Anti-woke grievance
It's like you can't even anymore
Did you know, fellow Americans, that you comprise a nation of individuals who are inescapably “woke” and “walking on eggshells?” You may not have realized this until reading last Sunday’s op-ed column by Washington Post writer George Will, published in our local paper, The Daily Sentinel.
Alternative link via the Washington Post, both are subject to subscription paywalls.
In his column, Mr. Will asserts that we exist within a “festival of sensitivities” driven by an entire industry developed around cultural sensitivity training and born out of the 1991 Civil Rights Act which added a provision for protection against emotional distress experienced as a result of intentional discrimination in employment based on federally protected classes such as race, national origin, sex, and so forth.
It is because of this law, Will argues, that we have regressed as a society into a world of identity politics in which unreasoned reactions to perceived offenses outweigh our fundamental rights of expression and free speech. This message, and others like it, have evolved in recent months into a drumbeat of outrage and vocal frustration over the scourge of what has derogatorily become known as wokeness.
So, what exactly are these anti-woke crusaders talking about? Has our cultural and political landscape been coopted by oversensitive embodiments of racial, ethnical, and gender identities? Are the progressive liberals taking the idea of political correctness too far, to a place where reason and reasonableness have been abandoned, undermining the very foundations of free discourse and the flow of ideas?
In case you’re not very familiar with this topic, I’ll give a quick summary. Wokeness is generally understood to be political correctness run amok. It is a term that represents an excessive, oversensitive, and repressive response to the idea that societal inequities are systemic in nature and that societal change to remedy that fact is justifiable.
Anti-wokeness refutes the legitimacy of this idea, and decries the “woke” response to it as a threat to the fabric of liberal (free) society. A common thread in anti-woke discourse proclaims the notion that equality and equity have generally made progress over the past century (this, of course, is broadly true) and so it follows that our society should be less concerned with issues of equality and equity than we were in the past, and that these concepts should dissipate in relevance and prominence in our culture and politics (this, I contend, is false logic at best).
Put another way, racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination are “over,” or at least they should be. Furthermore, discussing these issues, placing them prominently amongst our cultural priorities, functions in opposition to the objective of resolving these problems; it in fact gives rise to them. Are you getting this? Put even more simply: talking about discrimination causes it to exist. If we didn’t talk about it so much it just wouldn’t be a problem at all.
Let’s paint a hypothetical picture to illustrate the context and dynamics of this anti-woke claim. I’ll be a middle-aged white person; highly educated (PhD from Princeton, perhaps), upper middle class (upper-upper middle…ok I’m wealthy). I enjoy a platform in the media from which my opinions about important issues are disseminated to millions of people. I wield, therefore, significant social and political influence.
Now, I am concerned because the world around me is changing, and not in a way that I like. All of a sudden, it seems, other people are questioning the validity of my perspective, which is the dominant perspective in our society and which has been so for the entire history of the United States as a nation. Here are some of my concerns:
It is “suddenly unacceptable” to speak one’s mind about social issues. For example, I can’t even use certain words or language anymore without some people taking offense.
Furthermore, I am being asked to use new words that are unfamiliar to me and that make me feel uncomfortable.
“Identity politics” have become the prevailing issue in our political discourse, accompanied by “speech regulation, and an epidemic of irritability.” (my own tone notwithstanding)
Institutions are responding to these changes by making new rules, some of which appear to be intended to help groups of people who have previously been under-privileged, under-represented, or under-recognized in our society, and this strikes me as a form of discrimination. By the way, I thought the whole point was to eliminate discrimination, not embrace it!
“Free speech” is under attack! Liberal society depends on the bedrock principle of freedom of speech. This new movement of language policing must be illiberal.
Companies are spending money on sensitivity and implicit bias training, as if those are real things. An entire industry has developed around this, in fact.
Everyone, particularly those who enjoy a public profile such as myself, is scared and, critically, at risk of being “cancelled,” for nearly anything, at nearly any time. What does this mean? It means that if I do or say something socially unacceptable, or deemed so by the woke people, that I could face material consequences, such as the loss of my job, my reputation, or my platform of influence.
I could go on, but this is a good start. As you can see, the world has gone to hell in a hand basket. These developments are unjustifiable, they are dangerous, they threaten to unravel the very fabric of our free society. They also threaten me personally, of course.
