid, I would hear another language and feel left out.
It would almost make me cry. What are they saying? And how can I learn to do what they're doing? How come I only speak one thing? And for some reason, I'm just wired that way.
It's an eccentricity. But that led me to study the languages of the world. Right, and that led to this book, The Story of Us in Seven Little Words. What are those words? Ultimately, they are I, you, he, she, it, we, and they.
Why? And those words are our pronouns. And pronouns are important because they're not really words.
A word is like cat, or already, or chin up, or something like that. Whereas pronouns are like nails. They're screws. They stand in for other things, and we use them an awful lot. And it means that if they change, and inevitably they're going to change, it's itchy. You don't like it because it's like somebody is telling you how to use your fingers. But different times, different eras have different words.
They always do. Some of the words in our era as opposed to the 50s era. Did you go over in your book? Yeah, and so the words are always changing. You know, fax is now an archaic word, but I remember in the 80s when it felt very new.
Nowadays, the kids are saying, well, that's cringe. That's a new usage of that word. And words change. But pronouns, we don't like them when they change because that's kind of like, you know, your shoe size changing or something like that. So how do they what are some words that represent this era? And how is that indicative of what we're living through?
Well, we can't do that because feelings or I'm doing that because salt. And the idea there is that you're doing a kind of a baby talk. You're talking kind of like a kid. And that's certainly partly because it's now part of being a young person to be a little bit afraid of or a little bit reluctant about being a grown up, being an adult, being a grown up. That's something that's been shown many young people now worry about. And this is the whole conversation about kids being over parented and kids not learning to be independent.
It's this new cell phone generation. And I'm not meaning to criticize them, but I think that because feelings is a jolly reflection of that in that you pretend to be talking in a childlike way. Nobody would have come up with an expression like because salt in 1927. Because salt would mean you don't want to eat that because you're not supposed to eat too much salty food. But instead of saying that, you say because salt and you just assume everybody knows what you're talking about.
Just saying because salt, it's really kind of boiling it down. It's assuming a lot. It's as if you're not really very articulate. It's pretending not to be articulate as a joke.
That's something that adults in their fedoras would not have been doing in 1950. So you've started interesting. You observe, but you also notice, too, like the society has had the most success for people. You have that in contrast to the word grit. So grit is something you've got to find a way. You've got to find to grind it out. Overcoming obstacles. It's hard to do that when you're over parented or those obstacles are scaled for you.
Yeah, there is definitely some of that. We have a very advanced way of looking at grit these days, which is to question, and there's an intelligence in this, but you can take it too far, to question how hard people should have to work. The idea is that we should provide for people. We should make it easy that the idea is that everybody has equal opportunity. The idea that you're going to really, really push, we often ask how hard should anybody have to push. And that's also, especially if they are not upper class, and especially if they are, and I'm saying this as a black person, not white. There's a sense that how hard should we make people work given that people start at different places.
But that means that grit doesn't feel the same way to a lot of us now as it did in, I keep on mentioning 1950, but 1950. You know what's so interesting? It's like when you lose everything, like in Los Angeles, when you, in the middle of a war, like the Ukrainians, they have their homes blown up tomorrow. You know exactly what you're doing the next day. It's survival instinct, right? It's almost a relief to get out of that introspection of when am I fulfilling my destiny, my goal? You don't think that if you're in Kiev these days.
You don't think that if you're in Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades or Altadena. Yeah, I would honestly say I know what you mean. I wouldn't, I don't want to minimize what those people are going through. I wouldn't want to be in that situation myself, but I can think if there was one good thing about it, it would be that you knew that the only way to make this better is the grit and there would be no questions.
There must be a tiny bit of relief in that, although this is not to minimize what happens to people. Pronoun trouble. What do you mean by pronoun trouble?
What's trouble? Trouble is that whenever a pronoun changes in the way it's used, people get upset. And so, for example, you used to be only used if there were two or more people. It used to be that it would be Brian, thou are sitting in front of me, thou art sitting in front of me, whereas you would be, if it was you and somebody else, here talking to us. And so we had both a thou, singular, and then you for the plural. You took over everything. And so you became used in both the singular and the plural. That feels natural to us now.
