Why is the idea of “wokeness” such a problem for some?

I’ve been thinking about this question for some time now. “Wokeness” has become conservative political shorthand for progressives’ attachment to such things as “social justice” and “critical race theory.” Such “wokeness” is widely decried as divisive, an attempt to stifle dissent. The sloganeering of the Right—which, let’s be honest, has proven staggeringly effective—has recently taken to flogging “cancel culture” as the next apocalyptic horror from which we need to protect such personifications of virtue and sober political deliberation as Matt Gaetz, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Josh Hawley.

But taken together, these bumper sticker tag lines and conservative trigger phrases simply amount to a re-packaging of such tired epithets—excavated from the Newt Gingrich orc mines of the 1990s—as “identity politics” and “political correctness,” which have been used over the past thirty years to salve the consciences of people who yearn for the good old days when you could dehumanize people different from you with impunity. 

I thought it might be helpful to unpack some of these buzzwords and catchphrases all in one place, to provide a kind of handy lexicon of “wokeness” (in no particular order).

Political Correctness

“Political correctness,” according to conservatives, is an attempt by liberals to police the language of “normal” people by dividing human beings into two classes to establish political power: the oppressed and the oppressor. On this account, “political correctness” operates as a tool to outlaw speech that has always been otherwise culturally acceptable, but now—because of a heightened awareness of how language helps create reality—is considered out of bounds. 

But as far as I can tell, the indignant howling about “political correctness” has been an attempt to recapture the lost ground of social discourse in which there is no price to pay for being a jackass to people you feel superior to, by saying that any attempt to hold you to some standard of human decency is merely a power play to trample your God-given right to treat your “lessers” like a different species. In other words, what I call the “weaponized disingenuity” of such questions as, “Why can’t I say the N-word anymore?” or “How was I supposed to know she was so sensitive?” or “Why is it always the _________’s fault?” (Fill in the blank: white guy, police officer, rich person, etc.) To put a finer point on it: “Why am I an @$$#*|£ for pointing out what everyone with good sense already knows?”

In other words, charges of “political correctness” always come off sounding like a nostalgic yearning for a time when you could say whatever you wanted about people you didn’t respect without paying a social or political price for it. It’s useful as a rhetorical defense against being called a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe, xenophobe, etc., and it also has the added benefit of putting your accuser on the defensive, since you’re only stating the “obvious” while your opponent is only concerned about “protecting the feelings” of the people who’ve forgotten their place.

To be called “politically correct” is almost always a negative charge, suggesting that your real intentions for pursuing equity are a form of virtue-signaling, concerned more with verbal political orthodoxy and groupthink than with true justice. Criticisms of political correctness naively assume that the speech about vulnerable populations is politically motivated, while the racial/gender/ethnic/sexual epithets used to oppress people (and the systems that make them possible/necessary) aren’t political, but are merely a dispassionate description of “the way things are,” just a matter of “saying what nobody else is willing to say.”

But being “politically correct,” despite conservative attempts to imbue it with sinister motives, is simply the practice of treating people with the same respect and human dignity that you expect for yourself. It is using language about others that they choose, instead of language that you choose for them because it’s a habit, or because it’s inconvenient to have to consider how your speech affects others, or just because you hate certain people and want to be able to express it publicly without having to be ashamed. 

Identity Politics

The existence of “political correctness,” therefore, as an assault on “normal” people, acts as the verbal attack dog of “identity politics”—the belief that those who are excluded only seek to press a rhetorically effective tactic in pursuit of a political agenda. Again, such a political agenda is dimly viewed by conservatives convinced they seek no such advantage for themselves. That is to say, the charge of “identity politics” is almost always leveled by someone who’s convinced they have no “identity” about which it is necessary to be “political”—as if “whiteness,” “maleness,” “straightness,” “cis-genderness,” or “American-ness” were the natural state of things, any deviation from which has to be justified and approved by some great court of objectivity—populated, of course, by straight white guys born in America (preferably in a rural or suburban environment) with no gender/cognitive/physical “abnormalities.”

Again, “identity politics” is almost always used as a pejorative. If, for instance, you say that black people shouldn’t be harassed or killed by police, then the burden of proof is on you to prove that a) the life history and the precipitating event on which the police attack is based is not even remotely the black person’s fault (which is often impossible since being “black” is sufficient evidence of criminal intent), b) the police officer(s) had evil intentions in attacking a black person, and c) your questioning isn’t prompted by “identity politics” but by a straight-up assessment of the facts. You can apply the same formula to other grievances by women, LGBTQ people, immigrants, refugees, and the disabled.

In other words, whatever problems of inequity or injustice you might think you have must first be recognized and validated by people convinced they represent the real world and have no ax to grind. The catch–22 for non-white, non-male, non-straight, etc. people is that any experiences they claim to have had, if not shared by this divinely sanctioned court of legitimation, are deemed imaginary (at best) or cynical attempts to drag down “normal” people (at worst). 

“The reason you didn’t get the job has nothing to do with your race/gender/sexual orientation/ethnicity/gender identity/disability. I haven’t gotten plenty of jobs—and my race/gender/sexual orientation etc. was never the reason. You must be making it up.”

