About Being “Woke”

I am extremely frightened that my adoptive country is in danger of losing its democracy. (I came to the USA to marry an American 44 years ago.) I realize this is a liberal-left view (e.g. the New York Times, here), but that is my politics. I hope to be proven wrong. 

Soon after Trump came into office, I joined Indivisible, one of the grassroots liberal-left movements opposing him. At first, I co-led a group to plan innovative tactics. But the imaginable tactics seemed to be the same as all the ones I had seen or taken part in over my adult life on the Left. I left the group to consider the question that was consuming me. 

That question is how we on the left side of politics failed so badly. What were we doing that we need to unlearn? 

To get there I need to understand more about the right. One issue I am trying to grasp is the rightwing hatred of what they call the “woke mind virus.”  They believe this has infected all the ruling institutions of America, from the universities to the civil service to the corporations.

I confess I don’t read a lot of conservatives, which handicaps me.  I followed the conservative British-American blogger, Andrew Sullivan, for years partly because, after voting for George W. Bush, he had come round to calling him a war criminal for his pursuit of torture in the Iraq War. But I found Sullivan’s later obsessive focus on wokeness so tiresome I dropped him. 

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a remarkable Somali-Dutch-American woman who left Islam in objection to oppressive aspects within it, listed three major threats to Western civilization: the aggressive power of Russia and China, Islamism and “woke ideology.” I had once given an excellent review to her first memoir, Infidel, and I trust her good sense. But “woke ideology” makes no sense to me.

“Woke” is an entirely positive word to me. It means being awake to the hidden ways that racism and other types of oppression operate. I am trained as a sociologist so it’s no surprise to me that these ways are unfamiliar to people, especially in the US which has long taught that the American dream is equally available to all: you just have to get your act together. 

STRONG PUSHBACK 

I do understand that people can fear that sociological understanding can undermine personal responsibility and hope. 

For example, I was once co-facilitating a group of men serving life sentences in a US prison. Ten of the twelve were Black. I asked if they thought racism had any part in explaining why they were there. 

I was sure it did. Among other things I had read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which made the case convincingly, to me. There are many points to make, but here’s just one: Blacks and whites use drugs at similar rates, but Black men have been policed and incarcerated for it at much higher rates than whites. 

But when I tried very tentatively to suggest in that largely Black group that racism might have played a part in their being there, I got some vehement pushback. One man said his siblings were not in prison: he was. It was his fault, and he needed to work out why and make sure he became a different man. He thought my ideas would emasculate him, taking away his power to change his life and get out of prison. 

I fully agreed with him that he could change his own life. Our restorative justice program was all about participants finding empathy for the people they had harmed, taking accountability for doing it, and discovering their capacity to live differently. 

As our group went on, it became clear to many there that it helped their healing to be clearer about what they were healing from. If your society has sent you coded messages since childhood that you are less because of the color of your skin or the money you don’t have in the bank, did you internalize that shame? If so, then it becomes something to recover from, not something to excuse your anger but to explain it. Wokeness helps healing. 

CAN EVERYONE RECOVER?

On the other side of the coin, many white parents have objected that teaching their kids in school about the racism in America’s past is meant to make them feel guilty, as if the slavery and genocide on which America was built form an original stain from which white people can never recover. 

But from my perspective that is bad sociology, bad teaching. We can all recover from whatever inheritances we bear. Knowing what we have inherited, though, whether as whites or people of color, can form a realistic basis for working together now to ensure we all have the best chance to fulfil our dreams and potential. 

There are mostly invisible systemic barriers to success lodged in all our communities. The greatest of these barriers are the systems that prioritize money-making for the few over the welfare of the many and the biosphere. Racism was originally invented to stop whites and Blacks from making common cause against their masters. 

We need to spread wokeness in a way that brings us all together, not in ways that drive us apart in atmospheres of blame and shame.

So I believe the problem is not that we left-liberals have taught wokeness, but that we have done it poorly. In far too many cases newly woke whites have castigated other whites for not being woke. Those deemed insufficiently woke have been shunned, expelled from campuses, punished: the dreaded “cancel culture.” No wonder the Right fought back.

I was recently sent an excellent critique of cancel culture from the left not the right, that I strongly recommend. 

How do we say “No—Enough” with one hand to those who have harmed us and others, while at the same time holding out a hand of welcome to work with us and tell us how we can do better? Being woke does not mean joining in the punishment fest our culture has modeled for us in its prison system. One thing it should mean is being woke to the ways that policing and punishment have infused the ways the left itself does its work.

There is a great deal I have no answers for. But I am enjoying a new book on these topics, called Fierce Vulnerability, by my friend Kazu Haga, with whom I spent many memorable days facilitating a prison program.

It is time to invent a new way of doing opposition. Any ideas for effective tactics in our situation in the US that anyone can leave in the comments will be welcome.