CNN‘s Chris Cillizza (11/4/21) (11/4/21) said of James Carville’s anti-woke tirade, “After Tuesday, Democrats should bring Carville in and listen to every word he says.”
“Woke” is the label the aggrieved conservative suburbanite puts on the indignity of having to call their Starbucks barista “they” and finding Ibram X. Kendi on their child’s school reading list. But as the Democrats prepare for the midterm election cycle, anti-wokeness has become a key theme about the party’s future. Woke activists have been chief culprits in Terry McAuliffe’s loss in the Virginia governor’s race, correspondents tell us, and the electoral ground loss generally by the Democrats (The Hill, 11/7/21).
The meaning of this ubiquitous term often shifts with context. Originating in Black vernacular English, according to Merriam-Webster, to “stay woke” means to question “the dominant paradigm,” and to carry awareness of racial and other forms of oppression. The phrase became a Black Lives Matter call to action in the Ferguson uprising of 2014, but as that revolutionary spirit ebbed, “wokeness” has become a stand-in for what the right once decried as “political correctness” (Extra!, 5–6/91).
It’s a buzzword that can indict liberals as the speech police, or denounce anything from diversity initiatives (Newsweek, 10/15/21), criticisms of aggressive policing in Black communities (Fox News, 8/7/21) and LGBTQ complaints about Dave Chappelle’s Netflix comedy special (New York Daily News, 10/28/21).
“Karl Marx called his system ‘scientific socialism,’” Paul Rubin wrote in the Wall Street Journal (10/5/21). “Modern leftists advocate a similar ideology and call themselves ‘woke’ to indicate that they understand the world better than the rest of us.”
In the wake of Black Lives Matter uprisings and the rise in awareness of white nationalist organizing, corporate media have taken up the term, often in a pejorative or sarcastic context. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has featured the word in dozens of headlines, in pieces defending opting out of Covid-19 vaccines (10/29/21), transphobia (10/14/21), anti–teachers union positions (7/7/21), free-market capitalism (10/5/21) and voter suppression (4/28/21). The Journal has even used it to attack the Chinese Communist Party (3/7/21; FAIR.org, 3/17/21).
This parade of anti-woke pieces is part of an ongoing crisis of legitimacy at the Journal. As the Columbia Journalism Review (Fall/21) noted, nearly 300 news-side employers in July 2020 signed a letter to the paper’s publisher “complaining about a ‘lack of fact-checking and transparency’ on the editorial page,” which “was undercutting the paper’s credibility and making it difficult to recruit and retain journalists of color.” The “anti-woke” backlash serves as a prime illustration: The editors are eager to attach a current buzzword about race and gender anxiety to any issue they can, no matter how much a stretch, to defend corporate America and the Republican Party from any form of politics anchored in addressing economic inequality.
Unifying disdain
David Brooks (New York Times, 5/13/21) on “woke” language: “Performing the discourse by canceling and shaming becomes a way of establishing your status and power as an enlightened person.”
At the New York Times, the liberal and conservative columnists are united in their disdain for wokeness, seen as both an attack on Western openness and an albatross for the Democratic Party. Maureen Dowd (11/6/21) said “there is some truth” that wokeness sunk Democratic candidates; she cited corporate campaign consultant James Carville denouncing “this defund the police lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools,” even though neither of these things originated within the Democratic Party.
David Brooks (5/13/21) lamented how the language of wokeness was entering the corporate landscape, undermining “meritocracy” because wokeness “instigates savage word wars among the highly advantaged.” Thomas Edsall (5/26/21) warned that questioning the gender binary, as well as calls to “defund the police,” polled poorly.
Bret Stephens (2/22/21) denounced wokeness as a liberal, censorious crusade against offensive comedy, although this same columnist tried to get a professor fired for making a joke at his expense on Twitter (LA Times, 8/28/19). Stephens (11/9/21) returned to the topic again with high-octane sanctimony, saying that wokeness asserts that “racism is a defining feature, not a flaw, of nearly every aspect of American life,” and is a form of “indoctrination and extirpation, based on a relentless form of race consciousness that defies the modern American creed of” color-blindness.
