McWhorter on controversy, Fats Waller musical

New York Times columnist, best-selling author, linguist, and Columbia University Professor John McWhorter doesn't shy away from controversy. In writing about The Golden Girls,you wrote, quote, "This show was a paragon of the genre and starred three spectacular performers." Three. There were four stars in the Golden Girls. [CYNTHIA FEE, "THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND"] Thank you for being a friend

Who was the unspectacular performer? 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. So you really aren't afraid to offend. I'm going to go there. That's right.

In his columns and books, McWhorter speaks his mind on pop culture, pronouns, profanity, and perhaps most notably, race. There is a great deal of diversity in the Black community, and I can tell you it is not the default in the Black community to think of ourselves as pathetic. "Yes, we can't" has never been the slogan for Black America, and it's not now.

In 2000, when he was a professor at UC Berkeley, McWhorter published Losing the Race-- Self-sabotage in Black America,causing a stir. People thought that Losing the Racewas the kind of book that said that 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. What were you saying in the book, if not that? 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 going to do now. 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 going to do to fix it. I want to make sure we underline that because that seems like a pretty fair distillation of what you were saying. Grievance versus what? How did you phrase it? Grievance becomes the focus rather than constructive intent.

McWhorter's own constructive intent in writing the book was personal. 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 and just assuming that I think that. You didn't like that people looked at you and saw a Black man and assumed, or a-- Assumed. --professor at Berkeley, for that matter, and assumed that you would agree with their politics. Exactly. It was awkward because then I have 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? And is it fair to say that book, Losing the Race,in 2000, got you labeled by many as a conservative, as right wing. Yes, very much. How would you describe yourself. As always, cranky liberal. Yeah, I've never voted Republican. I am not aware of any significant overlap between card-carrying conservatives' concerns and mine. And I am somebody who is a liberal Democrat who noticed that what was considered the middle ground on race had shifted way left.

John Hamilton McWhorter was raised in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. His parents worked at Temple University. His mother taught social work. His father was a student administrator. What kind of a kid were you? 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. I was a nerdy little kid. I loved lists. I loved the printed page. I read strangely early. But 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, yeah, eight, I could recite all of the presidents wives. 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. [LAUGHTER]

With an undergraduate degree in French, a master's degree in American studies, and a PhD in linguistics, McWhorter can seem like the grown-up version of a certain cartoon character. Were you a fan of Linus?

I was Linus.

You were? I was thinking of all the Peanuts characters. I associate myself with him, not Charlie Brown, a little Schroeder. I'm going to try something here. [PLAYING PIANO, SINGING]

McWhorter, a divorced father to two daughters, is also a self-taught pianist and student of musical theater history, which explains his latest quest, reconstructing the long-forgotten 1940s hit Broadway musical Early to Bed, with music composed by jazz legend Fats Waller. This is the title song, which really had been lost to the ages until early in the 2010s. And it's basically that a sports coach comes out and tells his team not to dally with women, because if you do that before the big meet, then it interferes with your capabilities the next day. So that's what this is, a kind of a winking song. This comes up at the Olympics every four years. I'm sure it does. (GRUFFLY) So, team, (SINGING) early to bed, cozy and warm, whatever occurs. [PIANO MELODY] Early to bed, think of your form, but don't think of hers. Ready, Dahli? Yeah.

This project has become something of a family affair. Here's older daughter, Dahlia, singing another song from the musical. (SINGING) With a very goodly clientele Junior jerks from the boiler works who thought her singin' swell She had a voice so sweet and low I guess her dress was even lower still Selling vocals to those yokels Was her first important thrill You have a column you got to write. You do your books. You have a class, you teach. Mm-hmm. But you found time to help restore-- Yeah.

--a 1943 musical by Fats Waller. Because I'm strange, and nobody else was going to do it. (SINGING) The way to get ahead is early to bed

If forays like this make the 60-year-old author slash professor slash provocateur slash impresario hard to put in a box, well, John McWhorter is just fine with that. I feel good about how people perceive me. It used to be that 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.