Wokeness in 2023
I’ve been a vocal critic of “wokeness” for long enough now to have watched it and its “anti-woke” opposition evolve and get worse over a period of years. As they battle it out, the far ends of both sides have become more extreme, ideological, illiberal, and intolerant in their views—an occurrence about as hard to predict as what will happen to water if you put it in a freezer.
My earliest memories of pushing back on what I would now call wokeness go back to 2017. The specifics are unimportant. But I realized very quickly that speaking up, even just to ask critical questions, was probably going to cost me some friends. And it has, which saddens me. But that’s on them. I forgave them a long time ago.
I’ve always done my best to be charitable, diplomatic, and careful with my words when criticizing or discussing wokeness. But I’ve no doubt failed at times. I’ve surely put forward some weak arguments and made some bad calls. But that’s life, and it’s exactly how a well-lived one should go. You can only look back and know you’ve made a bad move if you learn from it and grow. The percentage of times my opinion about something has shifted while writing about it is high, while the percentage of times I’ve published writing and not wanted to add or change or otherwise clarify something later is low. The point being: I’ve made some mistakes. But I only know that I’ve made them because I sat at my desk and examined my thoughts and put in the work to turn them into past mistakes.
The gist of many of the early criticisms of wokeness was this: While there are legitimate social injustices that deserve our attention, many woke arguments are weak, petty, performative, oversimplified, and rooted in resentment. And such things will only serve to breed more resentment and invite backlash. And all of this will be profoundly unhelpful if the goal is to actually achieve greater social justice, rather than just greater social status.
That’s basically the argument I made early on, and the response I got back most often was that wokeness is just a movement for a more kind, inclusive, caring, and just world.
There’s some truth in that. At least for some people. Just as there’s some truth in it for some adherents of, say, Christianity. But that doesn’t mean that that’s all there is to the religion, or that that’s always how its devotees put it into practice. And more than that, it’s not always the guiding light at all. Sometimes people just find themselves in a tribe with an ideology that they take on as their own, without much critical thinking about it or any deep understanding of its origins or potentially harmful consequences. Add things like Twitter and echo chambers and whatnot to the mix, and watch the fault lines form.
What has long bothered me most about the “wokeness is just kindness” argument is that it implies—and some adherents of wokeness explicitly claim—that any criticism of it is just an argument against a more kind, inclusive, caring, and just world. And while there are, unfortunately, some “anti-woke” conservatives and media figures right now making this position sound almost reasonable, it is simply not true of the vast majority of the criticisms of wokeness that I’ve encountered. It’s also not true of any of the criticisms that I’ve made. For the most part, it’s a straw man argument, one that frames woke ideology as an unimpeachable good, and then distorts its dissenters as monsters against good.
All of which brings me back to the early criticisms of wokeness that I mentioned above, the ones that I heard not, for the most part, from conservatives, but from disenchanted liberals. People pushing back on views that they saw as counterproductive and harmful. People pushing back on friends and family members and ridiculous tweets and probably a few Twitter bots, not because they like conflict and losing friends, or because they hate kindness, but because they saw the writing on the wall. They saw the woefully weak arguments being made, and they saw what they would lead to. Backlash. Equal and opposite resentment. Equal and opposite illiberalism and intolerance. Not a more just world. Just a rush of newly constructed barriers to it.
The future, as Joe Strummer famously said, is unwritten. But the past and the present are here for us all to read right now. And nearly everything I read related to wokeness (both for and against) tells me that the early critics of it were right. The evidence is all over the place. But here’s just one example: There is literally a law called the Stop WOKE Act. Can you guess what prompted it and what it’s vehemently against? Can you guess what the equal and opposite reaction will be? I can. I hope I’m wrong. But yeah, I can see it plain as day. Unless, of course, something spurs the more tribal and illiberal among us to more closely examine their thoughts, and to put in the work to turn them into past mistakes.