French and Spanish, reads Russian well, and has some competence in several other languages. Social and political views McWhorter characterized himself as "a cranky liberal Democrat". In support of this description, he states that while he "disagree[s] sustainedly with many of the tenets of the Civil Rights orthodoxy", he also "supports Barack Obama, reviles the War on Drugs, supports gay marriage, never voted for George W. Bush and writes of Black English as coherent speech". McWhorter additionally notes that the conservative Manhattan Institute, for which he worked, "has always been hospitable to Democrats". McWhorter has criticized left-wing and activist educators in particular, such as Paulo Freire and Jonathan Kozol. He believes that affirmative action should be based on class rather than race. Political theorist Mark Satin identifies McWhorter as a radical centrist thinker. McWhorter is an atheist. Views on racism In a 2001 article, McWhorter wrote that black attitudes, rather than white racism, were what held African Americans back in the United States. According to McWhorter, "victimology, separatism, and anti-intellectualism underlie the general black community's response to all race-related issues", and "it's time for well-intentioned whites to stop pardoning as 'understandable' the worst of human nature whenever black people exhibit it". 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. He added that use by President Barack Obama and former Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake (for which she later apologized) could not be interpreted in the same way, given that the black community's use of "thug" may connote admiration for black self-direction and survival. McWhorter clarified his views in an article in The Washington Post. McWhorter has posited that anti-racism has become as harmful in the United States as racism itself. McWhorter has criticized the term "microaggression", as well as what he regards as the overly casual conflation of racial bias with white supremacy. As early as December 2018, McWhorter described anti-racism as a "religious movement". McWhorter has argued that software algorithms, by themselves, cannot be racist since, unlike humans, they lack intention. Rather, unless the human engineers behind a technological product intend for it to discriminate against black people, any unintentional bias should be seen as a software bug that needs to be fixed ("an obstacle to achievement") rather than an issue of