Dismantling Wokeness
Understanding the Social Justice movement and why it harms us all
‘Dismantling’ Woke Ideology
A theory is a lens through which to explain the world. Some are provable, predictive and based on rigorous scientific and empirical enquiry — like the Theory of Evolution or the Theory of Gravity. Other theories are qualitative attempts to make sense of the world and why it is the way it is — these are Social Science theories which are less specific, unprovable and as the name implies, based on social analysis. It seems there are indeed certain rules or laws of the material world, which science and mathematics strive to uncover. The social world on the other hand is a complex minefield, where the bloody trial-and-error of history and psychology (schools far more replete with disagreement and interpretation than their more mechanical counterparts) are our only guides. This makes grand theories about the social world difficult and closer to philosophy than exact science. In the past decade or so, several of these theories, drawn from disparate strands of academia have coalesced and overflowed into mainstream consciousness — broadly recognisable as ‘Wokeness’.
A general definition of ‘Wokeness’ is being ‘awake’ to issues of social justice. Informed by theories from sociology and anthropology — which themselves derive from Critical Theory, Feminist/Queer Theory, Postmodernism, Social Constructivism, Postcolonialism and Poststructuralism — Wokeness claims (confined predominantly to analysis of the West) that our societies espouse equality and justice in name only. As the argument goes, this requires no more evidence than the disparate outcomes between different groups (loosely delineated by race, gender, sexuality). Historical oppression of women and minority groups and its continuing legacy will not be rectified until we become aware of these differences, move beyond our illusions of colour-blindness and meritocracy and tacitly vow to intervene collectively to reverse them. The framework of beliefs that Social Justice believers subscribe to is rooted in a worldview centred on a heady mix of power dynamics and identity conflict. The predominant philosophical underpinnings are Hegelian, Gramscian, Foucauldian, Marxist — while there is far too much to go into depth with here, to be a Social Justice activist in its current definition is to subscribe to this worldview. Although many may disagree with this definition, the use of common rhetoric suggests a common ideological foundation; ‘equity’, ‘intersectionality’, ‘privilege’, ‘lived experience’, ‘ways of knowing’, ‘white supremacy’, ‘complicity’, ‘systems of oppression’, ‘allyship’, ‘othering’, ‘deconstructing’, ‘dismantling’ — all have their roots in far-left academia. It is difficult both to find situations where these terms are not being used in a Social Justice context or to find a Social Justice position which does not explicitly use parts of, or all of this vernacular.
Briefly, we need to understand these ideas to understand ‘Wokeness’- a loose understanding is it draws on Marx’s ‘conflict theory’ but centring culture, rather than economics, as the axis of material conflict. This leads to the dialectic cultural oppressor vs cultural oppressed narrative. Turning to power, it draws on Foucault’s knowledge-power nexus, his idea that whoever is in control of knowledge production wields and generates power. For Foucault, this means knowledge is, by definition, inextricable from how it is used, exclusionary of ‘other knowledge’ and can never be wholly objective or truthful. He also argued power dynamics were inherent in every social interaction; using as an example the doctor who wields power/knowledge over his patient or the social construction of mental illness. Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Hegemonic Discourse’ is also instructive for Social Justice literature’s prioritisation of structure over individual agency. Gramsci argued that the dominant culture exercised control/power through structural institutions, which reproduced the cultural hegemony, maintaining the ‘superstructure’ of society and keeping the individual chained by structural dynamics they are born into, beyond their control or ability to overcome. Lastly, and perhaps most insidiously, is the co-optation of Foucault’s French contemporaries, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. Both were concerned with language as the primary means of constructing reality- encouraging ‘discourse analysis’ and dovetailing with Foucault’s ‘power-knowledge’, Wokeness sees language as violence, the manifestation of weaponised knowledge used by those with institutional power to oppress others in society and maintain the status quo. This is perhaps why there is such a trend towards policing language, seeing words as ‘harm’, and looking for hidden meanings, ‘dog-whistles’ or power dynamics in everything we say and write.
One of many criticisms thrown at Wokeness is it is at odds with liberal values. This is not a design flaw, but specifically the goal; the ideology seeks to dismantle liberalism with non-liberal revolutionary ideas. As Audre Lorde argues, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.’ Or put more explicitly in an introduction to Critical Race Theory: ‘unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law’[1].
