At its simplest level, being woke means being sensitive to any action or statement by a straight white person (usually male) which appears to treat anyone who is a person of color, engages in unconventional sexual practices, or is female as an inferior. It is a form of heightened consciousness filtered through history.
In its purest form, wokeness is an all-encompassing world view, similar in its way to Marxism, which revolves around issues of identity rather than class. You could call it identity determinism. As the story goes, straight white men inevitably oppress people of color, and falsely attribute whatever success they have in life to their own efforts instead of their ability to steal from oppressed groups, simply because they are straight white men. The phenomenon exists regardless of income, education, or any other variable. Hence the electoral success of Donald Trump, and his high degree of support among white people; they were just doing what comes naturally to them.
Here are some of the characteristics of wokeness:
- A woke person completely rejects the conventional and comfortable narrative tying American history to freedom and progress. To a woke person, America is, and always has been, a land of oppression. The Declaration of Independence was a breathtaking piece of hypocrisy, the Constitution enshrined existing racial prejudices into our system of government, and Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement were failures, as evidenced by the wealth gap separating white people and people of color. The rest of the story doesn’t really matter in the big picture.
- There is a hierarchy of wokeness, with discrimination against African-Americans at the top. The grievances of women, gay people, and other minority groups get lower priority, although they are not completely ignored. White women in particular can be viewed as oppressors in some contexts.
- To the extent there is a remedy for hundreds of years of unmitigated oppression, it is through reparations. Reparations for African-Americans get most of the publicity, of course, but there have been proposals to extend the concept to Native Americans and gay people, as well.
So what can you do if you’re white and woke? I will post on that tomorrow.