How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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Over the next few weeks, Joanna will be talking about How Woke Won in the press and on various podcasts and news channels. It is easy to cast this obsession with language as simply performative or harking back to an earlier era of political correctness. Decades later, ‘woke’ itself came to be appropriated by white hipsters, at the very same time that exposing and condemning the appropriation of black culture came to be a woke action.

By the mid-20th century, ‘woke’ was still used almost exclusively by members of the African American population but two meanings ran in parallel: be vigilant for potential threats from powerful whites and also be ‘aware’ or ‘well informed’ about political injustices in general. If passengers of different ethnic groups find themselves cast adrift at sea, CRT sets them against each other when they should be collaborating to survive until rescued. The obsessive focus on language leaves advocates of woke politics open to the accusation that their project is superficial and performative rather than concerned with bringing about material changes to the quality of people’s lives. Praise was heaped upon public figures who made a display of being anti-racist, feminist, queer and gender-nonconforming. Yet to be woke is also to believe that demonstrating masculine behaviour makes someone a man (whatever their sex) while to be a woman is to look and act feminine.These important values were problematised and rejected first; then proponents of woke ideology saw an opportunity and readily filled the moral vacuum.

This was a protest song describing an incident from 1931 in which nine black teenagers from Scottsboro, Arkansas, were accused of raping two white women. Schools and universities, museums and art galleries, even the media and legal system are no longer driven by an imperative to impart knowledge, to pursue truth, to preserve the past or to cultivate beauty. it suggests that a since this movement enjoys hardly any real support amongst normal people it can be challenged successfully through normal democratic means - the supporters of the woke viewpoint dislike the light and transparency.

Woke may not be this elite’s self-descriptor of choice, but woke ideas underpin establishment decision-making and corporate mission statements. To be woke is to see gender as multiple and fluid and to employ a complex vocabulary that begins with transgender and cisgender and branches out into nonbinary, agender, pangender, genderqueer, demigirl and so on. Vox magazine notes that a 1923 book by the Jamaican-born philosopher, black nationalist and political activist Marcus Garvey included the rallying cry: ‘Wake up Ethiopia!

Knowing to say people of colour rather than coloured people; transgender rather than transsexual; Latinx rather than Hispanic; and sex assigned at birth rather than simply ‘male’ or ‘female’ serves to differentiate people who are woke from those who are not. Any criticism of particular goals is deflected by outrage that anyone could possibly disagree with the general principles. Both meanings were used in black dialect and were brought to the attention of the wider public with a 1962 New York Times article by the African American novelist William Melvin Kelley.Woke’ refers to the side in the culture war that denies it is waging a culture war, yet which repeatedly fires the opening salvos. However, they insist that the problem that needs to be addressed is not so much the individual sort of racism mouthed by bigots.

Yet despite this, the goals associated with being woke not only still exist but have moved from the fringes of political life to mainstream thinking. I think it is no accident that it is a college of technology (MIT) which is regularly placed above the universities in the rankings in the USA. As we have seen, to be woke requires far more than simply being aware of racism or being against racism. It is not woke to insist that people should be judged by their character rather than the colour of their skin. It’s the elastic definition of woke that has allowed it to shift from aspirational, to insulting and (almost) back again, while its key assumptions quietly gain ground within cultural institutions.It is not enough for people to be aware of racial injustice: ‘silence is violence’ comes the retort. At a time of great social cohesion in the Great Britain and Australia, woke promotes difference and division, and denounces any who speak out in opposition. Survey after survey suggests that most people do not identify as woke, yet woke thinking now dominates advertising, publishing, the media, civil service and our education system. It allows us to describe the outlook the currently dominates our social, cultural and political lives.