[5] He has authored a number of books on race relations and African-American culture, acting as political commentator especially in his New York Times newsletter.

[8][9] He attended Friends Select School in Philadelphia and, after tenth grade, was accepted to Simon's Rock College, where he earned an AA degree.

[13] Since 2008, McWhorter has taught linguistics, American studies, and classes in the core curriculum program at Columbia University.

McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New York Sun, The New Yorker, The Root, The Daily Beast, Books & Culture, and CNN.

[20] McWhorter has published a number of books on linguistics and on race relations, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English, Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why You Should, Like, Care, and Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.

Regarding the various positions arising from the universal grammar debate, he describes himself as partial to the theoretical frameworks of Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff.

[22] As examples, he cites English, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Swahili, Indonesian, and modern colloquial varieties of Arabic.

The Austronesian family of languages makes abundant use of prefixes and suffixes (which form new words by adding extensions either before or after root-words, such as [per-]form or child[-hood]), but the languages from the center of Flores Island, which belong to that family, are curiously devoid of prefixes or suffixes and are not tonal either (tones may make up for the loss or absence of affixes): Kéo, Lio, Ngadha, Rongga, Ende.

[29][30][31] Some of McWhorter's fellow linguists, such as Mauro Giuffré of the University of Palermo, suggest that his notions of simplicity and complexity are impressionistic and grounded on comparisons with European languages, and they point to exceptions to his proposed correlations.

[35] In a 2001 article, McWhorter's discourse was that the attitudes and general behavior of black people, rather than white racism, were what held African Americans back in the United States.

[36] In April 2015, McWhorter appeared on NPR and said that the use of the word "thug" was becoming code for "the N-word" or "black people ruining things" when used by whites in reference to criminal activity.

Rather, unless the human engineers behind a technological product intend for it to discriminate against people of a particular ethnicity, any unintentional bias should be seen as a software bug that needs to be fixed ("an obstacle to achievement") rather than an issue of racism.

[45][46] McWhorter has criticized the term "microaggression",[47] as well as what he regards as the overly casual conflation of racial bias with white supremacy.

[49] McWhorter criticized Robin DiAngelo's 2018 book White Fragility following its resurgence in sales during the George Floyd protests beginning in May 2020, arguing that it "openly infantilized Black people" and "simply dehumanized us", and "does not see fit to address why all of this agonizing soul-searching [for residual racism by white people] is necessary to forging change in society.

"[51] McWhorter expands upon his previous views and argues that "third wave anti-racism" is a religion he terms "Electism" with white privilege as original sin.