Wokeness: a Retrospective

 

 

In recent times my online sphere has had a fair few people make the claim that, in some sense, the culture has moved on from Woke. The dates I see often given for the heights of this supposed social phenomenon are 2014-2020, and the thought is there's been a general tapering off since the pandemic of whatever woke was. I actually also feel like I can sense a vibe-shift, but then maybe that's just the very fact that my online circles keep saying as much reflecting back on to me. In any case, people who believe this has occurred have also been offering retrospectives on what they think we have learned from this era and how it will be remembered. I thought I would use my blog to contribute to the genre. So this will be that: some words on what I think wokeness is/was, the extent to which anything has changed, and what lessons will be learned from this.

There is actually a small-industry of philosophers trying to define "wokeness" (sometimes "wokeism") and I don't think I can do it justice here. Instead, I will just draw from this literature to illustrate points as they come up. Basically the idea is that a new set of social norms arose primarily in spaces associated with the professional-managerial-class. These had some distinctive policy implications, which we shall discuss below, but were primarily connected to the implementation of various institutional reforms and changes in etiquette. The broad thrust of these changes was meant to be in an egalitarian direction, understand in the following way. Along certain key axes (primarily: race, gender, and sexuality) people became hyper-conscious of various long-standing inequities and the more or less subtle ways they can manifest. Woke changes in policy, institutional arrangement, and social mores were all meant to redress these inequities. Being woke was a matter of being broadly in favour of these kind of things.

I think 2014 is taken to be the onset of this because of the Ferguson unrest and its symbolic significance to what became the Black Lives Matter movement. And 2020 is taken to be its peak, after which it tapers off, because the defeat of Trump and the dominance of the pandemic led to just a different sort of issue becoming most salient. So then the thought is that this span of years, the wokeness era, was peculiarly dominated by a form of politics, and the reactions against those politics, wherein people were especially concerned with the characteristic woke issues and modes of addressing them. We may not have agreed on whether to do woke stuff, but by our revealed preferences we apparently did agree that this was what was worth talking about.

I will say that it is a broadly American cultural phenomenon but, as I have discussed in previous work, America's cultural hegemony means that its cultural fixations have a tendency to spread beyond its borders even where it is not an entirely welcome fit. I can recall seeing a black British anti-racist activist saying passionately "we were brought to this country in chains!" at a rally, which was not only simply odd but also as a framing renders invisible the genuine issues with treatment of black migrants to the UK. And likewise 2020 demands to "defund the police" were a bit of an odd fit in UK politics after a decade of austerity. Also, "le wokism" just sounds hilarious to English speakers; sorry French right-wingers but it's impossible to take yinz seriously. So, if what I say below sounds America-centric, that's because I think that the social phenomenon really was distinctively American, even though it in fact had international reach and impact.

(Of course life is always more complicated than one-way emanation from the hegemon outwards. The British media and political elite have, for instance, been genuine innovators in the sphere of transphobic hate, and probably are net-exporters of that particular moral panic back to the USA. Still, it's my blog and I simplify as I will.)

Now before commenting on what I think was learned from the political experiences of those years, do I think we have actually moved on from it? Kinda yes, kinda no. Here's my high-level take on this:

Kinda Yes: the pandemic and the immediate responses to it really did push the characteristic woke concerns out of the headline a bit. While polarisation meant broadly the same political coalitions found themselves squaring off on opposing sides of the debates about lockdown as had found themselves squaring off about campus free speech, it really isn't the sort of debate animated by the same sort of fixations as the wokeness wars that had preceded it. Likewise when debates about inflation and the extent to which there was a "vibecession" emerged in the wake of lockdown, these were simply not done exactly on the terms of discourse from a few years back. In short, the pandemic was a kind of circuit-break on the wokeness era, where a new set of issues simply forced itself to the top of the cultural and political agenda. 

More recently, I thought Trump's return would simply reignite 2019 style political fights on wokeness, but it has thus far actually not done so. As far as I can tell this is because the more aggressively authoritarian style of politics he has embodied this time around has i) rendered ridiculous some of the anti-woke talking points, and in any case ii) forced the chattering classes into a broad alliance against him. On (i) we shall say more below. On (ii) - and again borrowing from my previous work - the debates around wokeness were to a very significant extent a fight among the professional middle classes. They were tied up with debates about how exactly to structure a fairly elite segment of the workforce and on the American left tied into a war of position between the Sanders and Clinton wing of the eternal 2016 primary. The thing is, as Trump has started to act more overtly like the Mercantalist strongman that he so clearly wants to be it's fairly united these groups against him, as they all just hate him so much. 

