John H. McWhorter "Black Identity of the Future"

John H. McWhorter, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute earned his PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1993 and became Associate Professor of Linguistics at UC Berkeley after teaching at Cornell University. His academic specialty is language change and language contact. McWhorter is the author of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, on how the world's languages arise, change, and mix, and Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care. He has also written a book on dialects and Black English, The Word on the Street. The most recent of his two books on Creoles was The Missing Spanish Creoles; Defining Creole will appear in 2005. Beyond his work in linguistics, McWhorter is the author of Losing the Race and an anthology of race writings, Authentically Black. He has written on race and cultural issues for The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The National Review, The Los Angeles Times, The American Enterprise, City Journal, and The New York Times.