NECESSARY THROAT-CLEARING
In this post I am going to broadly generalize about social movements. I’ll be talking about liberal discourse in sweeping terms. But, this article is for those who, to a degree, buy into the broad generalizations I will give. So, I think it’s a fair and parsimonious tactic. Well, here it goes…
BATTLE LINES DRAWN
Within liberal discourse, there are two camps: the woke and anti-woke. I am in the latter camp- though not without some reservations. Why? Here are the arguments I find most compelling:
Wokeism is often used to harm innocent people by giving vindictive individuals a safe way to make tenuous accusation of racism.
Wokeism, at times, seems hyper-focused on cosmetic changes, without providing real solutions to America’s problems: both racial and non-racial.
Wokeism provides energy to self-defeating organizational norms, silences frank discussion of political effectiveness and gives energy to policy prescriptions that are both unpopular and that harm people of color.
OK, I’ve laid out my views on this matter. But, I’m not going to spend any more time arguing against wokeism or calling out its proponents.
This article is for people like me, who dislike wokeism and wish its influence was cut down. Who am I talking about?
To name a few prominent folks on my side of this debate: Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss, Jonathan Haidt, Conor Friedersdorf, Matt Yglesias, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Yascha Mounk, Jesse Singal and Freddie Deboer.
I think all of these prominent writers/anti-wokeists are doing it wrong.
They are ignoring one of the key drivers of wokeness and their time would be better spent addressing these drivers than listing, ad nauseam, why they don’t like wokeism.
What are they ignoring? The fact that large aspects of American racism are both highly salient and seem impossible to solve politically.
ROOTS OF THE AWOKENING
I have a number of friends who are much more on the woke spectrum of liberal politics than I am. Here is what I see as a common story.
When taught about racism as children, these friends were told about the evils of racial discrimination in the pre-civil rights era and the brave and non-violent struggle that defeated them.
Their education on this matter did not go much further than that. Yes, black people were discriminated against, but now they are not. So, they viewed racism as largely solved.
But, later in life, many of them began voraciously reading stories about other forms of racism. They read about how black people in America perceived micro-aggessions and many of them realizing that they themselves had been sources for these very means of discomfort.
Moreover, many of them learned about the continued harms of the historical sins of racism. They digested stories about the Tuskegee experiments, the red-lining of black neighborhoods, the psychological damage of slavery, the destruction of black Wall Street.
They learned how little wealth black Americans possess, how history had rendered many of their families without the privileges that these well-educated white people had taken for granted their entire life, how the police continued to use violence disproportionately against African Americans.
Yes, to those of us who had learned all about these things much earlier, this terrible fact of American society seems mundane.
But, to many this was a true awakening (pun intended). In those moments many of them felt guilty and were filled with an energy to do something about all of this. They had seen the brave civil rights warriors of the 60’s valorized and wanted, in some way, to imitate their courage, to do their part to end the ill-effects of racism that still lingered.
There is righteous anger, guilt and a craving for selfless heroism all bound up together here. But the energy wrought by these feelings has no productive outlet. Because American society has not made room for real redress of the racism of historical wrongs.
REPARATIONS FOR ME, NOT FOR THEE
I know what real redress of a historical wrong looks like. My grandfather fled Germany in the late 1930’s. His citizenship and rights were taken away, he was discriminated against and made to face hardship, because he was a Jew. His entire family, save a distant cousin, faced a terrible fate. They all died in the Holocaust- my grandfather, once a member of a vast family, had to face the world alone.
If the modern state of Germany had simply repealed the Nazi era laws against Jews and declared that the issue of anti-semitism was solved, I can tell you, I would find that chutzpah galling.
But, they didn’t. Germany apologized for its role in the Holocaust. They sent large sums to the State of Israel. They sent my grandfather money. To this day, I can get automatic German citizenship. Many argue that these were small and pitiful gestures- but they were real gestures made nonetheless.
What I sense from the newly woke is that they crave a way to create such a redress for those harmed by the American government. They see the sins of slavery, harmful medical experiments, lynchings, economic discrimination and they badly want these wrongs righted.
But, America has no room for true redress of its sins. Reparations have never been made to descendants of slaves. Those red-lined have never been made whole for their loss of wealth. The descendants of the owners of black businesses in Toledo have never seen a dime.
There seems to be political forces that want this status quo to remain.
Knowing that true redress of these harms is impossible, the woke have turned to, in my view, more irrational and cosmetic forms of addressing racism.
Instead of reparations, we have diversity seminars led by Robin D’Angelo. There are no payments to black Wall Street descendants, but we have the valorization of the 1619 project. Red-lined African Americans aren’t given compensation for lost wealth, but we get a movement to defund the police.
It’s tragic, but it’s not beyond understanding. And yet, the people most opposed to wokeism seem to ignore this.
THE PATH FORWARD
I have never read a newsletter by Andrew Sullivan where he proposed reparations for African-Americans. I have never read a column by Bari Weiss where she advocated for compensation to the descendants of lynching victims. I have never read a scathing article by Freddie Deboer about how we should provide money to descendants of black Americans who were red-lined out of mortgages.
But, if those policies were on the table, if they seemed a real, feasible political possibility- I believe that would attract much of the woke energy that, at the moment, seems badly displaced.
Yes, I agree with all of these woke critics- much of the activism spawned by the woke are irrational and self-defeating. But, dismissing those participating in this movement as authoritarian idiots is self-defeating for the anti-woke.
Wokeism is a viral and attractive product. It wouldn’t be so pervasive if it wasn’t. In a mad scramble to explain the broad appeal of a social movement that many find contemptible, anti-wokeists trot out vague causes that, coincidentally, could not be ameliorated.
They blame the coddling of Zoomers by helicopter parents. They blame societal malaise and restlessness. They blame Instagram. They sometimes equate wokeism to a religious revival or moral panic.
How about this for an explanation? American society remains unequal because terrible wrongs were done to large segments of society. These wrongs have never been redressed. Well-meaning people are mad that these wrongs, which are now available to research easily with the internet, have never been redressed. And our political society seems to view ANY direct redress of these problems as outlandish and impossible.
So, those well-meaning people are angry and lashing out, their righteous anger subverted into debates on who can make tacos and what new acronym to use for people of color.
To stop the terrible excesses of this movement we simply need to move towards a direct redress of these wrongs.
We should make the political space so that reparations for slavery, suing for damages for black wall street’s burning etc., seem possible to legislate. Until that happens- you will have a bunch of pissed off, hyper-educated and frustrated people. And if that condition persists, we will always have the problem that we call “wokeism”.