How do these ideas manifest in Wokeness? Firstly, the superstructure they identify in the West is ‘White Supremacy’, which they see as the main organizing principle of Western culture and society. Our societal ‘knowledge’ and structural reality has been constructed largely by white, straight, men who have historically enjoyed the highest role in society, and therefore the knowledge, as inextricable from power, is designed to maintain control of the cultural hegemony and preserve the status quo. These different identity groups are framed by conflict theory as being in an eternal, zero-sum struggle for control of the power-knowledge nexus and cultural discourse. ‘White man’s’ or ‘colonial’ knowledge (which is linked back to the ascent of European imperialism) therefore cannot be objective or true as it excludes alternative experiences and ‘ways of knowing’- it is this which informs the Woke that subjective experience from a minority standpoint represents ‘oppressed’ knowledge and enjoys an externalised (and therefore much deeper) insight into our society; ‘‘The privileged (along a particular axis) live in a “lifeworld” organized by that privilege, so that a subordinated standpoint is required to see its inequities clearly.’[2] Until the dominant cultural narrative (which includes enlightenment and liberal ideas) and status quo structures have been ‘dismantled’, TRUE equality and justice will be eternally out of reach. Nothing can be apolitical, as identity-based power dynamics are inherent in every aspect of society and every interaction because individuals interact primarily as avatars of their identity groups and from the relative ‘institutional power’ this group membership endows. The theory is totalizing and unfalsifiable; individuals from ‘privileged’ groups who dissent are merely intent on preserving the inequitable status quo and individuals from ‘oppressed’ groups who dissent are experiencing ‘internalized whiteness’; a concept eerily similar to Engel’s ‘false consciousness’.
It should be noted, these ideas are remarkably similar, and act interchangeably with the feminist idea of the ‘Patriarchy’, simply by replacing gender with racial identity in the equation. It has recently also been extended to ‘Cisheteronormativity’ (straight people who identify as the gender they were born in) by doing the same with sexual/gender identity. While all these sociological ideas are fascinating for academic discussion, what makes the racial element (via Critical Race Theory) so volatile is that the history of men and women is one of necessary mutual co-dependence and co-existence; the history of race/ethnicity by comparison is a torturous descent into mankind’s most tribal, wicked and dehumanizing capabilities. One does not need to stretch far back in history to see the self-same dynamics play out again and again and again — Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar, even China’s treatment of the Uyghurs today. If ever there is a fundamental truth about mankind, it’s that we sort ourselves far too easily into identity groups defined largely by their opposition to one another; and that the descent can happen very quickly.
A ‘Woke’ Society
We can see emerging signs in America of what this ideology prescribes and where it wants to take society. Because it is such a totalizing ideology — one is either white or non-white; either racist or antiracist; either works to dismantle the system or upholds it (curiously, for a theory that is so sceptical of absolute truth and so relies on the nuanced vagaries of social constructions) — it sees racism and discrimination as present in everything. No part of society is immune to sociological deconstruction and areas where race seems impossible to shoehorn in are accepting the challenge.
Mathematics
In America, the ‘Equitable Math’ toolkit to make teaching for children anti-racist argues ‘the concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false’. Accordingly, ‘White Supremacy culture shows up in maths classrooms when the focus is on getting the right answer’[3]. In the many, extended documents available for teachers to download are similar ideas to reapproaching how to teach maths to children. These include moving away from grading work because it ‘reinforces perfectionism’[4] (a key tenet of White Supremacy according to Social Justice activists) and dispensing with the need for students to ‘show their workings’ because it ‘becomes a crutch for teachers seeking to understand what students are thinking’ and, again, ‘reinforces worship of the written word as well as paternalism[5]’; 2 more tenets of white supremacy that must be dismantled and overcome. These make for interesting philosophical discussion about the epistemology or ontology of mathematics, but most people would rather the next generation of engineers who build our bridges or planes or space rockets not abandon the pursuit of the right answer for ‘other ways of knowing’ or spend their time ‘unpacking the assumptions that are made in the problem’.
In Boston public schools, the selective Advanced Work Classes for bright 4th to 6th Graders who scored high in tests has been suspended for the disproportionately high number of White and Asian children enrolled. A school committee member said she was ‘very, very disturbed’ by the statistics and described them as ‘just not acceptable’. Asking why Black and Hispanic children weren’t scoring high enough to secure ‘adequate’ representation is presumably more difficult than simply lowering the bar by punishing high-performing students and removing their opportunities to develop themselves.
The ideology is not being pushed in schools by accident or by the odd well-meaning ‘Woke’ teacher. The University of Colorado’s BA in Elementary Education shows how the course will mould attending students to become Woke political activists, presumably in turn so the newly qualified teachers will pass on these same ideas to their elementary school students. Its newly released course overview says precious little about the skills needed to teach young children, but it does commit to fostering an antiracist consciousness for its students. Teachers who successfully embrace the key guiding principles undergirding the course will be equipped to: ‘engage in humanizing anti-racist pedagogies’, design curriculums around ‘anti-racist, justice-centred learning’, become ‘critically conscious’, ‘hold a dynamic view of culture’, and perhaps most worryingly ‘view themselves as agents of change’. This is real cultural revolution stuff institutionalized in the education system, designed (like Dr Kendi’s ‘Antiracist Baby’ book series) to inculcate these far-left ideas in children early, lightly daubed in agreeable sounding rhetoric.
