C'mon Man, Woke HAS Been Defined!
There’s a new battlefield in the culture war naming nonsense perpetual motion machine, which now argues that there is no such thing as “woke” because somebody just failed to define it. That somebody was poor Bethany Mandel1, who was asked by Briahna Joy Gray to define “woke” and choked in the chokiest way since I mainlined 23 Nabisco saltine crackers with only half a teaspoon of water.2
Ok, that was bad, but it doesn’t mean folks haven’t defined “woke.” People have been defining woke for years. There’s a whole woke defining industry that helps keep the culture war economy churning.
David French, writer at The Atlantic, formerly at The Dispatch defined woke in 2022.
Left-wing institutional intolerance and illiberalism regarding race, sex, and religion.
John McWhorter, a linguist, offered a definition of woke beliefs in his 2021 book Woke Racism.
Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic, or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.
Back in 2020, progressive Aja Romano offered this sympathetic definition.
On the left, to be “woke” means to identify as a staunch social justice advocate who’s abreast of contemporary political concerns
Last year I offered my own definition.
a messy (and oft misused) label for a left-wing ideology that sees society as deeply defined by people's membership in certain identities—race, gender identity, sexual orientation—and believes ongoing oppression of some identities must be fought with a religious fervor. It’s the fervor, the assumption that anyone opposing their ideas is a hateful bigot, that gives wokeness its disturbing air of sanctimony, and separates it most sharply from old-time liberals like myself. Its most dedicated adherents are absolutely sure that they are fighting for a better world and resistance cannot be tolerated.
And this week, a decidedly annoyed Freddie deBoer (who had already discussed this whole naming mess back in 2021 with “Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.”) offered a more lengthy description in “Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means.”
“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils
So yes, Dorothy, people have defined “woke,” often at great length.3 To ignore this is to either have your head buried three feet deep in the sand or to be even more deeply disingenuous.
Some on the left want to deny that “woke” is anything negative because they want to claim that using it pejoratively is just another way to be racist.
Other people defend it as simply a label for a good person.
See? There are definitions. Many definitions!
And none of this will prove anything to anybody. People have picked their sides, chosen their weapons, and drawn squiggly lines in the sand. But at least, I hope, the idea that nobody has defined “woke” will be given a decent funeral. Perhaps along with the word itself, for I come not to praise woke but to bury it.
Look, something did happen in left-wing spaces— meaning law schools, media outlets, teacher’s colleges, and fair-sourced coffee shops—back in the ancient days of the Obama presidency. We can argue about what exactly it was and what caused it, but left-wing culture in 2020 was drastically different than it had been ten years earlier, more strident, more censorious, and more focused on identity politics. If you think progressive politics hasn’t changed in the last decade, I want to know what kind of weed you’re smoking and why you’re not sharing.
But whatever’s been happening, the word “woke” has become so abused and overused that it no longer effectively describes anything. You may think you know what it means, but people listening to you aren’t hearing your meaning, and that doesn’t lead to useful communication. It’s not just that people on the left are claiming it means the n-word, but people on the right have decided that everything they don’t like is now caused by “wokeness,” from the failure to fight climate change to the failure of Silicon Valley Bank. When Ted Cruz titles his new book, “Unwoke,” it’s time to put a fork in “woke” because it’s done.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t still something going on in lefty power centers worth talking about, but rather that we might need to use different words when discussing it. My Twitter mutual Angel Eduardo makes this point in “Don’t Use the W-Word.”
The truth is that we don’t need a term to describe “them.” “They” are the wrong target for our attention and criticism to begin with. Whatever side of the argument we’re on, a better approach is to focus on the specific ideas we think are holding society back.
Thomas Chatterton Williams—an “anti-woke” stalwart who helped create the famous Harper’s Letter—also argues we should avoid “woke.” (This is a case he’s been making for some time.) He agrees there is something there but that labeling it “woke” alienates those you are trying to reach.
Put simply, social-justice-movement insiders have different associations and uses for the word than do those outside these progressive circles. Before you can attempt to define what “wokeness” is, you should acknowledge this basic fact. Going further, you should acknowledge that as with cancel culture, critical race theory, and even structural racism, the contested nature of the term imposes a preemptive barrier to productive disagreement.
I find Angel and Williams persuasive, but I’m not entirely convinced. I think a word or phrase to describe this general trend on the left might still be useful. Just maybe.4 Freddie deBoer suggested using “social justice politics5,” which seems a decent replacement.
At least until Ted Cruz slaps it on his next book jacket.
Mandel is a conservative columnist pushing her new book, Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation (co-authored with Karol Markowicz).
And let’s have some sympathy for Mandel. We all have brain freezes and moments of mental panic. This doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a case. The people attacking her seem to have already hated her before the clip. (I have no opinion about Mandel. She’s barely on my radar.)
For more woke descriptions, check out Noah Smith’s “The Wokeness series: All the posts in one handy list.” Woke conflict is not Smith’s beat (“In general I try to avoid culture-war topics on this blog.”) so he writes about it from a sympathetic outsider perspective. Kinda like a friendly alien who’s trying to explain to us earthlings where we’ve gone terribly wrong and how we can fix it. Then he makes friends with bunnies, flies away on a bicycle, and everything turns out wonderfully. (Seriously, the man loves his adorable bunnies.) It’s a great list of articles, and while I don’t agree with all of Smith’s points, I found his essays all made my brain spin off in new and fun directions. Like riding a bicycle with a friendly alien!
“Maybe. Just maybe my boys can protect the book. Yeah, and maybe I’m a Chinese jet pilot.”
— Bruce Campbell, Army of Darkness (1993).
And how would I define social justice politics in a way that might not alienate social justice advocates?
America is deeply stained by the sins of oppressive bigotry: racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and ableism. This oppression isn’t simply found in people’s behaviors—acting racist or transphobic—although that remains a serious problem; the oppression is also systemic, built into the laws and traditions that make up the fabric of the United States. The solution is to support policies that will bring about diversity (so that every group has its fair place in society) and equity (every group has equal outcomes, not merely equal treatment, which is insufficient). This solution to oppression is a moral imperative calling decent people to act with dedication and enthusiasm. Creating DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) Departments in schools and businesses or asking for DEI statements from job applicants are some of the tools we can use to end systemic oppression. We also need to focus on language that causes harm by demeaning marginalized communities. Speech freedoms must be carefully balanced and sometimes limited to avoid the damage caused by hurtful words. Systemic oppression remains a profound problem and requires continued and intense collective efforts to bring about its end.
Ideology is, in many ways, a lens on how to examine issues. Liberals look out for individuals: Identitarians look out for identities. I call the 'Wokism' Egosumism (Latin for I Am). The Woke are Identitarians. if Ideology is a lens on how to look at the world, and the focus of how you order society I would classify:
Liberalism seeks to empower individuals
Communism seeks to empower class
Fascism seeks to empower the state/nation
Egosumism seeks to empower Identities
Is this imperfect? Of course. None of those definitions are complete, but it's my dumb way of making sense of all the craziness.
The people who say "woke" is undefined might want to consider the usage of "fascist". And nowadays, "Nazi".
Yes, anything left or liberal will be used by the right-wing as a term of abuse. It happened with "Communist" (but-that-would-be-Communism was an old joke), with "Socialist" (Obama-is-a-Socialist nonsense), even "Liberal" itself. Yet those words still can have reasonable meanings.
The deeper point of Freddie's essay is the part where he discusses potential motivations behind the idea that this politics is un-name-able. That's very evident in some of the responses. It also means, intrinisically, that there will never be agreement by those adhering to such politics to use any term whatsoever.