Stepping back outside the above persona, how about we examine these claims from another angle. Are these “concerns” as extreme and threatening as they are made out to be?
Language policing:
Let me ask you a question, reader. Do you feel afraid to speak your mind in public spaces? Speaking personally, that is not my experience. Are there certain words, jokes, or concepts that were more socially acceptable in, say, the 1980’s than they are today? Undoubtedly, yes. However, are your freedoms impinged upon by you feeling a reticence to express those things publicly? I would argue that no, they are not.
We have always contended with the concept of social acceptability. The only thing that’s happened here is that the specific things that are socially acceptable have shifted over time. This is not only NOT a big deal, it is perfectly natural. Societies and cultures evolve, and their norms evolve alongside.
Is it possible to get fired from your job if you say or do something extremely socially unacceptable? Yes. Was that also true 70 years ago? Yes, yes it was. It’s just that the norms of acceptability have shifted. But will you be thrown in jail for saying something awful to another person? Not if it falls into the realm of what the anti-woke are complaining about. If you say something bigoted you will not be punished by the law, your freedom of speech is protected thereby. Nothing has changed in that respect.
Institutional “wokeness”:
Are companies offering trainings on social justice and implicit bias to their employees nowadays? Yep, they are doing that. Does that mean that society is unravelling around our ears. No, it simply does not.
First off, institutions reflect public sentiment more than drive it. Companies are not out here telling us what to believe about bigotry. They are responding to a shift in our culture. People are demanding that they be treated with respect and on equal footing. They are not, however, yet experiencing that equity. So there are now ways for people to learn more about these issues and to consider changing their own behavior to support this outcome.
The problem is, apparently, that some people resent being asked to change their behavior in this way. “Why should I have to rethink how I conceive of my co-workers, neighbors, community members? My thoughts aren’t hurting anyone.” Well, it’s not about you Mr. Whiny Pants Dude. It’s about a collective effort to make our society work better for everyone. Is that something that bothers you, exactly?
Mr. Will implies that the institutions are driving these changes by embracing the social justice “industry”. This is just not accurate, and belies a feigned lack of awareness of how companies and their HR departments function. Human resources exists to protect the interests of the company, not to exercise some kind of progressive social agenda. They are offering the trainings so that they can tell their employees and their shareholders that they checked the box. “We aren’t bigoted,” they proclaim, while paying women and non-white people less and making campaign donations to congressional representatives with openly bigoted agendas.
Feelings:
Mr. Will and others argue that everyone is too sensitive now. They draw a line back to the Civil Rights Act of 1991 that created protections for people experiencing emotional distress due to intentional discrimination. “This is ridiculous,” the anti-woke proclaim; “how can we justifiably protect people from having their feelings hurt?”
Well, I would argue, that is not the point of the law. Protection from discrimination is not about hurt feelings, it is about actual bigotry and unjust treatment, and the real impacts of experiencing those things, say, at your job. What Will fails to acknowledge is that he has never experienced anything like this. He has no idea what it feels like, and is therefore willing to dismiss the experience as invalid, or at least unimportant.
I’m no legal expert, but my interpretation is that the law was created because people were experiencing adverse impacts from discrimination and there was limited legal recourse available to them. Is the policy perfect? I don’t know, probably not. Are there many policies that perfectly solve a given problem or meet a given need?
But is this policy causing people to be oversensitive to offensive behavior? No, for crying out loud. It’s giving people a path for legal recourse when they experience discrimination and bigotry directed at them. This is likely why instances of lawsuits on this subject increased following the enactment of the law; the law didn’t invent or encourage intentional discrimination, it provided legal means for redressing it. Just because Mr. Will doesn’t experience this himself and doesn’t really need the protections offered under this law doesn’t mean the same thing is true for everyone else.
Identity politics:
This complaint is endlessly confusing to me, I’ll admit. The claim seems to be that identity politics is the biggest problem we face as a society, instead of, say, threats against our democratic processes, poverty, mental and physical health and well-being, climate change, attempts to dismantle the public education system, to name a few.
