I’m so glad you mentioned McWhorter. As a trained linguist myself, I thought his denial of “systemic racism” was not only bad when I heard it, but worse than even ravenous nuttos like Byron Donalds or even Robinson. It is professionally and profound ignorant for a professor linguistics at Colombia to express a complete absence of understanding of what systemic and structural mean as these terms are foundational to this field of study, as they came from it. Structuralism was created by a linguist in 1906-08 and published in a the post-humous work by Saussure’s students from his notes in 1913. The ideas of systemic thought and structuralism went on to influence every department of humanities and graduate studies in the six decades afterwards, changing methods of analysis. To come out an say systemic racism doesn’t exist showed such a profound lack of his own field of study he is a professor in, I would have demanded his resignation from Colombia as a disgrace to the field and someone who dishonors it. You don’t have to agree with the systemic part of racism or the structural part of it (which I do by the way) but at least have the professional courtesy of acknowledging its profound significance on humanities it had in the 20th century. I felt offended as only a dedicated structuralist can, but I suspect it is akin in your field as saying what Robinson did, that Martin Luther King Jr was not important black American activism and set blacks back instead of forward. (He didn’t say it like that, as he was far more succinct and compactly articulate in his derision of King.)