Typically, “wokeness” and “woke ideology” are terms of abuse, used against a LGBTQ variety of practices that, despite their diversity, have a similar character. Often, what is dismissed as “woke” is a new practice that is recommended, requested, enacted or enforced as a replacement for an old one.
These practices range from changing the names of streets, institutions and buildings to determining who reads to pre-school children in libraries and altering the words we use in polite conversation.
When a practice is identified as “woke,” there is an implication that the non-woke practice is better or at least equally good. Thus the dismissal of something as “woke” is an endorsement of some alternative.
If we stop there, all we will see is a power struggle between progressive and conservative values. To dig deeper, I am going to share a particular case of calling out, or language policing, as an example of wokeness.
This incident happened to a Jewish friend of mine when we were students. She was directing a play about the Holocaust and, during auditions, a young woman casually used the word “Jew” to mean cheat. When my friend challenged this, the young woman asserted that it wasn’t offensive; it was just the way people from her town talked.
In the wrong
I use this example because I think it’s clear this young woman was in the wrong. My friend wasn’t being overly sensitive and was right to call her out.
But this example is also useful because it’s fairly typical of cases where someone attempts a “woke intervention” and it’s rejected — someone follows a practice that is common in their community, a “woke” intervenor calls it out, and the person responds not with an apology or even a question, but with outright dismissal.
Often, such responses come with an explicit criticism that the “woke” intervenor is over-sensitive, irrational or controlling. Sometimes, the original speaker claims victimization at being targeted, ironically displaying the hypersensitivity often attributed to people described as woke.
Three claims
In thinking about this and similar situations, it strikes me that woke interventions tend to share the same kinds of motivations. They boil down to the following three claims about the targeted practice that justify the woke intervention:
1. The practice is offensive to the members of a group to which it pertains;
2. The practice implies something that is false about this group and reflects and reinforces this inaccuracy;
3. The practice implicitly endorses or maintains unjust or otherwise pernicious attitudes about the group that facilitate discrimination and various other harms against them.
So, in my friend’s case, she was right to call out this young woman, who had insulted her to her face and implied something about the Jewish community that is not only false but dangerously and perniciously antisemitic.
Now, in any particular instance, it is an open question whether, in fact, a specific term or practice is offensive, inaccurate or facilitates discrimination. This is where the difficult work starts.
Real effort is required to learn to see injustices that are embedded in our ordinary language and everyday practices.