“I’ve never been targeted by the police for harassment. Therefore, the police don’t target people for harassment; only those who’ve committed crimes have anything to fear from the police.”

This gaslighting continues the fiction that a level playing field is already a reality and that your failure to achieve/avoid trouble/be treated with dignity is an individual problem and not the predictable result of a system designed to produce such outcomes. Identity politics means that you only blame the system because of your own defects and inadequacies, not because the system is engineered to put you at a disadvantage. In other words: “Why do you always play the _______________ card when something bad happens or you don’t get what you want?”

Critical Race Theory

It is this disbelief that people’s experience of the world results not from systems but from individual intention and competence/incompetence that is at the heart of Critical Race Theory (CRT). CRT has been used over the past fifty years to critically analyze how law and culture are constructed to produce disparities in outcomes based on race. It sets out to answer questions like:

• If 5% of illicit drug users are African American, why do African Americans represent 29% of those arrested and 33% of those incarcerated?

• If African Americans and White people use drugs at similar rates, why is the rate of imprisonment for African Americans six times that of their White counterparts?

• If African American children represent 14% of the population, why is it that African American children comprise 32% of the children arrested, 42% of the children detained, and 52% of children whose cases are waived to criminal court?

• Why is it that White men with a criminal record are more likely to get a job interview than Black men with no criminal record?

CRT calls attention to the fact that racism is so deeply encoded in our legislation, our judicial system, our cultural practices and assumptions that it exists beneath the horizon of White people’s awareness—so much so that White people can casually take for granted that a world in which they seem so regularly to fare well is merely the product of their virtue and industry.

Those who fulminate against CRT, however, will likely respond that if all legal and social problems stem from bad luck or bad individual choices, and that if Black people have legal and social problems disproportionately, then the only thing we’re left to conclude is that Black people are somehow more legally and morally defective than White people. Translation: If Black people have trouble, it’s probably their own fault.

Blaming Black people for the problems they face has the benefit of reassuring White people that the system by which they so regularly benefit (legal, social, economic, etc.) is benign. Additionally, it puts White people’s fears to rest that any advantages they enjoy are somehow not chiefly the product of their own resourcefulness. To call attention to disparities in wealth, achievement, political power, or status must therefore be a rationalization of failure and self-pity since those disparities are entirely the result of talent and hard work or its lack.

Complaints about CRT, then, are largely about a refusal to admit that the way things are isn’t the way they were designed to be, but entirely a consequence of individual effort and individual failure, implicitly affirming the fear that if we were to change the system in a way that produced equitable outcomes, I might not enjoy the same advantages I do now (which would totally suck, because my life is great—or if not great, then way better than “those people” have it). If we say (as CRT does), for example, that the United States was built in large part on the backs of enslaved Black people, that would mean White people benefitted (from the founders to the current day) from advantages they’ve been socialized to believe they created themselves—and that such injustice requires redress. (And acknowledging that maybe I’m not the rugged individual I tell myself I am and that I didn’t earn everything I have while playing on an uneven playing field would hurt my feelings … so that would be bad.)

Criticism of CRT, like much of conservative ideology, amounts to a self-affirming “photoshopping” of reality and a rationalization of selfishness.

Social Justice

If CRT is a critique of the way racism is embedded in legal, economic, and cultural systems, then social justice, another favorite bugbear of the Right, is a broader critique of the way injustice is embedded in those same systems. In addition to racism, this critique targets things like homophobia and transphobia, ableism, misogyny, xenophobia, disparities in wealth, as well as a lack of access to healthcare and good education. Social justice is the recognition that all of these inequities built into the system are intersectional, that is, they are all symptomatic of the larger problem of injustice. “Intersectionality” (another target the right likes to retail), is a concept that suggests all the inequities embedded in the system aren’t the product of “a few bad apples,” but the different faces injustice wears to keep those in power … in power.

But arguing that injustice is systemic instead of purely the result of individual intentions—as a commitment to social justice does—threatens the status quo. According to social justice advocates, if the problem isn’t the result of the bad faith of individual actors, then what needs fixing isn’t so much your neanderthal uncle Kevin with uncultivated social skills and a Fox News addiction (though, let’s be honest, Uncle Kevin needs some work), but the structures that institutionalize uncle Kevin’s prejudices as inevitabilities. Uncle Kevin’s prejudices are formed by Fox News; Fox News doesn’t merely reflect Uncle Kevin’s prejudices. The machinery that produces conservative consensus isn’t concerned with reporting on what happens in the real world as much as it is with shaping the social and cognitive framework that creates reality.

