John H. McWhorter

John H. McWhorter is a City Journal contributing editor, linguistics scholar, and cultural commentator. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America (2001); Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority (2003); Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America (2006), which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Nonfiction; The Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of “Pure” Standard English (2001); The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language (2003); Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care (2004); Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English (2009); and What Language Is (and What It Isn’t and What It Could Be) (2011), as well as three books on Creole languages.

McWhorter’s writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, National Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Time, Daily Beast, Politico, The New Yorker, and New York magazine. He has appeared on numerous TV and radio shows, including Meet the Press, John McLaughlin’s One on One, The O’Reilly Factor, The Colbert Report, CNN’s Book Notes in Depth, and NPR’s Fresh Air.

McWhorter holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford University. Previously, he taught at Cornell and was an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. McWhorter is currently an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. The Teaching Company has released four of his audiovisual courses.