You can't imagine English as anything different. But when that was changing, there were people who didn't like it. And now here we are, there's some other things to be said about the use of I and me.
Billy and me went to the store. Nobody thought that was a bad sentence until people decided that it was. But now we have the whole they, them business.
And they is changing under our feet practically every week. And for a lot of people, it's a problem. Are we going to ever stop seeing the pronouns at the bottom of emails? I mean, when is that going to go? I think that that has become a jolly fashion statement to show that you understand that maybe we need to not think of there only being he's and she's, but some people who would rather not be referred to by gender. And there are many people who want to show, you know, whether they they want that or not for themselves, they want to show that they understand that gender is fluid.
I think that's going to be a calling card for a long time. It's kind of like I hate to say this about people who I'm sure were very sincere. Remember the Darfur war? Let's see. Yeah, let's talk about that when we get back. More with Professor John McWhorter.
Don't move. So it's our privilege to have Professor John McWhorter in studio. He's taken a sabbatical.
He doesn't have to miss class. His book is now Our Pronoun Trouble, the story of us in seven little words. But I do want to pick up on what you were saying about Darfur. I was just gonna say about 20 years ago, there were people who had signs on their lawn saying not on our watch about Darfur.
And frankly, the war passed for a while, but it came back and it's now worse than ever. And back then there was an extent and it's not that people were being insincere, but there was an extent to which if you put up that sign that was showing that you understood that people and especially black people were suffering in a different part of the world. We all do that. I think that the pronouns are a way of showing that you understand that the gender binary culturally doesn't have to be absolute. And frankly, I don't I don't see anything wrong with it.
I'm not going to be putting that I prefer to be called he him. I think it's rather clear and I have other stuff to do. But I think if you're of a certain age, you feel it as a kind of a of a politeness. It's like putting out a welcome mat. Right. How do you feel about what coming up on 250 years of American history?
Do you believe that all races, all colors, all creed should be celebrating that? Well, to tell you the truth, I think that to suppose that the United States's history has been one long hit job, which is what we're often told, is lazy. I think it's easy to look at the bad things and to see it all in succession and to say that everything that's happening now shows that nothing has really changed and that we're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
That's easy. And there's a certain drama in it, a melodrama in it. But the truth is that we started at a certain place which was unusually advanced.
The Declaration of Independence at the time, a really revolutionary document, as in it came from the French Revolution's ideas, except it actually worked and people didn't end up guillotining each other. And then it's been a long rehearsal where you get better with treating black people as equals. Not perfect in 1863, but that was better than 1862 and 1964 with the Civil Rights Act was better than 1863, et cetera. And then also with women and also with any number of other things where we get closer and closer to the ideal. It takes a little work to think of it that way because it's easier to pretend that progress doesn't happen than to admit that it happens slowly.
But yes, by 250, I hope that we can really blow our own horn. Right. Without skipping over, Jim Crow, without skipping over slavery, you talk about where we come and where we've evolved to. What is it like as a black kid in fifth, I think fifth or fourth grade, when you first started hearing about American history and hearing about slavery? And were you in a mixed situation? Was it an all black school? And how do people, what's the correct way to teach that?
And how were you taught it? You know, the truth is that I think the kind of a tabula rasa blank slate black kid hears about slavery now or heard about slavery in the 70s when I saw Roots on TV, et cetera, and my mother was very conscious of teaching me things like this. And what you think is that's over. You think that was then.
That was a damn shame. And then some. But here we are now. That's what you first think. Then you're taught to think. And this happens, I think, more in college than in most schools. But you're taught to think that actually there hasn't been that much progress and that there's a straight line between slavery and, for example, what happened to George Floyd and the fact that somebody might give you a funny look in a store. I think you learn that later. And I think that that's a dangerous message because the truth is you try to make the best of what you've got, even if a disproportionate number of the people you are are starting from behind.
I grew up in a very middle class and very integrated circumstance. And I don't think that's why I said what I just said. I think in general, even less advantaged black kids who grew up in all black neighborhoods hear about slavery and they think of it as something distant. And I know for a lot of people, they shudder at the thought. Don't think that it was so distant. But frankly, it was.
