John McWhorter revisits backlash over Losing the Race and lost Fats Waller musical

John McWhorter has made a specialty of saying the thing many people would rather leave unsaid. That instinct helped turn his 2000 book, Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America, into a controversy when readers took its argument about Black social problems as a claim that Black people were responsible for their own setbacks.

At the time, McWhorter was teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. He later said the reaction made him seem like someone saying Black people should “stew in their own juice” and stop complaining, a line that captures both the backlash and his willingness to keep pushing into disputed territory.

That same habit of provocation now shows up in a different register: cultural recovery. McWhorter has been working to reconstruct Early to Bed, the 1943 Broadway musical with music by Fats Waller and a book and lyrics by George Marion Jr. The show opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City on June 17, 1943, after a pre-Broadway opening in Boston, and ran until May 13, 1944. It is set in Martinique, but much of its score and orchestrations were lost, leaving the work largely absent from the history of American musical theater.

The lost material matters because Early to Bed marked a milestone in Broadway history. Fats Waller was the first Black composer to write music for a Broadway book musical with a mostly white cast, and the only one to do so with commercial success. Yet the musical has been overshadowed for decades, with historians more often describing the circumstances around its creation than the work itself.

McWhorter, who describes himself as a self-taught pianist and a student of musical theater history, has approached the project with the same intellectual risk-taking that defined Losing the Race. In both cases, he moves toward material that can trigger resistance: race in one instance, race and canon formation in the other. His reconstruction effort was showcased at the Triad Theatre in New York City on January 9, 2026, where a small invited audience gathered to hear the project take shape.

The through line in McWhorter’s career is not simply controversy for its own sake. It is the use of controversy as a tool, whether he is challenging how America talks about Black life or forcing attention back onto a nearly forgotten Broadway score. In both arenas, he treats the argument itself as part of the work.