Economic Relief
Joe Biden created an executive order on day 1 of his presidency to make racial equity a cornerstone of his new administration and has suggested this ideology will inform post-pandemic business recovery is funded. The new Emergency Relief for Farmers of Color Act provides $4bn in debt relief specifically for non-white ‘socially disadvantaged’ farmers (with an extra $1bn to address systemic racism at the U.S Department of Agriculture). This is roughly half of the total $10.4bn American Rescue Plan earmarked solely for minority farmers, despite white farmers outnumbering them by 13:1. Perhaps the ultimate goal is to intervene in the free market enough so that farm-owners perfectly match the ethnic demographic breakdown of the broader population, despite the resentment such an artificially manufactured approach will inevitably breed along the way.
In Oakland, California, a poverty relief program is set to pay out $500 every month to low-income families — the catch? Eligibility is based on race, specifically Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) households. This is exactly the kind of discriminatory corrective justice antiracism advocates like Dr. Kendi will celebrate as progress. The justification: that white households on average make three times as much as Black households will obviously be of great comfort to the 10,000 white inhabitants living in poverty and excluded from the scheme because of their skin colour. As an experiment in racial harmony determined to further ringfence individuals into avatars of their respective racial groups, it seems dangerous, but perhaps the likely forthcoming rise in racial tensions between poor Blacks and Whites will prove useful justification for policymakers and the media that White Supremacy is still very much still alive and kicking.
Healthcare
Perhaps the most immediate life-and-death implications of Wokeness’ identity politics is in US healthcare systems. Health Equity has become a byword in the professional medical community as they identify racial disparities in health outcomes and jump to the low hanging explanation of systemic racism. An article in the Boston Review written by two physicians (both of whom teach at Harvard Medical School) propose an ‘antiracist agenda for medicine’. Despite themselves identifying the cause of the disparity (white people with heart issues ending up in cardiology rather than general wards more often) as likely ‘patient self-advocacy’, the ultimate solution to improve healthcare in the US is ‘medical restitution’. Alongside federal reparations, the authors cite Joe Biden’s executive order as impetus to begin ‘offering preferential care based on race or ethnicity’. This mode of thinking has already influenced the CDC vaccines rollout (‘older populations are whiter…Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit’). In Vermont, vaccines for younger groups were first made eligible to citizens who ‘self-identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Color’. Segregation in America is back under the progressive new guise of equity.
Reinforcing Tribalism
Are there any signs that the mainstreaming of Social Justice academia has worsened relations between races? In the UK, defenders of the BLM marches last year suggested the negative responses were simply ‘exposing pre-existing fault lines’ — despite twice as many BAME respondents claiming it has harmed race relations than saw it as a positive movement. In the US, Gallup polls suggest race and racism has become much more of a concern in the last five years- with 19% of Americans ranking it the most important problem facing the U.S in 2021; the highest since 1968. Polling on Black-White Race Relations shows a similar trend, declining consistently since 2013.
2013 was also the year BLM entered the public consciousness. At around the same time, respected media such as the Washington Post and the New York Times suddenly began mainstreaming Social Justice vocabulary. Terms like ‘White Privilege’, ‘Intersectionality’, ‘Whiteness’, went from fringe academic enclaves to mainstream discourse practically overnight (see charts below)[6]. In 2005, then senator Barack Obama railed against the idea of Identity Politics, arguing you can’t change people’s minds ‘if you just out of hand disregard what your opponent has to say from the start. And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you — because they are white or they are male — that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.’ [7] He also argued ‘there is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.’[8] Since then the idea of national unity — even the idea of pride in a national identity itself — has fallen out of vogue, replaced by the foundational sin ideology that modern states are defined by the bloody circumstances of their creation and societies by their differences rather than their sameness.