The implication is that identity politics is only practiced by “woke liberals.” The term is used to suggest that identifying as a ‘fill-in-the-blank person’ rather than just a person is only used as a political tool for manipulation, rather than as an attempt to achieve recognition for the lived experience of people with those identities.
This dismissiveness is just bigotry in thin disguise. It’s yet another attempt to invalidate those “other” identities. Beyond that, the “political tool” of identity politics is deployed at least as readily by anti-woke conservatives. Watch five minutes of Tucker Carlson and tell me if you think he’s appealing to a certain racial demographic or not.
You can’t simultaneously complain about “identity politics” while using it to manipulate and exploit the latent bigotry of your audience. It’s hypocritical, disingenuous, and absurd. The problem they seem to have is that non-white, non-straight, non-cis-gendered, non-male people are being identified as having a valid claim to inform how our society works.
Yes, this represents a change from how things operated 70 years ago. No, it doesn’t represent a threat to our society. It represents the continued fulfillment of the promise of our society - remember that “all men are created equal” thing?
Getting cancelled:
Complaints about “cancel culture” are also a dog whistle to those who would prefer it if polite society didn’t include anyone who doesn’t look like them. It’s ok that our culture is changing to include social protections for a wider array of individuals. This is what America is supposed to be!
It is absurd, as well, that the cries about being cancelled often come from people speaking through mainstream channels from a position of prominence. If your opinions are published in the New York Times or the Washington Post, or are aired on major TV networks, or are broadcast via your podcast to millions, your voice is not being silenced, it is being amplified.
At its core, the argument about wokeness and anti-wokeness is about who belongs and who has a say in our society. The anti-woke side wants to claim that the central issue at hand is liberalism, or freedom of expression. But in making this claim they are willfully ignoring (or just outright dismissing) the claim of the woke side, which is that societal inequity exists due to systemic discrimination and that dynamic should be remedied by the implementation of policies that seek to establish equity.
It is difficult to refute the existence of societal inequity. The question is, why does it exist? In dismissing the problem, the anti-woke position suggests something simple, something that reflects (in my opinion) the validity of the claim of the woke position in the first place: that societal inequities exists because they reflect the respective value of the participants.
In other words (the implication being), racial inequity exists because non-white people are less capable than white people. Gender inequity exists because women are less capable than men. And when it comes to the people asking to be included in the conversation by the use of new/inclusive language, well those people aren’t real in the first place, and so their claim to validity is, well, invalid.
It is unreasonable, claim the anti-woke, to ask for, let alone be granted accommodation for one’s differences (whether they be related to the color of one’s skin, one’s sexual orientation, one’s gender identity, etc.). These issues shouldn’t, and don’t, matter. There is no such thing as systemic discrimination. Instead, people are successful in life according to their capabilities alone. It is the loud complaining about inequity and the resulting “discriminatory” policies that threaten us, more so than the inequities themselves.
In his column, George Will references a “legal research paper” entitled, “The Roots of Wokeness: Title VII Damage Remedies as Potential Drivers of Attitudes Toward Identity Politics and Free Expression,” by Gail L. Heriot, a law professor from the University of San Diego. In the paper, Heriot complains that issues related to “race, sex, and national origin” seem “to have grown, especially in very recent years.”
Heriot’s primary concern appears to be that despite the civil and women’s rights movements of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, and the various laws passed in response to those movements, issues of race and sex are still problems today (the implication being that they should no longer be problematic). The culprit for the failure to successfully resolve these issues and leave them in the past where they belong? You guessed it, wokeness (encouraged by a law that provides legal recourse for intentional discrimination in employment).
This paper illustrates very nicely why we can’t just relegate this conversation to a debate about policy; the anti-woke position isn’t seeking to have that debate. They are seeking to invalidate the entire subject. Rather than identify policies she views as problematic and proffer a constructive alternative solution, Heriot uses her assessment of certain policies as ineffective to suggest that the problem they were intended to solve was illegitimate to begin with.
This is the trick deployed by anti-woke activists, and it is another example of the false logic of anti-wokeness. Just because a policy is not working well or doesn’t resolve a problem, or even contributes to that problem, does not necessarily mean that the problem shouldn’t be solved, or even be attempted to be solved, or that the problem doesn’t exist in the first place.