Social justice, at least in its theoretical sense, is an analytical tool used to unmask the assumptions transparent to the multitudes, which produce inequity by propping up unjust systems. It points out blind spots in the way people perceive reality, blind spots that too often benefit the powerful at the expense of everyone else. The myth of the self-made individual, for instance, operates to reassure people who have a lot of wealth, power, fame, etc. that they manufactured their success without help. As a consequence, they don’t owe anyone anything since all they have they earned. And to the extent that they’re willing to give from their abundance, it must be viewed as an act of charity—not the requirements of justice imposed on them externally by society or political regime based on any advantages they enjoy. In fact, an opposition to social justice requires a denial of any unmerited advantage, any privilege that comes from outside the individual’s control. To admit to privilege is devastating to the belief that one’s place in society is determined solely by one’s talents, determination, and resourcefulness.

Social justice is in part a belief that we’re all participants in structures that benefit some while disadvantaging others. Which disadvantages exist in many cases not as a deficiency of character, ambition, or grit, but as factors beyond an individual’s control. Such factors include things like race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, generational poverty, geography, parenting, and luck (good and bad). But to say that much of who we are and what we accomplish has to do with the vagaries of being one person rather than another is an insult to an ideology that assumes bootstrapping is how anything gets done in this world. And to say that some people’s success while other people’s misery comes from factors beyond their control is assumed by bootstrappers to be divisive—an indictment of success and an excuse for failure. 

But more importantly than the theoretical critical apparatus, social justice is a practical commitment to obtaining equity for all people, regardless of the external variables that determine a person’s life. And because a great part of the fault lies with the systems that circumscribe a culture’s reality rather than with individual “bad apples,” the world will not sufficiently change “one heart at a time.” Instead, true justice must be sought also through economic, social, and legislative policy choices. That is not to say that individuals don’t affect the system (for good and for ill), but that the system is what subtly teaches people what “good” and “ill” are. In other words, the systems that narrate “reality” operate beneath the surface of our perceptions to shape our understanding of the possibility of what might be called “real” in the first place. We’re taught what is just, equitable, possible, or ignorable in ways that reinforce the results turned out by the system. The fury with which the cult of individual responsibility defends itself by arguing that systems have relatively little to do with outcomes is the cry of the Wizard of Oz to “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”

Cancel Culture

The strong language used to denounce “cancel culture” evinces an abiding fear (almost always by those on the Right) that businesses might dare hold someone accountable for acting like a jerk to other human beings because of some characteristic of identity over which those human beings have no control. “Just because I speak and act like Joseph Goebbels’ life coach doesn’t mean I should lose my job, my book contract, or my place in the spotlight. I have rights, you know. Like the right to humiliate people I don’t approve of. It’s probably in the constitution. You should read it sometime.”

The unfortunate if unacknowledged reality for conservatives, however, is that “cancel culture” has been a cottage industry on the Right for forty years. Attempts to ban or otherwise encumber music with lyrics deemed too explicit, the deflection of blame for mass shootings from guns and gun culture onto violent video games, the demonizing of abortion providers, the masses inveighing against Colin Kaepernick’s perceived slights against the National Anthem and the flag, obloquies against corporations that appear insufficiently affronted by rainbows and transgender bathroom choices, among other campaigns to ban or limit the social, political, and economic impact of the morally compromised.

Raging against “cancel culture”—beyond its obvious cynicism and hypocrisy—is an attempt to “work the refs,” which is to say, it’s a way of trying to regain moral ground lost by being spiteful to people they believe themselves superior to. In short, then, condemning cancel culture is shorthand for saying, “I should be able to say what I want, no matter how partisan or prejudiced against the vulnerable and the marginalized without having to pay a price for it.”

Wokeness

“Wokeness” functions in our culture as a pejorative, an accusation against “social justice warriors” (SJWs)—people who talk too much about things like “systemic racism,” “intersectionality,” and “privilege.” Critics assume SJWs are people who make excuses for their failure and impotence in life. Calling someone “woke,” therefore, acts as a way of dismissing them and their ideas/complaints as special pleading by or on behalf of people too lazy or too defective to take responsibility for not having been born the right color/gender/sexual orientation/ethnicity/etc. Moreover, these whiny slackers are just mad that they or the people they advocate for weren’t born to the right parents on the right side of town, like the smart successful people they’re trying to drag down.

Siddhartha Gautama, after reaching enlightenment under the Bo tree, was henceforth known as the “Buddha.” Buddha, which is often defined as “enlightened,” is better understood as “the awakened one.” The thinking goes something like this: People, by and large, sleepwalk through life, existing in some shadow land where our attachments fool us into believing the lies we tell ourselves and that temporary things are permanent. The Buddha is the awakened one who sees true reality rather than the invented one most people sleepwalk through; it is Neo finally reading the Matrix everyone is unknowingly plugged into.

Consequently, to be truly “woke” is to be able to read the “Matrix,” which is transparent to most people; it is to be awakened to the social, legal, and economic systems that mass produce a version of reality that raises some people up while keeping others down, based largely on factors beyond individual control—race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender identity, etc. Being woke, therefore, means not only acknowledging that the emperor has no clothes, but that one of the empire’s principal functions is to convince everyone else that they’re the ones who are underdressed. 

Why is the idea of “wokeness” such a problem for some? I thought it might be helpful to unpack some of these buzzwords and catchphrases all in one place, to provide a kind of handy lexicon of “wokeness.”