The Woke Wars
Aside from the state of the economy and reproductive choice, it is likely that “woke” will play a significant role in the 2024 elections. Florida’s governor DeSantis is counting on his strenuous opposition to woke culture to carry him past the criminally indicted ex-president in the Republican primary. His state, DeSantis famously declared, “Is where woke goes to die.”
In addition to the notorious campaign against Disney, the governor has taken measures to transform the most progressive and academically challenging campus in the Florida University system (New College) into a virtual clone of Michigan’s ultra-conservative Hillsboro College. He has signed legislation barring schools from teaching material that would cause any student to feel “guilty or ashamed” about ancestral misdeeds. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Recognizing its appeal to prospective conservative voters, Republican leaders in other states have made the DeSantis project their own. Schools, and even a few public libraries, have been ordered to take books on racial and gender justice off their shelves. Here in Wisconsin and elsewhere, funding for D.E.I. (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives have been stripped from state and local budgets. All of this as part of a conservative effort – with near-daily shout-outs from Fox News – to defeat the “woke” agenda.
Of course, more than a few Americans for whom “woke” is anathema have only the fuzziest notion of what they are opposing. A word rooted in the African American vernacular, “woke” signifies little more than an individual or community’s “alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination,” an ongoing reality that any sober, objective person would be hard pressed to deny. As the concept gained traction, it came to encompass other marginalized groups — including abused women and the victims of LGBTQ harassment. Now, however, troops of anti-woke warriors have marched to the front line of America’s longstanding culture war, hurling that scurrilous label (along with such staples as “libtard” and “socialist”) at their enemies on the left.
But here’s the thing: much as this opportunistic and cynical campaign bothers me, I fear that some of woke and D.E.I.’s more passionate advocates have had a hand in fostering some of this reactivity. Indeed, more than a few natural supporters of the cause have backed away not out of disagreement with the principles involved, but rather due to the manner in which they are being presented or, more accurately, force-fed. Two recent articles out of Harper’s Magazine are, in this respect, well worth reading.
In his essay “Doing the Work”(July 2023) Ian Buruma, a leading public intellectual and professor of Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, argues that for some of its most insistent promoters woke has come to resemble a religious dogma more than a respectable socio-political position. Indeed, in keeping with the American Protestant/Evangelical tradition it exhibits a propensity to separate (like the Biblical sheep and goats) those who have been illuminated, and thus redeemed, and those who still dwell in darkness.
Buruma quotes from the African American linguist John McWhorter who has dropped woke as a descriptor in favor of “the elect.” According to McWhorter, the elect are people who “see themselves as having been chosen…as understanding something most do not.” Like dogmatists everywhere – whether religious or secular – there are really only two ways of handling the unreformed: they must either be converted or punished.
For those who have embrace woke as gospel, “white privilege is the equivalent of original sin” – a stain that one acquires at the moment of conception. “Just like Protestants who believe they are born sinners,” Buruma observes, “a white person can only be considered an antiracist so long as he or she keeps confessing culpability.” Framing the anti-racism effort in this way discourages skepticism and honest questioning. “To have reservations about something that is treated as sacrosanct is to be…a heretic, and someone to be cast out.”
Buruma and McWhorter’s analysis struck me as particularly apt in light of recent trends in the movement long known and admired for its open-mindedness. As a life-long Unitarian Universalist, I have watched with growing concern as quasi-creedal statements condemning the denomination’s “white supremacy culture” and Eurocentric principles have served to cow skeptics and engender a culture of orthodoxy. The sad thing, as Buruma points out, is that “the tendency of cultural and social elites to apologize for our good fortune and anxiously affirm our moral credentials” does little to bolster the material fortunes of “the less fortunate.”
Russell Jacoby makes a related point (Harper’s, March 2023) in addressing the hallowed American tradition of free speech. He offers a citation from Frederick Douglass’s 1860 address before the abolitionists of Boston to underscore the value of this right: “Liberty is meaningless where the ability to utter one’s thoughts and opinions ceases to exist. Free speech strikes fear in the hearts of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”
This hasn’t stopped some putative progressives from condemning free speech as a convention that sustains racism. Jacoby cites commentary from Sussex University’s Darcy Leigh, for whom the “liberal politics around the freedom of speech have functioned to control or silence Indigenous, Black, and/or otherwise racially othered speech.” As a “tool of the elite,” speech must be silenced if it “risks harm to marginalized groups.”
The danger inherent in such revisionism is that more veterans in the fight for civil and human rights will simply opt out, preferring to watch the woke wars from the sidelines. Ideological dogmatism and the righteous need to deride the doubtful for their apostasy isn’t a strategy that will work to anyone’s advantage in the long run.
