Last week I saw this definition of "woke" by Tyler Austin Harper, an African American academic I read sometimes on Twitter:
An attitude prioritizing identities related to race, gender, and sexuality over class identities, and which reduces politics to ritualized performances of correct language use and self-examination that are designed to purge one’s inner bigot without requiring material sacrifice.
I understand where he's coming from, but he's wrong.
First, what he's describing here is what used to be called "political correctness," though that was as much of an aggravated misnomer as "woke" is now. I wonder what it was called before that. Despite its association with liberals and the left, a fixation on correct terminology over content can be found all over the political spectrum, and probably throughout history. Today's American Right has its own totems, from "DEI," "CRT," "grooming," to "Merry Christmas," "There are only two genders," and "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." And while I understand his formulation, it's composed in language that only an academic could love, and a left-wing academic at that: MAGA would see language like "class identities" as paradigm wokeness.
Second, while he's describing a recognizable attitude, it certainly isn't what Leadbelly meant when he advised his listeners to "stay woke." Nor, at the other end, is what the Guardian writer I quoted in my previous post on this matter meant by the term.
But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke.
That's the beauty of such words, I suppose. They allow you to deride and dismiss people you disagree with -- or think you do, since you don't have to listen to or understand their actual views; with luck, they don't understand their views either, they're just using different shibboleths. I've often gotten pushback from people I challenged to clarify their positions, because they couldn't do so and didn't see why it mattered. They thought I was being sophistical, or "showing off," though throwing around "woke" is showing off one's moral superiority if anything is. I ask them about this when it becomes obvious that they are talking past each other, assuming that they mean the same thing by a key word ("woke," say, or "God") when they don't. Using these words can produce an illusion of agreement, but it's only an illusion. True, it's easy to get bogged down while trying to sort out what you mean or believe, but that doesn't seem any worse to me than flailing around in mutual incomprehension because neither of you knows what the other means.
Although Harper is correct to criticize the attitude he does, it's not as if he's the first to do so: he has plenty of predecessors who denounced "political correctness" for decades before him. Since he's defining a part of the problem as if it were all of the problem, he's coming close to the irrational people Sartre criticized in his essay on anti-semitism, who "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed." The "one superb word" in this case is "woke."
Someone tried to brush aside this problem in another context recently by pointing out that words change their meaning over time. It's true, they do, but usually by adding new meanings that co-exist with old ones, which leads to the confusion I'm talking about here. By "woke" do I mean merely "alert," with Leadbelly, or politically and morally enlightened, like the Guardian writer, or virtue-signalling, with Harper? The most common meaning in the US today, I would argue, is none of these: it's the MAGA meaning of any and all opposition to bigotry and injustice, with (as with "political correctness") the smug assumption that their comfort with bigotry is itself truly correct and woke. They try to sell their sloganeering as "common sense" rather than "woke," but "common sense" is another virtue-signalling evasion of thinking.
If Harper thinks that right-wing opposition to "wokeness" has anything to do with a sophisticated class analysis that rejects mere theatrical posturing in favor of a thoughtful, informed stance, he's tripping - but I don't think he took the actual right-wing stance into account. While I appreciate his take to some extent, I see it as part of the problem, not a step toward a solution.