Zaid Jilani (New York Times, 10/26/21) wrote that John McWhorter sees “the woke racial worldview as harmful…because it deprives Black people of their humanity by infantilizing them.”
The problem is not just the opinion page. John McWhorter, a Times contributor, has written a critical book against “wokeness,” and the Times (10/26/21) didn’t just give him a favorable review: It hired Zaid Jilani—a former contributor to progressive outlets like the Intercept and FAIR.org, now writing for right-wing outlets like Quillette and Tablet, and devoted full-time to Twitter assaults against wokeness—to give the book a public relations boost. Jilani began with the stated assumption that the left’s “worldview” is that “nonwhites are little more than virtuous victims cast adrift on a plank in an ocean of white supremacy,” and that this view has quickly taken over everything from universities to corporations. Jilani’s only criticism of McWhorter’s book was that it didn’t offer a “thorough” enough takedown of racial justice writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones for Jilani’s taste.
Both Jilani and McWhorter are on the board of advisors of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which, despite its name, includes other activists who are riding the anti-woke wave, including Islamophobe Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Middle East Eye, 12/15/17) and Bari Weiss, who dramatically resigned from the New York Times (7/14/20) on the grounds that some of her colleagues disagreed with her conservative views. The review was rigged to prop up the right’s hysteria about “wokeness.”
‘War over “wokeness”‘
At CNN (11/7/21), wokeness is why Democrats are losing electoral ground, and the news channel focused on (8/5/21) moderate Democratic New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’ anti-woke attack on his left-wing party colleagues. Chris Cillizza, covering Jeffries’ statements, said that while “Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez remain hugely prominent voices within” the Democratic Party, there are “limitations of the activist left,” a statement that is true about any political faction.
Cillizza added that “the Democratic leadership is fed up with having to hear from the Twitter left about how everything they are doing isn’t good enough.” In summation, the crime of “wokeness” is being a part of the party’s left flank, and being too vocal about it.
The Hill (11/6/21) went further, saying that the party has gone “to war over ‘wokeness,’” which the paper described as the left’s accusation that the party’s centrists “are cravenly abandoning the party’s core supporters and its core purpose.” And former AP reporter Dan Perry (Daily News, 11/3/21) said the “American center” has a “visceral distaste for the cultural war stoked by the woke project,” throwing around phrases like “defund the police” and “trigger warnings,” but never linking these catch-phrases with the platform of the Democratic Party.
Labeling anti-racism as ‘woke’
NPR (10/1/19) chose a word to describe progressive views on race that is almost always used to mock progressive views on race.
This year, especially in the wake of the 2021 elections, there seems to be an explosion of coverage where wokeness is flimsily pasted alongside “the Democrats,” with no particular obligation to show that ideas like “white privilege” or respecting trans people’s pronouns are part of the mainstream party’s platform (or that such notions are disastrously unpopular). But this problem has been brewing for years.
With a headline trumpeting that white liberals have become “woke,” NPR (10/1/19) two years ago reported that since 2012, “polls show an increasing number of white liberals began adopting more progressive positions on a range of cultural issues.” The piece reported that progressive whites are “more likely than in decades past to support more liberal immigration policies, embrace racial diversity and uphold affirmative action.”
This inclination isn’t described as negative in the piece, but because NPR is the closest thing liberals have to counterbalance the conservative dominance of US talk radio, it’s notable that the organization chose “woke,” a term that now acts as a catch-all pejorative for excessive cultural acceptance, to reference not particularly radical ideas, like that there’s bias against Black people in the criminal justice system.