For a while it looked like maybe he would break off a wing of the tech world but his absurd trade policy seems to have killed that. Now even many hard-right members of intelligentsia are worried Trump discredits them, regret voting for him, and write angsty-dialogues about how maybe some of this nonsense is their fault. My prediction, in short, is that Trump 2 will turbocharge education polarisation in America, meaning that among the chattering classes there is a greater sense of unity against the common enemy that is him and his movement. People are just less inclined to fight over the woke stuff when they think there is a real credible threat of a dictator on their doorstep.

(This is also a place where internal dynamics in the periphery of the American empire reinforces the core issue. We have also witnessed (in fact worse) economic troubles post-pandemic, the rise of authoritarian right parties on populist lines, and are often just physically closer to the expansionist Russian war. I think these will lead to similar sorts of united-front-of-the-chattering-classes phenomenon, and ever more so with time.)

So I think new issues and ways of talking about those issues becoming salient as a result of the pandemic on the one hand, and the disputants of the previous woke discourse being united by shared hatred of incompetent autocracy on the other.

Kinda No: there's one really boring sense in which we haven't got over wokeness, and that's that the right wing press and politicians haven't found a new term with which to sneer at leftists. In my lifetime, across the UK and America, I've seen "loony left", "PC police" (or saying of things that they are "PC gone mad!" or "health and safety culture"), "champagne socialist", and "latte/limousine liberal" all come and go. From this I conclude that there's a natural churn to these things and I am sure saying that everything and everyone you don't like is "woke" will get boring eventually too. That hasn't happened yet, so we're going to be hearing about "woke" this that or the other for a while yet. But this too will pass -- and soon, inshallah.

The more interesting sense is that it's not like we agreed on what to do about those long standing inequities. Debates about trans people and their place in public life are, if anything, becoming more heated - and since what is at stake here is obviously very much in line with the characteristic concerns of the woke years. Also, debates about the relationship between people of different races in America have, to put the point mildly, been a recurring issue in their history. (And Britain's! Though arguably we're doing a bit better on this front.) While exactly how bad or urgent things seem to people is changeable - witness the chart below - there's no particular reason to think that we have reached the promised land and can expect things not to flare up again in future.

 

Source

All the more so since a lot of how the fashy populists keep their base in line is basically the by-this-point-established right-wing strategy of maintaining their base at a permanently furious fever pitch level of intensity about whatever nonsense they can, and the characteristic woke issues are recurring features of their rhetoric. Not to mention, of course, that there are plenty of true-believer bigot-fanatics within the populist-right ranks for whom this is why they got into politics. (The current anti-woke backlash is recognisably a development of the right's own cultural-demographic obsessions from the same era. With enough historical difference I even imagine people will look at a lot of these things as basically all instances of the same type - early online era political enthusiasm, or something like that.) So if our politics for the near future is to be organised around the dispute of the populist-right versus everyone else, I expect this to be at least somewhat tied into the characteristic concerns and tropes of the woke era.

So there you go, a mixed bag. In any case, onto lessons learned! I'll divide these into topics which I think were especially salient (at least to me!) during the woke era.

1) Police brutality and racism. As I have previously mentioned, America has an incredibly high level of ambient violence compared to most wealthy nations. Despite some attempts to obfuscate this I think it can fairly be said that one troubling aspect of this is how violent and militaristic their police are. They sometimes engage in what can only be described as petty-tyranny, and it is no-coincidence that this is deployed against poorer black communities. One of the great goods of the woke era was to draw sustained critical attention to this, and promote various attempts at changing things. It is too early to say exactly how this will pan out, but so far as I believe in democracy (and that democracy in America will survive the present moment) I do believe this will turn out to the good.

The slogans "Black lives matter!", "Defund the police!", "Abolish the police!" and "All cops are bastards!" became emblematic of this part of the woke era. The middle two are recognisably political policies (the first is, one would piously hope, a truism - and the last I think shall be remembered as quaint, somewhat akin to "Don't trust anyone over 30" from the 60s period of social unrest). I do not think anywhere is going to respond to the above issues by abolishing the police (and in my experience people who took this seriously as a proposal often basically immediately floundered on pretty basic questions about what we would do if they won, and resorted to bluster where called on this) so I doubt it will even be remembered.

