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We clap when our infants don't spill their food. We can afford to let go of clapping when exotic folks don't, when in our times, celebrating diversity is a shibboleth of moral legitimacy among thinking First World people, and considerably, if not comprehensibly, beyond.

— John McWhorter

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More quotes by John McWhorter

If your opinions never evolve, you’re either not paying attention or not genuinely interested.

[T]here comes a point when a usage is so common that we must consider it not slovenliness but change.

There is a certain mercy in the impression that he won’t perceive how those who elevated him saw him as a performing monkey. Still, it’s long past time for Anglophone academia to stop thinking that it’s immoral to evaluate black scholars on the basis of whether they are—get ready!—intelligent.

Compared with some other examples of the genre, Arday’s mendacity and incompetence are especially stupefying. But he is nonetheless a symptom of academia’s dehumanization of black scholars and willingness to accept intellectual mediocrity in its self-seeking pursuit of virtue.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: John McWhorter (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.