Woke culture has become an important feature of the American cultural and political landscape and has entered the international public debate. Michel Barnier, former European Commissioner for Brexit and now aspiring French presidential candidate for Les Républicains, recently declared that “il faut Lutter contre la culture woke”.
Naturally Barnier used this expression extensively – in the sense of a certain leftist culture – because, on closer inspection, wokism is a uniquely American movement.
In any case, Zingarelli has included "woke" among the new words of the language and so has Le Petit Robert.
Unfortunately, the arrival of wokism, which starts from important instances such as those that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo movement in 2017, is the culture of cancellation which embraces a very dangerous and extreme principle, that of the total decontextualization of history and the present. Which can also be a strongly progressive principle in fields such as art or literature, but which becomes harmful in the social and political sphere.
The woke culture greatly influences the left of the Democratic party, which in turn has a strong hold on the Biden administration. But Biden has five more votes in the House and one in the Senate.
Bret Stephens, a New York Times scrutiny columnist, spoke about the woke "ideology" in a speech on the op-ed page of the New York newspaper. It is worth knowing his opinion in the Italian version.
An American story
American history is, in many ways, a history marked by great protests. Generally of two types.
The first type are the protest movements which, even if radical, believe that the American system is ultimately geared towards fulfilling its promises of equality, inalienable rights, the pursuit of happiness and pluribus unum (which is also the motto of the American nation) which pushes towards an ever more perfect union.
This is what Frederick Douglass had in mind when, in a scathing critique of American hypocrisy, he called the Constitution a "glorious document of liberty."
The second type is protest movements that have turned against the system, either because they don't think the system can deliver on its promises, or because they have never agreed with the system itself.
“We did not land on Plymouth Rock,” Malcolm X memorably said. “And the Rock landed on us.”
Build
The experience of nearly 250 years shows that the first type of movement has generally been successful. Issues such as emancipation, suffrage, civil rights, gender equality have made tremendous progress. Those movements are constructive and aim to unite Americans more closely on an already existing foundation.
The second type of movement – from the Confederacy of the Southern states, to white supremacy in the Jim Crow era to militant black nationalism in the 60s – has always failed. These movements want to tear things down, divide Americans, reject and replace the foundations of the nation with something else.
To destroy
The ideological protest movement loosely called Wokeness belongs to the second type. Last week had its first major impact on democracy and elections, not only in the race for governor in Virginia but also in a referendum on replacing the police department in Minneapolis and on law and order issues in Seattle. Wokeness has been defeated, and it won't be the last time.
I wonder what's wrong with a movement that aims to make Americans more aware of racial injustices, past and present? Nothing. In cases like those of Eric Garner, George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, white America has had definitive proof that black people's lives can still suffer the same cruelties they suffered a century ago.
Wrong at the root
But, like many movements that go beyond the initial rationale for action, Wokeness today is much more than a struggle to reform the police or expose racial injustice when it occurs. Instead, it is the assertion that racism is a defining characteristic of the nation, not a defect in it, something that permeates every aspect of American life from its inception to the present. It lies in the books we read, the language we speak, the heroes we worship, the streets we travel, the way we do business, the way we select the worthy, and so on.
Wokeness is a prescription, not to initiate genuine dialogue and reform, but to spread indoctrination and erasure. A recipe based on an extreme form of racial consciousness that challenges the modern American creed of judging people by the characteristics of their character and not by the color of their skin.
The untruth
The problem with this type of accusation is that there is a ratio to it. America's past is riddled with racism and, as Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It hasn't even passed."
But the charge is also biased, distorted, ungenerous to previous generations who carried on America's promise. It is also untrue to the country most Americans know today.
Wokeness operates as if there were no civil rights movement and as if white Americans were not an integral part of it. You operate as if 60 years of affirmative action had never happened and as if an ever-increasing percentage of black Americans are not of the middle and upper class (and which, incidentally, is concentrated in the US South). You reason as if we hadn't twice elected a black president and recently buried a black general as an American icon.
The insult
It operates as if, city after city, the police force isn't led by people of color with officers from different backgrounds. He operates as if white supremacy is still systematically enforced, while ignoring the fact that a previously marginalized ethnic minority, namely Asian Americans, have higher income levels than white Americans.
Above all, Wokeness believes that some unfortunate events such as the murder of George Floyd, which are national scandals, are in fact national norms. They are not, despite current injustices. Most Americans, I believe, not only perceive the falsehood of these allegations, but are increasingly reviled by them.
The damage
Insult turns into harm when it comes to the solutions that Wokeness prescribes, and how it prescribes them. This doesn't just mean proposals like "abolish the police" that are so blatantly destructive that voters immediately sense the danger inherent in them. Insult also lurks in more subtle situations.
Here is a typical example. The American Medical Association recently released its “Guide to Language, Narrative, and Concepts” with some recommendations such as replacing the term “disadvantaged” with “historically and intentionally excluded”, “social problem” with “social injustice”, “vulnerable” with “oppressed”, and “blacklist” and “blackmail-blackmail” with words that suggest no correlation of the word “black” with “suspiciousness or disapproval”.
Almost Orwellian
This behavior is not just silly. It's Orwellian. It is a sinister attempt to transform everyday discourse into a perpetual, politicized and almost unwitting indictment of the "system". Anyone who has spent time analyzing how totalitarian regimes of the XNUMXth century operated will notice the many similarities.
The main thing that separates those regimes from today's Wokified institutions is the element of government coercion. Yes, there can be immense pressure to comply in places like Yale Law School, where no microaggression is too small not to arouse the ire of probation administrators. Ultimately, though, Americans are still free to reject the Woke ethos, even if that outcome sometimes leads them to abandon their institutions.
Without future
That's why the Wokeness will fail. For every attempt to erase certain writers, there will be others to publish them. For every diktat to fix language by substituting some words for others, people will simply find even more subversive ways to say the same thing.
For every effort to turn high schools and colleges into factories of Wokeness, there will be answers to start all over again. Because technology, capital and good ideas move faster and this movement will succeed faster than their skeptics imagine.
In the long run, Americans have always supported protest movements that make the country more open, more decent, less divided. What is called woke today does none of these things. It has no future in the homeland of freedom.
°°°°Bret L. Stephens has been a columnist for the "New York Times" since April 2017. He won a Pulitzer Prize at the "Wall Street Journal" in 2013. He was previously editor of the "Jerusalem Post".
From “The New York Times,” November 9, 2021