Whereas "defund the police!" strikes me as exactly the sort of thing that will lead to a lot of scholarly fussing about how to establish causal relations between budgetary measures and crime outcomes, how one might disaggregate policing functions into various other agencies, and whether or not defunding the police even happened in the first place.

The answer, of course, will turn out to be "it depends". It'll depend on how you measure things, what you choose to measure, how stringent you are about certain evidential thresholds, and all the normal things that complex and ambiguous questions always depend on. Reasonable people will disagree and what one thinks of this aspect of the woke era will largely just reflect one's antecedent political commitments and however the partisan coalitions shake out in the future. So I suspect that in the long run good will come of the woke era on this issue, even if the record of the characteristic positive proposals of the woke times will be somewhat hazy and mixed.

2) Free speech especially (but not only) on campus. Second only to the issue of police brutality was a more diffuse cultural sense that The Woke were very censorious. They were small-minded, associated with near puritanical toxic moralism in fan culture and parts of academia they controlled, and prone to absurdly over-the-top social shaming in response to people who violated their oft. changing morals. On the pro-woke side was a sense that they were simply standing up for mutual respect and common decency, and if it seemed difficult to people that was because our culture was so steeped in normalised inegalitarian norms. It is only natural, after all, that to the once-privileged the sudden imposition of equality feels like oppression.

This was, I think, for many the actual prime emotional driver of their involvement with wokeness. And it is a point where I suspect we shall come to a rather odd historical judgement. For what it's worth my sense is that on the merits it is difficult to say anything too definitive about so diffuse and nebulous a question as "are or were the woke intolerant?" I think the truth is something like: a somewhat puritanical moralism is latent in any large political grouping, and that fact long-predates the particular form it took here. The time of wokeness was unusual in a bad way though in the degree to which it empowered a form of this (indeed anti-woke types sometimes felt this empowered censoriousness to be the defining feature of wokeness), and this is because there is something unusual about the extent to which woke political concerns tended to be all consuming or promote a kind of mono-focus. For some reason part of this political era was a tendency among true believers to evaluate everything almost-entirely along the lines of whether or not it was advancing the cause. Maybe this inherent to all moral thinking? Morality always seems to trump other things even if it shouldn't. In that case, what was unusual was the degree to which this succeeded in this, and persuaded many people to suppress aesthetic, civil, etc, norms in favour of woke pursuits. It likewise interacted with American consumerist culture to generate many people who would insist their pop-culture consumption, reflective of their identity as it is, be entirely on message at all times. If nothing else this led to some tiresome conversationalists and dull art, and that was annoying.

(Of course there was some great art associated with the moment too. I picked a header image from Moonlight for good reason, it's a truly wonderful film that exemplifies the artistic concerns of the woke era realised extremely well. I also think we might add the recent success of the film American Fiction and the book Yellowface - both of which I very much enjoyed - to be more evidence that there has been a vibeshift, as both are comedic-dramas which convey cynicism about the artistic world's response to the woke era. I see them as artistic expressions of some of the ideas from Olúfémi O. Táíwò's popular essay on elite capture.)

But at the same time, it wasn't actually wrong that some previous norms needed changing. Like, legit, 80s comedy really does seem like it's full of straight up rape. It was into the early-2000s a staple of a certain kinda joke (discussed in here, for instance) that if a name "sounds black" it is inherently stupid and makes one deserving of unemployment. I remember this; people would tell me that my hair was inherently unprofessional when I was growing up. It's just absurd! And likewise when I was a kid a way of saying something was bad was just to say it was "gay"; such casual homophobia was just totally normal. Bulldozing through this nonsense will turn out to have been a good, and it is easy to forget what we owe now we live in the world the woke era created and can just laugh at its excesses. It is a good thing, and I hope shall amount to a lasting change, that the sort of easy and casual expressions of outright bigotry or laughing off sexual assault shall be made that little bit harder going forward.

So was it too censorious, often priggish, and prone to going way too hard? Absolutely. (One day I will write up what I think of cultural appropriation discourse, but I think I waited too long and now it is irrelevant!) Did it lead to cringe and unbearably preachy art? Yes.  But did it hasten along better social norms, shocking us out of genuine expressions of hatefulness? Also yes.