Conservative talking points
The media equation between “woke” and anything vaguely in the realm of social justice allows the right to paint once fairly moderate liberal ideas as some kind of fringe—an East Coast and California counterculture that is woefully out of step with meat-eating, flag-waving straight white America. Worse, this trend of corporate media declaring “wokeness” as the contemporary existential crisis of American liberalism falsely converts tired political debates into something novel.
The Brooks column invoking meritocracy captures a fairly old conservative talking point about affirmative action (National Review, 6/3/03), and the Stephens column asserting that racial consciousness is clinging to past injustices and won’t reckon with a post-racial present echoes the George W. Bush administration (1/15/03). The idea that openness to immigrants is a multicultural affront to American culture can be heard in Pat Buchanan’s famous ad playing off fears of “press 1 for English” (CBS, 10/10/00).
Kyle Mann (Wall Street Journal, 11/9/21) defends Dave Chapelle’s mockery of trans people because it reminds us that “those with an ironclad grip on our cultural centers are not imperial gods.”
The conservatives rallying behind Chappelle’s rant against the trans community are using the banner of edgy comedy as a form of retribution for perceived liberal dominance in media and entertainment; the Wall Street Journal (12/1/20, 7/27/21, 11/9/21) has devoted at least three opinion pieces to the subject of wokeness and humor in the last year, while The Hill (3/4/21) frets that this ambiguously defined “woke cancel culture” has “robbed us of…our sense of humor.” But that’s an argument that comes from City Journal editor Brian C. Anderson’s 16-year-old book South Park Conservatives, a product of the George W. Bush era of conservatism (New York Times, 6/26/05).
“It’s a straight-up moral panic,” Steven Thrasher, a journalism professor at Northwestern University who has served as a writer for the Guardian and Village Voice, told FAIR—the whole thing is “beat for beat the same thing as political correctness in the 1990s.” The difference, as Thrasher sees it, is that the words “woke” and the contemporary “cancel,” unlike “affirmative action” or “diversity,” come from Black vernacular, so when the corporate press mocks or belittles these terms, there is “a glee of having co-opted it, that’s like an extra twist of the knife.”
Damning “woke” to keep us sleepwalking toward disaster
This article is so bad that it actually kind of reinforces many of the well- reasoned critiques of “wokeness.” Nowhere is this so clearly underscored than in introducing Ayaan Hirsi Ali — a Somali ex-muslim who escaped actual patriarchy, including forced marriage and FGM, and literally requires full- time security anywhere she goes due to ongoing threats on her life by murderous religious fanatics — as an “Islamophobe.”
The author should be ashamed.
Woke cultists have no shame.
Silly thoughtless comment. The article was predicated on the corporate mainstream (and right leaning) media conflating “woke” with the Democrats’ platform but never actually tying specifics in to prove their point. Instead invoking the term “woke” accomplishes for the center and fringe right (The DNC writ large and at its core power structure is center right – as is the corporate mainstream media – and that you’ll try to dispute this shows the amount of programming/propaganda you’ve been dosed with, per the article above) the co-optation of a Black vernacular word as an extra “twist of the knife” in riling up and frightening conservative “White America.”
Regarding Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s case, you again miss the forest for the trees. Yes, that’s an awful situation, but the implication in the mainstream and rightwing media here is that MOST Muslims force their daughters into marriages and that ALL Muslims embrace fanatical interpretations of the Koran. To put it another way, her situation is the exception and not the rule and it doesn’t serve as any kind of effective worldwide barometer on the state of the Islamic religion or its adherents.
It wasn’t long ago that this country had what amount to being forced marriages in and among various majority white religious groups. Were those cases co-opted by the mainstream and right to smear ALL whites with the same types of tropes that you see in the case of Hirsi Ali’s case?
Most parents don’t want their daughters sharing locker rooms and sports with male bodies. People who call these parents ‘bigots’ alienate regular people from the Democratic Party.
