John McWhorter on being “strange” and reconstructing Fats Waller’s long-forgotten Broadway musical

New York Times columnist, best-selling author, linguist and Columbia University professor John McWhorter doesn’t shy away from controversy and isn’t afraid to offend people. 

Take, for instance, “The Golden Girls.” In his New York Times opinion article on the TV series, McWhorter writes, “This show was a paragon of the genre and starred three spectacular performers.” There were four stars on the 1980s sitcom.

“Honestly, I was never crazy about the Sophia character. I wouldn’t have wanted to hang out with Sophia. Whereas with Rue McClanahan and Betty White, and Bea Arthur, those three to me were amazing,” McWhorter said. 

“I’m gonna go there. That’s right,” he added with a laugh. 

John Hamilton McWhorter was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. His parents worked at Temple University. His mother taught social work while his father worked as a student administrator.

“I grew up in a rarely, truly integrated middle-class neighborhood in Philadelphia called Mount Airy. It was Black and White people living practically alternating in very nice middle-class houses,” McWhorter said.

He recalled being a “nerdy little kid” who “loved lists” and “loved the printed page.” 

“I read strangely early. I was the little professor. Not to the point that I couldn’t go outside and play, but I now know that it’s peculiar that when I was 8, I could recite all of the presidents’ wives,” he said. 

“I would try to share it with people enthusiastically and get dissed, justifiably, and gradually learning no, most people don’t find Latin case declensions interesting. They don’t want me to teach them how to decline the word ‘stella.’ That took me a while.”

With an undergraduate degree in French, a master’s degree in American studies and a Ph.D. in linguistics, McWhorter can seem like the grown-up version of the Peanuts character, Linus. 

“I was Linus,” he said. “I would associate myself with him. Not Charlie Brown. A little Schroeder.”

In his columns and books, McWhorter speaks his mind on pop culture, pronouns, profanity and most notably, race. In 2000, when he was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, McWhorter published “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America,” which caused a stir.

“People thought that ‘Losing the Race’ was the kind of book that said Black people’s problems are Black people’s fault and that therefore Black people need to stew in their own juice, shut up, pull up your pants, stop complaining and just get real,” McWhorter said. 

“I was saying that if you have been treated like animals for hundreds of years and freed rather suddenly by revolutionary legislation, then it can be hard to know where to go next. And there can be a temptation to think more about the victimhood than what you’re gonna do now,” he said. 

McWhorter added, “I thought that we had to look at the difference between civil rights activism in, say, 1962 and then people talking about Black power in 1967 with no real plan. It’s mostly about expressing grievance rather than talking about what you’re gonna do to fix it.”

“Grievance becomes the focus, rather than constructive intent,” McWhorter said. 

McWhorter’s own constructive intent in writing the book was somewhat personal, recalling his discomfort when people assumed he would agree with their politics either because of his being black or a professor at UC Berkeley.  

“I thought I want people to stop coming to my office, leaning in the door and saying to me things like, ‘You know, I think that we should just have different standards until the demographics of Berkeley represent the demographics of California,’ just assuming that I think that,” McWhorter said. 

“It was awkward, because then I had to think, ‘Do I have to tell them, or do I sit here and pretend?’ And be something that I’m not in order to avoid the fracas,” he added. 

McWhorter said many people “very much” labeled him a conservative or a right-wing Republican after the book came out. Instead, he describes himself as a “cranky liberal.” 

“I’ve never voted Republican. I am not aware of any significant overlap between card-carrying conservatives’ concerns and mine. I am somebody who is a liberal Democrat, who noticed that what was considered a middle ground on race had shifted way left,” he said.

McWhorter — a divorced father of two daughters — is also a self-taught pianist and student of musical theater history. This explains his latest quest: reconstructing the long-forgotten 1940s hit Broadway musical “Early to Bed” with music by jazz legend Fats Waller. 

The project has become something of a family affair. His older daughter, Dahlia, sings one of the songs from the musical.

When asked about how he finds time to restore the musical on top of his busy schedule, McWhorter responded, “I am strange and nobody else was gonna do it.”

If forays like this make the 60-year-old author/professor/provocateur/impresario hard to put in a box, well, McWhorter is just fine with that.

“I feel good about how people perceive me. It used to be that, you know, there was always at least behind some rock or tree that guy who’s thinking, ‘You like Dick Cheney,’ or something like that. Now, much less.” 

“People just see me as me, which is better than being seen as anybody else.”

Story produced by Kay Lim. Editor: George Pozderec.