John H. McWhorter V was born in Philadelphia in 1965, but his interests extend beyond his life time to include topics such as how Latin evolved into French, Italian, Spanish and other Romance languages (the subject of his doctoral thesis), old cartoons (he has a big DVD collection of Mickey Mouse and other cartoons), dinosaurs, human anatomy, classical, jazz and musical theater (he plays piano and sings), old movies and radio shows. He wrote a controversial best-seller entitled “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America” (2000), in which he takes and defends a position similar to that of Bill Cosby. Subsequently (2005), he wrote “Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America.”
He received a B.A. in French from Rutgers in 1985 and a Ph.D. in linguistics from Stanford in 1993. McWhorter is fluent in French, Spanish and German, and he can more or less speak, or at least read, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Esperanto, Swahili, Hebrew and Japanese. When he is not writing about race, he continues to write about language both academically (“Language Interrupted: Signs of Non-Native Acquisition in Standard Language Grammars,” 2007) and popularly (The Power of Babel: The Natural History of Language,” 2001; and “Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care,” 2003). Inevitably, he sometimes writes about both race and language, especially in his columns, available in the “New York Sun” and on the Internet. He has been interviewed about race and language on radio and television. The Teaching Company has produced a linguistics course on CD featuring lectures by McWhorter.
McWhorter is interested in how languages naturally change more than in Noam Chomsky's theory of transformational or universal grammar, which seems to have captured the imaginations of most late twentieth century linguists. McWhorter takes the con side in the debate over Black English, although his position is not simplistic denial; he maintains that Black English is more of a variety of English than a separate language. In an “In Depth” interview for C-SPAN television in 2003, he confessed that he enjoys playing the piano every day “more than almost anything.” He has done cabaret shows in New York, which he enjoys, but he gave up his “hobby” of acting in plays when he realized that “I don't really have an acting bug. I started to realized that I don't really enjoy being on stage that much; I don't really get along with actors very well....” He had a particularly bad experience acting in an Off-Off Broadway production of Tom Stoppard's “Arcadia” in which he had to learn an English accent. “It's no easier for a linguist to master an accent than for anyone else,” he said. Add to that having to spend time in a small theater night after night with actors he did not get along with. “It was an absolute nightmare—worst experience of my adulthood.”