Working class women have no choice but to send their kids to public schools. When students are staging walk-outs because a male who committed sexual assault was transferred to a new school, where he did it to a second student, their parents are going to vote with the politician who seems to hear their concerns and wants to protect their daughters. In Virginia, that was Youngkin, not McAuliffe.
Progressives are so Woke they are no longer feminists. The International Olympic Committee today announced that male to female transgender athletes can compete in women’s Olympic sports with no requirements even for hormone treatments. No progressive group, no national women’s group like NOW or NWLC or Emily’s LIst is saying a single word in protest of this blatant unfairness toward female athletes.
Abigail Shrier recently interviewed Sen Tom Cotton and wrote about it with the title “Can the Republicans become the party of women?”
If the GOP is the party that seems to want fairness for the daughters of soccer moms, they will have a good shot with a lot of voters.
‘Woke’ is exemplified by furiously arguing about whether abortion is a women’s issue or an issue that affects ‘pregnant people’, while state after state restricts abortion rights for real women.
Nobody cares Becky. Keep crying about it. I’ll enjoy it.
Actually scratch that. Republicans and paranoid people do care
But I repeat myself.
Fair has crossed the line between media criticism and taking sides on a very real and very important political issue: the question of whether women and men really exist, or whether anyone who gets it into their head to claim that they are a member of the opposite sex should be allowed to do so.
One very unfortunate, but undisputable consequence of this is that most of the articles defending the existence of women (and therefore by extension of men) currently appear in conservative media.
A lot of us therefore find ourselves following media we wouldn’t previously have touched with a barge-pole. Fair should be writing about that, and not selling women down the river.
“the question of whether women and men really exist, or whether anyone who gets it into their head to claim that they are a member of the opposite sex should be allowed to do so.”
I will never understand the obsession that some have with other people’s bodies and the need to enforce their will on those people without caring for their consent. People like to talk about freedom alot but when push comes to sove is “freedom for me but not for thee”
“Working class women have no choice but to send their kids to public schools.”
If you think electing Republicans like Youngkin are going to change that then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.
Re: the transgender issue – It’s always the exception rather than the norm that’s trotted out as a means to stifle all future progress in this very real and changing culture and demographic. Yes, the conservative brain fears change and is more motivated to act by fear than the liberal brain – scientific studies show this, so it stands to reason that conservative politicians and media will use the scariest possible examples to prevent an honest discussion on the matter which at the same time is what they’re pretending to do. IOW, this should be looked at on a case-by-case basis. Will there be (very rare) abuses of a system that allow for trans students to share the locker room of their choice? Definitely. And you can count on every single one (being a tiny tiny fraction of what happens in reality) being trotted out and used to scare the conservative and center id.
Re: abortion, if you think electing Republicans because they’re allegedly less “woke” than Democrats is going to protect women’s rights, I’ve got another bridge to sell you.
The Woke believing a few girls raped is an acceptable price for inclusion of males in girls locker rooms and toilets will definitely send lots of parents to vote for the anti-Woke.
Students in Loudoun County Virginia and Charlotte-Mecklenburg North Carolina have held walk-outs to protest on-campus rapes of girls, and administrators that covered them up lest parents object to trans inclusion. Real feminists, real progressives, would be with the young people demanding safety for girls in schools.
I had no idea I was an “aggrieved conservative suburbanite”, since I live on the Upper Left Side and am well to the left of Bernie Sanders.
“Woke” — the opprobrium now attached to the terms is richly deserved — is not “left”. Or “progressive”. It’s a form of cultural intolerance which aptly describes the state of American institutions full of white administrators terrified for their jobs.
I don’t care if it’s pro-Palestinian academics who offend Bari Weiss or are the survivors of the Cultural Revolution who are getting censured or fired because 20-year olds who have never missed a meal are mortally offended by the sight of Laurence Olivier in blackface. You either believe in defending free speech and free thought, or you don’t.