And I think that a healthy self-image is to think about yourself more than what the obstacles were for your great, great, great, great grandparents. I know. And as we come up in year 250, I think it's going to be hopefully people can all say everything you said and feel good about the country. This is your team, right?
This is your team. We're here now. We watch Greenland. Greenland is so they have 20,000 people. They have great pride and they don't want to be owned by anyone. And I want to get back to the point where if people insult America, everybody feels it. They don't say, yeah, I hear you.
I'm stuck here. Right. Because I think people have to compare us to other countries. How do we do when you do that, John?
Yeah, I think people need to realize that to have criticism of America, it's one thing to love America and to wish it got better, but to listen to it being criticized from other places and to nod as if you hate your own country. Basically, just make sure that you're being honest. I honestly believe that if that's how you feel, you should really be considering.
And there are some people who do it, but very few. Go to Germany. Go, therefore, to Canada, which is a lot like the United States but has less of what you would think of as the blood on its hands. Or go live in, you know, Russia is a very interesting place. Go live there. And to the extent that most of those people would never do that, basically, because they have, you know, kinship ties here, friends here, and frankly wouldn't want to live anywhere else. It means you should love your country despite criticizing it. Yeah, definitely. What is it like on campus now with this anti-Semitism that we saw on full display over the last couple of years since the October 7th attacks?
Well, the truth is I'm on sabbatical this year, and so I haven't been on campus. But what that comes down to is why people are so upset about a war going on in a very small place very far away is that they see it as white people on brown people. So they see it as white supremacy or what's called settler colonialism, and it is oppressing the Palestinians who are brown. And it doesn't matter that most Israelis are not technically Caucasian or white. The idea is that Israel was founded by the larger Western white establishment.
And mostly the lead constitutions don't believe Israel should exist? Most people who teach, well, you know what, I don't know the statistics. I'll say that I have known ever since I was a teacher, you know, first at Cornell, then at Berkeley, and then at Columbia, that it is a very common, not at all surprising opinion among faculty, especially humanities and social science faculty, that Israel was a mistake. Very few people have a rabid view about it, but it's very common at a dinner party to hear somebody just say it, especially if a Jewish person isn't there. And it was very common when I was a graduate student, when I was at Stanford, that was a very ordinary view.
And it's not that these people would want to see Israel pushed into the sea, but their idea was Israel shouldn't have happened, and how Israel treats Palestinians now is something like a genocide. That did not shock me a year ago the way it shocked many people, because if you're in university culture, you know that that's long been the standard. We're stunned how much money I am goes from the federal government to these institutions. Harvard gets $8.5 billion in payments.
$400 million is a portion that is being withheld from Columbia right now. Do they need that money? They do need it, Brian, and to be honest there, I have to say, the solution to fixing this is not to threaten scientific research, which is what's going on here. If what they're trying to do is say, either change this and really go to an effort that you weren't going to before, and that there was no way to make you go to, or we're going to take away your science money. If the idea is just a gambit, I get it, but if what they really mean is that we're going to stop studies cold, we're going to stop the kind of science that you need to do, honestly, the science is more important. This is not what you want to hear, but the science is more important than the anti-Semitism. Well, what would get these colleges' attention?
To be honest, I think it would have to be, one, maybe this. I mean, maybe this will just shock these schools to their socks to the point that they really do work on making it so that there's no more tolerance of anti-Semitism than there would be of a bunch of white kids saying DEI must die and walking around with pickets. You know, if those kids did that, they would be sent to the planet Jupiter right away. But somehow it's okay to say from the river to the sea, maybe this gambit will work, or if it doesn't, there has to be a national conversation about it, and these things take time. But, you know, there are things that change. And so, for example, there is no epidemic of teen pregnancy anymore. If anybody is saying babies are having babies in the ghetto, they're talking about something that really hasn't been true for about 20 years. In this case, we could wake up 20 years later and notice that there's been a shift in terms of campus anti-Semitism, and maybe it would be because of all of this that's happened.
