I think a lot of this response is somewhat revisionist and doesn’t constitute a reason to consider this piece free of the problems described above, but I particularly want to respond to this part in my capacity of a linguist.

There are many linguists who have a lot of valid and important things to say about race. Unfortunately, McWhorter has lately not been one of them. He has been going around repeating widely debunked claims about race, some of which are related to linguistics and some of which are not. I would never encourage someone to “zip it” (yikes, thanks for putting those words in my mouth) but I would certainly look askance at someone who thought he was making valid points on this score.