This website has crossed the line from analysis to advocacy. And the level of discourse is an embarrassment.
Some thoughts (in no particular order)
I wish you had started this article with the quote from Steven Thrasher and a little history on what happened to the anti-political correctness argument. Maybe the left can use some of the same tactics it used back then to discredit the anti-woke backlash.
How come those who profess to be color blind only live in white neighborhoods, only work with white co-workers, only go to predominately white establishments? It’s no wonder they don’t see color. Everywhere they go, all they see is white.
If being woke means being anti-racist, anti-prejudice and anti-inequality, then why doesn’t being anti-woke mean being pro-racist, pro-prejudice and pro-inequality?
Are Carville, Dowd & Brooks STILL alive?
Creative Class™ woke-washing to distract from our BLATANT Oilgarchs installing zombie kleptocrats; CRUSHING popular, essential and election-winning policies. Drooling neo-Liberals co-opt yet another astute Black concept (predating Marcus or Huddie) spin it un-ironic 180° from mindful self-preservation, into BS ofay bumper sticker slogan virtue-signalling. It’s what WOKE was all about, remaining cognizant & not distracted by imbeciles paid millions to cherry pick, straw-man, obfuscate or LIE away our self interests?
https://economichardship.org/2021/11/a-widow-prepares-to-start-living-in-her-van/
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/11/18/pers-n18.html
https://www.dailyposter.com/pharma-dems-helped-the-drug-industry-save-half-a-trillion-dollars/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/11/18/imagine-if-stopping-climate-change-was-more-important-than-creating-more-climate-change-billionaires/
Pramila Jayapal e-mailed millions of us to back Biden’s Bail Out BS Boondoggles, right as Rittenhouse got off… so to speak. If THIS unremitting, silly-ass “Kick The Fucking BALL, Charlie Brown!” scam doesn’t scare the living shit out of you, it sure feels like “our” party’s just stepped up, feeding us to their smug 0.01% constituents, intentionally blatantly, just to see if we react? Ignore ANY distraction.
While I really dislike the anti-woke rhetoric coming from the political establishment, I feel like this recent study from Jacobin should be considered as an honest explanation of how woke/activist language hurts coalition building, which they say is exactly what the working class needs right now. Whomever has the vision to organize these workers will have the power to guide the future of American politics. Fingers crossed it isn’t an authoritarian fascist.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/11/common-sense-solidarity-working-class-voting-report
https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/08095656/CWCPReport_CommonsenseSolidarity.pdf
Unfortunately, nothing in the program of woke suggests any intention or desire to win over anyone, including working class voters. On the contrary, the language is meant to demean anyone who raises objections or rejects the jargon. You must enter the temple naked and with an empty mind. And you will attend retraining, if I say you need it.
Unclear whether the movement even cares about politics. As long as the faithful can dominate institutions, and the venture remains a source of gainful employment, who cares who’s running the country?
except nowere in the survey is the meaning of woke specified. Whats makes someone a woke progressive? what policies are “woke”?
This is a very one-sided article. I’m a proud liberal, and I’ve seen the climate-change movement get hijacked by the far left, steering it into the demolition-derby of race issues. In my own local group, I was criticized by the group’s President for suggesting that we try to find common ground with conservatives, such as the Evangelical Environmental Network. When I criticized my group’s support for the riots at Black Lives Matter protests, they took my name off their mailing list. This is all “wokeness,” and it’s a plague on the left. I totally agree with James Carville and author John McWhorter (see this excellent interview from Brian Williams’ “The 11th Hour” show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xprz8JWlqcs).
the reason why you see more racial profiling in enviromental issues is because minorities are disproportionaly inpacted by climate change so policy must center those populations. What type of polices does the Evangelical Environmental Network support and what do you think they will add to the discource? You need something more than market based solutions that will continiue the exploitation of the global south so no big oil no defence contractors as policy advisors
Poverty is a more important predictor of climate-caused harm than race. Rich blacks are far less affected than poor whites. Besides, no matter which group you want to consider, they will all be far better off if we can stop climate change. Taking up the “racial justice” banner only muddies our climate message, plus it turns off conservatives, making climate change into an even more liberal cause than it was before.