Yeah, I guess we're going to have to see. The other thing would be the foreign students. I'm just shocked how many foreign students are on campus. I know how many very successful high school students just don't have a shot at the Ivy Leagues, especially white kids these days. Well, they pay the freight, for one thing, and to be honest, that's been a reality I have lived in so often that I had not really thought about it that much.
But yes, there are a great many students from other places, and there is an amount of the space that their admission takes up that maybe if we could change things, more disadvantaged American kids of all colors would come in. So people are just tuning in now. Pronoun troubles out today.
Today is its first day. What do you want people to take from the book? I want them to take from it, one, that every one of those little words has an interesting history, and two, that almost all of them have been controversial at some point, so the history is interesting.
And three, to know that it's not too long, and that some people tell me that it's funny. That's a pronoun trouble. Right, and who does your intro? The intro is, um, you mean? I mean the dedication, the first, didn't you have an introduction to your book?
It is dedicated to my Russian partner, so that's what that says, so that's to mine, and that's who it's dedicated to. Right, um, right now in our country, the tariffs, I know United Economics guys, you worry about it? Yes, because I think that, for example, with the cars, the cars are going to be more expensive, and that's hard for people because people like to buy cars. Apparently that's going to hit wealthier people more than people who aren't wealthy and are more likely to buy American cars.
But American parts are often made in other places. I think it's a rather heartless policy. But, yeah, I guess we're going to see what happens if we can rebalance everything. And so, John, where do we go to get the book?
You go to your friendly bookseller, or, frankly, there are many places online that you can go to get the book, and it's also an audiobook, and frankly, I read the audio for it, and so I recommend that as well. I want you to hear Governor Gavin Newsom, March 6th, on should men be in women's sports. I think it's an issue of fairness, I completely agree with you on that. It is an issue of fairness. It's deeply unfair. No, I'm not wrestling, I'm not relaxing with the fairness issue, I totally agree with you.
Now that's on trial today, he was just about, he's saying that maybe he has a second visit to that. How do you feel about trans men in women's sports? Honestly, if someone has gone through male puberty and then has decided that they are a girl, I understand the I am a girl part. But if you've been through male puberty, I don't think you should be able to compete against women in sports. I'm mystified that somebody who's been through male puberty would then go into a female space and say, I'm one of you, and win, and be fist-bumping in the air as if that's some kind of victory. I think that is going to be one of the oddest things about the 2010s and 2020s in, say, 2050 when we look back. That clearly just isn't fair.
Yeah, and to me, it's one of these issues where Democrats are holding onto. In fact, I was talking to Jason Crow, he was in last week, and I just said, well, how do you feel about it? He goes, well, it rarely happens.
He goes, well, how do you, just tell me what you think. But if you have a daughter or a sister or a cousin, you play soccer against them, you play field hockey against them, it is dangerous. It's dangerous because men are, on the average, stronger than women. No, it's really, really not fair. And I think that anybody who competes under those conditions, I'd like to talk to them and say, how do you feel like it was a significant victory? And that might mean either there will be trans sports or maybe a person like that to choose to compete in some other way, because they've had that unusual life history.
But no, it's transparently unfair. Professor Lasley, is cancel culture over? It's never going to be what it was in 20 and 21. I think that this defenestration, this throwing people out of windows from the hard left that happened, I think we tend to forget a lot of that happened on Zoom and on Slack. It wasn't people sitting in real rooms. And it was people who were lonely and bored and feeling tribal because of the lockdown. There was a big, you know, talk about how you changed the anti-Semitism on campuses. There was a massive conversation. There was a backlash against that. I participated in it, and I think that it worked. And so, yes, there are people who are hyper woke, who are hyper upset.
A lot of them now have concentrated on the Gaza conflict, for example, because here out in the rest of the world, it's harder for them to have the sway that they used to. If you want to feel smarter and more incisive and be more impressive at the hanging out in the bar tonight or tomorrow, pick up Pronoun Trouble. Get right through it. The story of us in seven little words is entertaining and interesting, as in everything you do. Professor, thanks so much for coming in. Thank you, Brian.