But, here's the thing: I don't think any of that will much matter when it comes to the historical judgement of this element of wokeness. Much like what Americans now remember about early-20th century communism in their country was its persecution by McCarthy, what I think shall stand out about woke censoriousness is that the populist reaction to it was far far far more censorious. Trump 2 is proving to be more anti-intellectual and straightforwardly anti-science than even the harshest parodies of the woke crowd. Appointing RFK Jnr. to promote crank-health nonsense, deporting students for OpEds the MAGA crowd doesn't like, defunding sciences including wildly popular medical research, strong-arming media companies that host comedians he doesn't like. All that done with the might of the American state behind it! And a diffuse low-level of terrorist campaigns against drag queens reading story books as well as political assassinations from his supporters (this is a feature not just of MAGA but of the far right internationally, as we have found here in the UK). There is simply no way that anyone looking back on this era with an interest in censoriousness or repression of political speech will think the woke crowd stand out; or, rather, they will stand out - as the victims of political repression.

(There is even a far more sympathetic and even more vindicatory narrative available. The woke crowd claimed there were a bunch of authoritarian bigot-fanatics waiting in the wings unless we suppress them through various fairly soft means, largely social pressure and ostracism at harshest. The reactionary centre spent ages saying they were ridiculous, and in alliance with the right basically won in the cultural sphere meaning we did not suppress those forces. Then American political life was in fact taken over by authoritarian bigots who proceeded to defund USAID because aid goes to too many dark skinned people and give the president power to review college syllabi. How were the woke not just right? Maybe their flaw was that their methods of suppression were not sufficiently harsh! Whether or not you think this is fair, for what its worth I think it oversimplifies too, I think it's obvious that this telling of events will clearly be tempting to plenty of people. Certainly in the near future, and who knows maybe for future generations too.)

Now I say this despite in fact agreeing with some of the criticisms thereof! But it just feels obvious to me that, given what we're now seeing, historical hindsight is going to be pretty clear on this. I think this is a lot of what the right intelligentsia worried about being discredited are themselves picking up on. It is why some complaints about wokeness have been rendered ridiculous by Trump 2. Whether it's fair or not, the world has conspired to vindicate the woke on this and render their flaws insignificant in comparison.

3) Corporate HR apparatus for promoting diversity in various forms. One of the oft-commented-on features of the woke era (actually especially by disgruntled leftists) was that it was associated with a kind of "diversity consultant", the most famous of which was probably Robin DiAngelo cos she had a best-selling book. This was the idea that we could train people into new etiquette norms that would better embody and express respect for each other, while avoiding the bigotries that wokeness was most concerned to avoid.

Now, for good reason, this idea has been much mocked. Some of the theories underlying it seem to have been goofy at best, actively pernicious at worst. Some versions of EDI trainings are hard to distinguish from parody. There's really not much evidence any of this stuff works to do various of the things you might want it to do. A cynic might suspect a lot of this was just a means of companies generating evidence of having attempted to follow best practices that can be used to ward off any attempt at an employee suing and claiming they have a hostile workplace environment. The cynic would be correct.

I'm in print with yet another reason to be cynical about these things! So I shall shed no tears for them. All I can say is that they probably reflected (without contributing, if anything promoting backlash) a genuine need and positive change. As women enter various parts of the workforce they were not previously so well-represented in, and likewise various racial or ethnic minorities, people have to adjust and adapt workplace norms to accommodate one another. This will probably always be awkward and the silly corporate legalism and goofy Theory enthusiasm of the wokeness era didn't add much good. But I think that, similarly to the case of police brutality, in the long run our working our way through this time together will be seen as a good thing and lead us to a better place. So while I doubt this added much good and suspect it did some harm, I actually guess it will be looked back upon kindly or with indulgence, in something like the way we might look back now at early Quaker fussiness about plain speech.

4) Education policy stuff. One of those things where the Wokeness Era interacted with a longrunning theme of US politics which was the education reform movement. I do not know much about the Education Reform movement. (I think the whole "reading wars" thing should go here too, for instance, but I don't know enough about it and have just linked the first google result there.) But broadly there has been a push to change various aspects of American schooling and the metrics by which schools and students are assessed. Matt Yglesias had a little series on it if you want to read one perspective thereon. In any case, the pertinence of all this was that Ibram Kendi became a rather influential figure after the release of his book How To Be An AntiRacist.