The Evangelical Environmental Network supports the switch to clean energy. I’d say that’s some common ground worth exploring.
I think it is time for you while folks to stop regarding black people as helpless infants who need you to babysit us:
I want you to like me but If you hate me for the color of my skin, that’s your problem. I don’t need your love. What I do need is a decent education for my children, including college. I need good health care, a safe community, a decent house, and dignified employment for my family. I know that you are screaming about my skin color to keep your politicians’ minds off of providing the society that my family needs. That would cost money they would have to take away from programs that benefit the billionaires who fund their campaigns.
Wow. An extreme ideology that took over corporate media, entertainment, and big tech is finally getting a little push back, and that is classified as the media being anti-woke?
Where have you been for the past five years? “Wokeness” has reigned and still does. Have you watched TV commercials lately? If you only went by the composition of TV commercials, then America is mostly black, Asian, and Hispanic with a minority white population. You would think about half the country is LGBT.
YouTube algorithms prevent comments with the words “men are not women”. They appear briefly and are gone within minutes.
Public schools and college campuses have become activist indoctrination centers. The American flag was taken down because it made a teacher “uncomfortable”. Students were told they could pledge to the rainbow flag.
College professors, lifetime liberal Democrats, who dare not to fall in line, lose their jobs. People who believe in progressivism, feminism, LGBT rights, etc. are ostracized because they do not march in lockstep.
As it became a cultural norm, the ideology became more militant and, according to black Columbia professor John McWhorter, it even took on elements of religious zealotry.
These are just minute examples of “woke” ideology’s wholesale takeover of the culture.
So now there are progressives on the left who say, “Wait a second. How is ‘woke’ fascism better than rightwing fascism? How is ‘woke’ racism better than rightwing racism? They are still fascism and racism.” For the first time in *years* the corporate media gives even partial time to that perspective, so the media is now anti-woke?
Wow. Someone drank their Kool-Aid and everyone else’s too.
“..an extreme ideology that took over corporate media, entertainment, and big tech..”
It did?
Huh, didn’t realise the identity politics crowd had gone big on CMEBT – enough that they took over? Well, there ya go, wonders never cease.
‘Woke’ is a simple ‘one word wrap’, summing up all that America is collectively sick and tired of – stemming from the new-left cultural Stasi and their over played hand.
Thank You for supplying that term – through a new use of an older concept – and then allowing it to be, once more, co-opted. Language is an amazing organic, and sometimes ironic, thing that way.
“Wokeness” truly is a problem for us Democrats. My climate action group once used to focus on climate action. Now they’ve brought racial justice into the mix. Many other enviromental groups have done likewise. So now the woke enviro-groups include 350.org, Sunrise, the Sierra Club, and undoubtedly more. 350.org has gone so far as to condone the rioting at Black Lives Matter protests, even posting on their website (https://350.org/dismantle-white-supremacy/) a link to this article condoning rioting, despite their claim to be “non-violent”: https://soletstalkabout.com/2020/05/28/how-to-respond-to-riots-never-solve-anything/. They also have an article titled, “There can be no livable planet without queer liberation.” Nothing muddles our climate message than hanging upon it every social ill known to mankind. And if you don’t believe that “Defund the Police” played a major role in us Dems not gaining the expected number of Senate seats in 2020, the you’re not paying attention. Those who criticize “wokeness” are absolutely correct.
Any parent who cares about their child’s education should be concerned if Kendi is on their school’s reading list. He is a racist who advocates violence. If he is being allowed to spew his hate and intolerance at your kids school you have a serious problem in that school that goes well beyond just Kendi’s hateful and threat filled lies.