Rebroadcast: Race and Class with John McWhorter

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)

Open Source is off this week, so we’re re-broadcasting five shows we developed last year the month after Katrina hit as part of an ongoing series on race and class. Tonight: Rethinking Race and Class with John McWhorter.

From Chris’s original billboard:

Black and white America, how did we get here: in 40 years, from the militant vision of the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to the grotesque apartheid (Maureen Dowd’s phrase) in the Superdome tableau after Katrina. Forty years of agitation, legislation and desegregation not just of Southern schools but job markets, advertising, prime time TV, higher education and major league sports. Yet that candid camera on New Orleans in the floodwaters said: think again about the color-coded Other America—in law and economics, privilege and culture. What really worked over 40 years to breach the line or move it? And what didn’t? John McWhorter’s book “Losing the Race?? made him a black eminence among conservatives, the campus version of Bill Cosby’s line that black America let itself and its children down with a self-sabotaging culture of hip-hop flippancy and welfare.

Chris Lydon, Open Source, September 26, 2005