Tajfel and Turner’s 1979 development of Social Identity Theory identified how human psychology so easily lends itself to group identities and the construction of in-group bias and out-group hostility. In a 1954 experiment, they randomly divided a group of 12-year old campers into two for an extended sports competition — animosity towards the out-group began almost instantly; ‘the flags of each social groups became increasingly salient symbols as each group raided the other’s cabins and threatened to burn the other’s newly created symbolic identity.’[9] Their subsequent ‘Minimal Group Paradigm’ experiment demonstrated that in-group favouritism and out-group bias occurs even under arbitrarily imposed groupings (such as using coin-flips to decide groups)[10]. Social Justice scholars may argue this is not natural human behaviour but an internalization of socially constructed competitive culture. However, a holistic view of history and conflict, across time, culture and species indicates competitive rivalry is one of the few ‘truths’ of the natural world. One must only look at sport to see how easily we self-sort into factions; how we crave winners and the losers they require; how competition pushes us to be better, be the best; how even the most mild-mannered of us can find themselves screaming at the referee, chanting at the opposition, rejoicing in their defeat. In their experiments, Tajfel and Turner also optimistically identified how these rivalries can be easily overcome once the divided groups are given something to unite on and construct a cooperative identity around. Wokeness is antithetical to unity across difference because it cannot properly reconcile the groups it makes real and reinforces as in perpetual conflict. It regards the broadest unifying identity we have yet created — national identity — as a shameful relic of a bygone age, a refuge for xenophobes, fascists, racists.
Conclusion
Social Justice advocates have a fairly clear choice- to walk back slightly embarrassed from the insatiable runaway train this absolutist ideology demands, or double-down on the antiracist pedagogy and support these policies as progress towards some as yet undefined ‘equitable’ greater good. Nobody suggests there are easy solutions to such complex historical and socioeconomic issues, but surely there is some common-sense consensus that certain ‘solutions’ — which sacrifice equality and individualism and reify tribal identities in an ill-conceived attempt to overcome them — will lead to far bigger issues than they are likely to resolve. There is no broad inequality issue which is better fixed by a focus on race as the defining axis rather than using socioeconomic status; a working-class populist movement that transcends crude identity politics would be a real and welcome challenge to the American (and broader Western) political system. Certainly, genuine neo-Nazis will be licking their lips at the prospect of a continuous cultural shift away from a colour-blind society to one where racial identity reigns supreme, and until ordinary people organise and stand up against this insidious ideology with liberal reason and rationality, their ranks will likely swell with alienated, impoverished whites seeing their individual rights and freedoms superseded by the scales of corrective justice. One thing must be clear: Wokeness is a totalizing ideology that cannot be appeased, because at its root it sees our liberal societies in a way that is fundamentally broken with no clear idea beyond communist utopianism of what our post-broken Social Justice societies will look like; destruction is far simpler, and more immediately gratifying than creation. Still, at least that’ll lead to more work for the growing bureaucracy of ‘Anti-Hate’ and Diversity, Equality and Inclusivity taskforces and the universities who produce them[11]. We just have to hope the tribalism doesn’t get too out of control along the way, but perhaps we have indeed transcended our more primitive human impulses as progressives would like to believe. They are only social constructions after all.
[1] Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, ‘Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (Third Edition)’, (2017), pp. 3
[2] Charles W. Mills, ‘Critical Theory in Critical Times’, (2017) pp. 241
[3] Equitable Math Toolkit, ‘A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction’ (2020), https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf pp. 65
[4] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf pp. 68
[5] https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf pp. 54
[6] Alex Tabarrok, ‘The NYTimes is Woke’, Marginal Revolution, 02/06/19, https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-Woke.html (accessed 25/07/20) and Zach Goldberg, Twitter Thread, 28/05/19, https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1133440945201061888.html (accessed 25/07/20) N.B. graphs created using original data from ‘LexisNexis’ and New York Times Analytics 1970–2019, duplicate wording accounted for and various ‘control’ words used to demonstrate frequency increases did not occur across the board. Similar trends seen for social justice terms: ‘Patriarchy’, ‘Non-Binary’, ‘Transphobia’, ‘White Supremacy’ available in graph form at MarginalRevolution hyperlink above
[7] Jonah Goldberg,’ Obama’s words on identity politics better late than never’, The Chicago Tribune, 22/07/18, https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec-goldberg-obama-mandela-hypocrisy-identity-politics-0723-20180720-story.html (accessed 21/03/21)
[8] Eugene Scott, ‘Obama’s evolution from downplaying identity politics to acknowledging the prevalence of tribalism’, Washington Post, 30/11/18, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/11/30/obamas-evolution-downplaying-identity-politics-acknowledging-prevalence-tribalism/ (accessed 04/08/20)
[9] W. Russell Neuman, ‘The Digital Difference: Media Technology and the Theory of Communication Effects’, (Harvard University Press; Cambridge MA, 2016) pp. 188
[10] H. Tajfel, M. G. Billig, R. P. Bundy, and C. Flament: ‘Social Categorization and Intergroup Behaviour’, European Journal of Social Psychology, 1/2, (1971) pp. 149–178
[11] The rise of a ‘woke’ bureaucracy is heralded in the American University system- Ohio State University as of 2021 is employing at least 150 employees to address diversity at an annual cost of $12m, with 88 staff alone in the Office of ‘Diversity and Inclusion’. Such institutionalized bureaucracies are presumably resistant to questions about the efficacy of their work and job status.
