Culture warriors say wokeness is dead

Michael Hiltzik, Tribune News Service

Across the intellectual heavens, the cry is heard: “Wokeness is dead.” The story is that the movement for diversity, equality and inclusion in American society and workplaces has shot its bolt.

Corporations are downplaying their diversity programmes, and some are even telling employees who pressed them for inclusive policies to go find work elsewhere.

Teachers and school librarians are on the run, forced to screen schoolbooks for any hint that America hasn’t reached perfection in its race relations, lest they be subject to arrest.

The outcome is school bookshelves devoid of books, because those that used to be there have been found wanting, or merely because no one has time to page through them in quest of textual non-conformities with white privilege.

Keep your eye on this trend. It won’t be long before culture warriors like Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., start taking credit for killing “wokeness.” At the moment, however, they’re still riding the anti-woke hobbyhorse. On Presidents Day, when we honour Presidents Lincoln and Washington (go figure), Greene seemed to advocate secession by red states to counteract “the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats.” Which issues are those? She didn’t say.

DeSantis declared that he has made Florida into a place where “woke goes to die” — apparently his rallying cry for his forthcoming presidential campaign.

The evidence of his determination is provided by the acres of vacant classroom and school library bookshelves in his state, ransacked to eradicate woke artifacts in schoolbooks.

All this raises two fundamental questions: Is wokeness really dead? And what is wokeness, anyway? One problem with assessing the rise and fall of wokeness is that the term is vacuous to the point of being meaningless. To some, it signifies acknowledging and accommodating the diversity of American society and culture; to others, it bespeaks a punitive and sanctimonious campaign against white privilege.

Conservative economist Tyler Cowen grappled with the difficulty of definition in a column proclaiming that “wokeism has peaked” last year. “On the positive side,” he wrote, wokeism “is highly aware of racism and social injustice, and is galvanised toward raising awareness. On the negative side, it can be preachy, alienating, overly concerned with symbols and self-righteous.” If Cowen was suggesting that these are two equivalent sides of the same coin, he was way off-base. Part of the problem was that he was trying to shoehorn multiple movements into a single whole.

Others have been trawling the same waters for signs of wokeness’ passing. This weekend, Noah Smith, a centre-left economist and blogger, declared, “I feel like I’m almost starting to write about wokeness in retrospect.” Among his data points was that “corporate interest in DEI (that is, diversity, equity and inclusion) seems to be waning.” Smith pointed to a recent posting by Musa Al Gharbi, a sociology researcher at Columbia University, headlined, “The ‘Great Awokening’ Is Winding Down.” Al Gharbi’s evidence included, among other things, a database showing that references in the New York Times to terms such as “sexism,” “mansplaining,” “racism” and “multiculturalism” — all ostensibly watchwords of the Woke faith — had fallen since the 2020 election.

That illustrates the difficulty of defining wokeness. Its critics on the right appreciate its very ambiguity. They can endow “wokeness” with a sinister connotation, a process that has become common among conservative culture warriors; witness the exploitation of terms such as CRT (for “critical race theory”), ESG (for environmental, social and corporate governance) and “entitlements” (for Social Security and Medicare).

Conservative politicians use these terms to represent some sort of inchoate government overreach. But the vast majority of their audience — and even the politicians themselves — couldn’t define them. For those using them as talking points, that’s a virtue.

Never mind that CRT isn’t an element of the curriculum in any grade school, that ESG is a responsible approach to investing in a world beleaguered by global warming, that Americans are — yes — “entitled” to Social Security and Medicare benefits because they’ve paid for those benefits all their working lives; repeat the term often enough with a sneer, and they can be made to symbolise for credulous listeners all that they believe is wrong with the world.

DeSantis, Greene and their ilk don’t even bother to explain what anyone should consider ominous about “wokeness.” When Florida education officials dickered with the College Board over its Advanced Placement Black studies curriculum all last year, they didn’t feel obligated to explicate what was wrong with it, ultimately ruling that the course was “inexplicably contrary to Florida law” and complaining that it was “filled with Critical Race Theory “ They guessed they would scare the hell out of the College Board, and they guessed right.

Anti-woke crusaders are thus free to find “wokeness” wherever they choose to look. Take Cowen, who is director of the Mercatus Center at Virginia’s George Mason University, a programme that was founded and has been funded by the far-right Koch network.

In his column, Cowen identified last year’s recall of three San Francisco school board members as possibly “the turning point for the fortunes of the woke” and a signal that “even left-leaning voters can put up with only so much wokeism.” He asserted that “voters were upset that the school board spent time trying to rename some schools in a more politically correct manner, rather than focusing on reopening all the schools.” He noted, in passing, that voters may also have been irked that the board instituted a lottery for admission to the city’s selective high school instead of relying on grades and test scores.

But Cowen had things upside down. All voters were mainly irked at the extended pandemic closure of the public schools; Asian voters particularly were irked that the lottery system would obstruct their kids’ access to the elite school, where they have been in the majority.

The renaming issue was a sideshow; if those other factors hadn’t existed, the renaming might not have caused more than a ripple. Incompetence, not wokeness, was on the ballot.

The latest brouhaha over woke culture involves the children’s and young adult books of Roald Dahl. Dahl’s publisher, Penguin Random House, has made extensive changes to the books for new editions, ostensibly so they conform more closely with modern mores.

Smith, the economist and blogger, notices that condemnation of the bowdlerising from the anti-racism and “cultural left” has been “near-universal” and asserts that at peak wokeness, three to five years ago, the same action would have fostered a “heated debate” among the same cultural sentries.