Steelmanning Woke

Too much has been written about “woke” (including too much by me). I’ve deplored this (“It’s time to put a fork in “woke” because it’s done.”), I’ve argued that woke is on its way out (“the cultural trend that we sometimes call “woke” has begun to lose its grip”), and yet I’m writing one more essay. Why? Because the thousands of pages describing wokeness usually do so in an adversarial way. What if I tried to define it so that someone who is “woke” would feel I was being fair? In other words, how would I steelman woke?

First, I gotta do the pro-forma dismissal of anyone arguing there is no such thing as “woke.” Seriously? You guys are still doing that? Look, it may be an awful label, perhaps you’d prefer “social justice politics,” but it’s blatantly obvious that there are different ways to be left-wing, and it boggles my mind that anyone could deny there is a particular way of being left-wing that involves both emphasizing identity (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) and talking about this emphasis in particular ways.¹ The kinds of people that are called woke tend to drop bombshells like “privilege,” “systemic,” “whiteness,” “patriarchy,” and “cis-hetero-normative.” Saying these people don’t exist is some next-level gaslighting!

And whatever it is, it’s not just “being a decent person,” as someone said to me recently. I mean, c’mon man (as Uncle Joe would say), EVERYONE thinks they’re a decent person. If that’s your definition, Andrew Tate and Vladimir Putin are both woke because they’re doing the right thing according to their warped moral compasses!

So let me offer up a woke social justice catechism that I hope will make those kinds of folks, whatever they call themselves, nod their heads and say, “Yes, even though I don’t believe there’s any such thing as woke, you have accurately described my worldview; that’s what I mean by ‘being a decent person’.”

America is deeply stained by 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. These systems enforce the dominance of privileged groups over marginalized groups. Labels like “white supremacy” or “patriarchy” help to describe the nature of this oppression.

The solution to systemic oppression 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).

Working on solutions to oppression is a moral imperative requiring decent people to act with dedication and enthusiasm. To be passive in the face of systemic oppression is to be complicit in that oppression. Silence is violence. Those with privilege in our society—white people, men, straight people, cis people—have an extra obligation to acknowledge their privilege and to be good allies in the process of reducing oppression.

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 reduce systemic oppression. Again, there is no moral passivity in these efforts. If you are not actively anti-oppression, you are complicit in oppression. The personal is political.

We also need to recognize the words we use can demean marginalized communities and thereby cause harm. Replacing phrases like “the homeless” with “people experiencing homelessness” and “disabled” with “differently abled” helps to reduce dehumanization. Freedom of speech is worthwhile, but it must be carefully balanced against the harm words can cause. People who regularly express hateful ideas (racism, transphobia, etc) should not be given platforms from which to spread those ideas. They can still speak, but de-platforming will limit their ability to cause harm.

These points capture only some of what we mean by “social justice.” Social justice is a broad struggle against the multi-dimensional and stubborn problems of ongoing bigotry and oppression.

So? Did my words capture approximately what you believe, Mr. or Mx. Social Justice? I hope so. You are less likely to agree with what follows.

A good chunk of what I wrote above is not horribly far from what I and other traditional liberals believe.² Social justice politics just takes those ideas two or three (or fifteen) steps further.

For example, I avoid using hurtful words, and I wouldn’t gratuitously insult a Muslim’s faith. When I enter a mosque, I remove my shoes out of respect. Despite my atheism, I don’t ridicule anyone’s belief in Allah. However, because I prioritize free speech more highly than many woke lefties, I would still vigorously defend the right of an art history professor to show images of Mohammed to her class—something that got a professor at Hamline University fired last year—even though I know it might offend some students.

Similarly, while I think more diversity of all kinds is generally a good thing, I oppose any insistence that would-be employees be required to include diversity statements as part of a job application. What goes on in my mind is my own business, and as long as I do my job, I don’t think it’s healthy to demand ideological loyalty oaths.

And, like Arundhati Roy, I oppose editing old works of fiction to make them less upsetting to sensitive modern ears.

The recent decision to re-edit the work of Roald Dahl—my God, who next? Nabokov? Shall Lolita vanish from our shelves? Or shall she be recast as an undercover pre-teen activist? Shall old masterpieces be repainted? Shorn of the male gaze? It’s so sad to even have to say all this. Where will it leave us? On a shore without footprints? In a world without history?

And then there is the zeal. Many who embrace the social justice worldview paint the world in moral absolutes, and anyone who deviates from their thinking must be loudly condemned. At its most extreme, this behavior leads to “cancel culture,” attempts to get people de-platformed or fired because of their “bad” views. This fervor and moral certainty leads people like linguist John McWhorter to call social justice a religion (Woke Racism).

I don’t agree with McWhorter. Social justice has no church structure, no religious texts shared by all, no weekly ceremonies. Some religions lack these things, of course, but social justice types don’t claim to be part of a religious movement, and I’d think they’d know. They simply see themselves as being “decent people.” They also vary widely in their adherence to the ideas I listed above. There is a tiny minority of hardcore activists, but most social justice lefties are well-meaning people who know little of the lingo but go along with current trends. I know plenty of people I’d call “vaguely woke.” They believe in some of the stuff but can laugh at the more extreme positions.

And none of these definitional debates are helped by conservatives who insist on calling everything they don’t like “woke.” The Rings of Power series has black hobbits? Woke! Barbie talks about feminism? Woke! A young woman has purple hair? Woke! You want an electric stove? Woke!

Definitional confusion is inevitable because social justice is not a religion. There are no sacred texts to anchor it to an unchanging meaning. I think of social justice politics as a semi-cohesive ideological fashion trend and fashion shifts. One year it’s bell-bottom jeans, the next, it’s ruffles and codpieces. There are a lot of folks (myself included) who think the power of social justice has declined. Back in 2020, a mob of New York Times staffers forced the firing of Opinion Editor James Bennet. In 2022, Felicia Sonmez targeted fellow reporter Dave Weigel at the Washington Post (for liking a joke), but it was Sonmez who ended up being terminated. The vibe had shifted.

Shifted but not gone. Whatever “woke” is, there’s still plenty of it out there. Those buried deep in lefty spaces might laugh bitterly at the idea of a vibe shift as they repeat loyalty oaths in order to keep their jobs. Still, even if it hasn’t disappeared, woke is evolving, as all trends and fads do. What comes next? I dunno. Ask Freddie deBoer:

So when people ask me whether we’ve turned a corner, as they frequently do, I’m never sure what to say. “Woke” vs. “Anti-woke” is a horribly exhausted and pointless framework, one which suggests binary simplicity where there is only boundless complexity, but beyond that, there was never any chance that there was going to be some clear victory for one or the other. What will emerge will be some synthesis of the two impulses. (Probably an equally exhausting one.)

1. Back in 2021, Freddie deBoer asked for some kind of label for this new way of thinking in his perfectly titled essay, “Please Just Fucking Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.”

2. And because words are annoying, when I say “traditional liberal,” I mean a 1990s-2000s liberal, the kind who voted for Clinton and Obama. I don’t mean “classical liberal,” those 19th-century free-market laissez-faire types.