Anti-woke folks use the same tactic when they highlight particularly egregious examples of political correctness gone wild in order to imply that political correctness itself is the problem. Are there extreme examples of unreasonable “wokeness”? Yes, there certainly are. You know what else exists in the world? Actual discrimination. Actual bigotry, violence, and hatred. Just because someone acts unreasonably in the name of a given cause does not mean the cause itself is invalid.
There is a hyper-intellectual tone to much of the anti-woke rhetoric. It suggests that unreasonable behavior is rampant among social justice activists, as if it doesn’t also exist among everyone else. This tone plays into the latent bigotry of its audience, seeking to confirm their suspicions that those loud angry people (Blacks, women, gays) are inherently unreasonable (crazy).
They may say:
“We are just over here being reasonable, trying to have a free society, and you all have to ruin the party with your pronouns and your hair-trigger sensitivity to the micro -est of aggressions. No one has a right to avoid being offended.”
Well, you are correct Mr. Anti-woke, no one does have a right not to be offended. But that’s not the proposition here. The right they do have, and should have is to be held as equals in society, by society; to participate through democratic process; to have a say in how society functions.
When you refuse to use inclusive language; when you take offense when kinder people take issue with your open bigotry; when you complain about your rights being infringed upon just because there are social consequences to crass and intolerant behavior and language, you refuse to acknowledge the right of certain others to exist and participate within our society.
This is another facet of the hypocrisy of anti-wokeness. They cry and moan about how sensitive everyone else is, while expressing excessive sensitivity about not being “allowed” to treat other people disrespectfully. How obnoxious is that, really. You’re offended because you can’t be a jerk any more? (You can, by the way, still be a jerk, if you want. You just might end up branded a jerk, which of course would be well deserved!)
I think it’s worth highlighting that the underlying implication that “free speech” is eroded by these developments is often aimed at the social consequences to their behavior and language, rather than any actual legal ones. Free speech, after all, is a legal protection. And, as far as I know, it is well intact in our body of law. Getting fired from your job or losing your proud reputation are not the same as being locked up or held legally accountable for your actions. Freedom of speech as a legal right is just not under threat. Not in the way they suggest.
What is actually under threat, however, are democratic norms. And this is possibly my biggest issue with the seeming obsession over the ‘threat of wokeness.’ By spending so much time talking about culture war hot button issues, these commentators distract from the much bigger problem of eroding democracy. It’s hard not to read this as intentional.
The current effort to undermine and/or dismantle democratic process that is underway in the US and elsewhere is ultimately an effort to lock certain people out of the political sphere; to remove their voices from the decision making process. George Will and Gail L. Heriot complain that “identity politics” is running rampant. Maybe that’s not due to a societal sea change initiated by a particular employment policy in the Civil Rights Act of 1991. Maybe it’s because certain “identities” do not have an equal voice and some people are fighting to keep it that way.
This is an entirely separate subject, and a massive one at that. So instead of further elucidating the threat to democracy that I am alleging, I will simply point you to a single resource. There are thousands of resources, but this one alone is enough, I think, to illustrate the point.
By way of clarification, I often encounter a sentiment similar to this: Why do people have such a hard time voting? If they really cared about it they would go out of their way to make sure they can vote, just like I do.
My response: The entire point of voter suppression laws is to discourage participation. If enough obstacles are placed in the way, they will deter at least some participation in a given election. Since elections occur across vast numbers of people and often have relatively thin margins of victory, even small shifts percentage-wise can have an outsized impact on overall results. Elections are a numbers game, and these laws are an attempt to game the system. In other words, they are anti-democratic.
So, are these efforts coordinated? Who knows. What I can say is that they compliment each other nicely. If you happen to agree that certain people shouldn’t get to participate in society, shouldn’t have a say in how our government works, shouldn’t exist, even, in some cases, then perhaps you may find yourself agreeing with the anti-democratic, anti-woke crusaders.
If, however, you believe that when it comes to our political process all members of society should have a say, then perhaps you are just as ‘woke’ as George Will thinks you are, after all.
Note: After writing this post, during the proof-reading process, I came across this Youtube video about cancel culture. I think presents the issue in a helpful way. It’s about 22 minutes long. Check it out if you’re interested in understanding a broader context for the mainstream media’s treatment of this subject.