Kendi actually has something I actually like about him, or at least find rather charming. Which was that he basically has a naive consequentialist take on racism. If something promotes worse outcomes for one racial group rather than another then he'll say it's racist. Now, there is a subtlety. Quoting from the linked piece, he defines racism/racist policy as such: "a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities... A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups." Afaict he does tend to take 'disadvantageous inequality' as an inequity (from the same source: "[r]acial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing") so that is not the subtlety. Rather,  the subtlety comes from the fact that this definition clearly does require some degree of stability to the inequity, it has to be normalised in some way. But setting that complication aside, this is someone who is just taking racism to be anything bringing about consequential inequalities between racial groups.

This, I admit, tickles me. In addition to just finding it funny how much psychodrama this definition caused ("You can't just say everything is racist!", people on the internet furiously declare, vastly under-estimating me) I also generally like non-moralised views of racism, and hope that promoting this would make people better at taking critical feedback. Racism is, to me, an analytic category whose main use is in describing certain social systems that have been influential and prevalent from the late feudal period into the present; that, at least, is what I took from dear old Charles, and it has guided my work. On some theoretical level I am genuinely just not that concerned about morally evaluating individuals and how mean they are; I will leave that to the Lord. So I enjoyed that Kendi causing a fuss with his naive flat-egalitarian account of racism, one that just makes questions of intent, character, or generally the moral judgement of individual agency, all irrelevant.

But this is all an aside (and also, I should be clear, most people - including people who took up Kendi's definition of "racism" - did and do not share my taste for anti-moralism about racism) because as far as I can tell where this ended up having most bite was that he ended up gaining some traction in the education theory world. In particular, the rather disastrous move was made (by him!) of equating things that provided evidence of racial inequality with the racism itself. And that included standardised tests. This, to be clear, does not follow from the definition of racism - it does not say that coming to learn of inequalities is racist, it says inequalities are! What is needed to get to the anti-testing view is an absurdly post-materialistic view of political life, wherein what really matters isn't what kids are actually learning and what sort of conditions they live in, but rather what sort of things The Discourse says about them. By providing a basis for people to make invidious claims about black people, and I guess also by just complete pessimism about anything other than mere Discourse being done with such information, the tests themselves come to be seen as racist. Some rather obvious instances of the genetic fallacy are then appended to all this (did you know Galton was a racist jerk!?) but it's clear the emotional basis is concern about how black people are talked about in contemporary Discourse and no other conception of what we might do with information about inequality.

Kendi's post-materialism was a convenient rhetorical ally for various groups sick of standardised testing for various reasons. These reasons range from good (our measures become metrics and distort the incentives teachers face, they "teach the test") to thoroughly pernicious (it's far easier for rich parents to game personal essays than it is to game standardised tests when it comes to college admissions) - but in any case all found something they could use here. And there was already an education reform movement in America, even if it was nowhere near the force it once was. So it was that one of the big names of the woke era became entangled with something that had a bit of pre-existing clout and a large coalition ready to rally around it.

As is already apparent I think this was basically one big mistake. I don't imagine history will look too kindly on it, and I anticipate the defeat of those forces who pushed for it. The extent to which people remember it as a major part of the Wokeness Era will basically be a discrediting feature.

So there you go, that is my assessment. Wokeness was defined by certain characteristic concerns with demographic inequities, and a focus on them in political life and the Discourse thereabout. In some ways the pandemic and the death and terror and economic disruption it caused, along with the rise of the populist right, have affected a genuine shift away from these characteristic concerns. But given the stickiness of our political language, the persistence of some genuine underlying problems, and the rhetorical tactics (and in some cases genuine concerns) of the rising populist right I doubt we have truly seen the last of all these issues. For the four major issues I associate with wokeness, I think it led to some actual problems with police brutality being addressed, and probably some genuinely nicer etiquette norms being implemented. But it was also genuinely censorious (though this fact may end up masked by how much worse the populist-right are on this front) and ended up associated with wasteful HR policies and positively bad educational policies. Contrary to what some of its obsessive haters will insist it was not a disaster, but while I appreciate the difficulties of living in a transitional era and believe many of us involved in this were trying our best, ultimately I doubt we have achieved much of permanent value.

All in all, I give wokeness 4/10.