Are The “woke” Wars Waxing Or Waning?

A year ago, I wrote two posts for Writer Unboxed on the subject of troubling developments on the publishing front, both concerned with restricting access to certain books and subject matters: Good Intentions and the Pathway to Hell, Part 1: Book Bans and Good Intentions and the Pathway to Hell, Part 2: Sensitivity Readers.

These two phenomena mirror each other, in that one (book banning) is largely a response to the cultural concerns underlying the other, concerns often derided as “woke.” But book banning is only one weapon in the anti-woke arsenal.

As Conor Friedersdorf noted in an article for The Atlantic:

“Roughly a decade after the movement for diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, began to spread in American higher education, a political backlash is here. The Chronicle of Higher Education has tallied 80 bills since 2023 that aim to restrict DEI in some way, by banning DEI offices, mandatory diversity training, faculty diversity statements, and more. Eight have already become law, including in Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, North Dakota, and Utah. The worst of these laws violate academic independence and free speech by attempting to forbid certain ideas in the classroom.”

Some of the restrictions, such as those in Florida, are more onerous than others, but they all reveal an attempt by conservative legislatures to rein in what they believe to be excessive focus on racial identity and programs intended to counter prejudice.

Another aspect of the backlash is the renaming or restructuring of DEI programs at many corporations, hoping that by emphasizing inclusion instead of diversity or equity they can avoid vexing litigation or government counter-initiatives:

“Amid growing legal, social and political backlash, American businesses, industry groups and employment professionals are quietly scrubbing DEI from public view — though not necessarily abandoning its practice. As they rebrand programs and hot-button acronyms, they’re reassessing decades-old anti-discrimination strategies and rewriting policies that once emphasized race and gender to prioritize inclusion for all.”

Meanwhile, research on the effectiveness of DEI programs, which include such elements as more inclusive hiring practices, anti-discrimination policies in the workplace, and sensitivity training seminars, are inconclusive, with some suggestion they have little if any perceived effect on reducing prejudice.

Add to that a recent monologue by Charlamagne Tha God for The Daily Show that criticized DEI as “well-intentioned but mostly garbage,” stated that over 900 studies have shown that DEI programs don’t make the workplace better for minorities, and can actually make things worse due to “the backlash effect.” (He also compared DEI initiatives to the Black Little Mermaid: “Just because racists hate it, doesn’t mean it’s good.”) Last, he noted that the number of Black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is the same as it was five years ago, and the whole push for DEI programs in the workplace are largely for the sake of public relations and mitigating damages in discrimination lawsuits.

The comedian, who is Black, got caught serious flak for this position, but he’s absolutely correct about backlash—on both the right and the left.

As in many cases of mutual misunderstanding, it often seems as though the various parties are talking past each other. But there also seems to be a need for clarity on what exactly “woke” stands for and what it doesn’t.

Identitarian Progressivism

Although the scholars and writers most responsible for developing the collection of ideas maligned as “woke” come from a variety of backgrounds, they share a focus on battling political oppression based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability (as opposed to class, as in Marxism).

Though it originated on college campuses, its influence has spread to a number of other organizations, especially nonprofits, as well as the business community—including publishing.

It has also suffered stiff opposition on a number of fronts, none more vocal than white supremacists and religious conservatives.

[Note: In response to my piece last month focusing on Christian Nationalism, one commenter provided this link to explain what Christian Nationalism really is. Quoting from that piece: “The ‘secular neutral’ American state has given us Pride month, drag queen story hour, and child sacrifice (abortion). When one goes to school or work one has to attend Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity training (DIE) [sic] which is the secular form of a catechism.”]

The foundational principles of the Identitarian Progressive movement might be described as follows:

• A deep skepticism inspired by Michel Foucault about objective truth and “grand narratives,” and an emphasis instead on competition for power. [Note: Most postmodern philosophers have issues with truth claims that seek to be considered “objective;” American Pragmatism, from Charles Saunders Pierce to William James to John Dewey and Richard Rorty have, since the middle of the 19^th century, argued that truth is social, that it is reached by consensus through honest inquiry, and its pursuit owes more to science and democracy than the “received wisdom” of most religions.]
• The use of a form of discourse analysis, again indebted to Foucault, for explicitly political ends, a methodology inspired by Edward Said, author of Orientalism, a foundational text in anti-colonialist thought. (As his ideas became increasingly linked to identity as a kind of defining essense, he reacted negatively, remarking, “Nothing is mroe boringthan identity.”)
• An embrace of essentialist categories of identity inspired by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who coined the term “strategic essentialism” to convey both a rejection of racial essentialism as an objective truth and at the same time an embrace of identity as a political project to unite citizens oppressed on the basis of that identity. (In recent years, she, like Edward Said, has criticized the misapplication of her ideas as having adopted the essentialism while dismissing any strategic objective.)
• A pessimism about the state of Western societies, especially with respect to racism and sexism, and a preference for public policies that explicitly make how someone is treated depend on the group to which they belong, both concepts inspired by the work of Derrick Bell (one of the originators of the concept of Critical Race Theory [C.R.T.], which argues among other things that racism is so embedded in American culture that efforts to desegregate schools, neighborhoods, and the workplace are doomed to fail, and white liberals are no less enchanted with the concept of “incremental progress” than mainstream conservatives). [For a profile of Bell and his work, written by Jelani Cobb for the New Yorker, go here. It includes the following assessment of recent criticism of C.R.T.:
  • “[C]onservatives have been waging war on a wide-ranging set of claims that they wrongly ascribe to critical race theory, while barely mentioning the body of scholarship behind it or even Bell’s name. As Christopher F. Rufo, an activist who launched the recent crusade, said on Twitter, the goal from the start was to distort the idea into an absurdist touchstone. ‘We have successfully frozen their brand—”critical race theory”—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category,’ he wrote. Accordingly, C.R.T. has been defined as Black-supremacist racism, false history, and the terrible apotheosis of wokeness. Patricia Williams, one of the key scholars of the C.R.T. canon, refers to the ongoing mischaracterization as ‘definitional theft.’”
• An embrace of an intersectional logic for political activism—which argues for recognition that some members of oppressed groups face discrimination on multiple fronts, e.g. Black women—as well as a deep-seated skepticism about the ability of members of different identity groups to understand each other, both ideas associated with Kimberlé Crenshaw, professor at UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School.
• An emphasis on anti-racism as a focal point on critiques of the current political, cultural and social realities of the U.S., inspired by the work of Ibram X. Kendi, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Robin DiAngelo.

The movement is distinguished by its advocacy for oppressed minorities across the spectrum, as well as a skepticism if not pessimism concerning the possibility of reconciliation between such minorities and the culture’s dominant group(s).

For that reason, Identitarian Progressives tend to reject liberalism’s emphasis on universal values and neutral rules, arguing that values are culturally relative and so-called neutral rules invariably serve the interests of the dominant power group.

It also fostered a movement to encourage members of dominant groups to “check their privilege” by recognizing the various assumptions made about oneself and others that are part of the often unconscious subtext at work in the culture. For example: the tendency of white people to identity members of racial minorities by their race but to think of themselves as race-neutral individuals.

However, this pessimism has created an atmosphere of polarization along identity lines. In the realm of publishing, this has led at times to online “mobbing” of writers accused of, among other things, “cultural appropriation” (inappropriate use of subject matter, concepts, techniques, or language from ethnic or cultural groups not one’s own) and “othering” (objectification of individuals outside one’s own cultural, ethnic, racial or gender identity group). The judgments concerning such matters are often subjective, the online attacks all too often occur before a book has even been released, and among the naysayers are people who have not even read the work in question.

Also, the skepticism about members of different identity groups being able to understand each other has elevated “lived experience” to a place of honor that empathy and imagination have difficulty equaling, a matter of no small concern for writers of fiction. This can unfortunately confine each of us to a silo of our own personal experience with virtually no ability to claim authenticity about anything else.

Critiques

There is also an attempt to scrub language of usages that carry discriminatory connotations. This turn to “equity language” is part of a “renegotiation of speech norms,” determining who gets to decide who can say what, that historian Thomas Zimmer considers perfectly natural given the emergence of previously marginalized voices into the national conversation.

However, this focus on terminology is not without its detractors. For example, in his article “The Moral Case Against Equity Language,” George Packer argues:

“The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide discourages using the words stand, Americans, blind, and crazy. The first two fail at inclusion, because not everyone can stand and not everyone living in this country is a citizen. The third and fourth, even as figures of speech (“Legislators are blind to climate change”), are insulting to the disabled. The guide also rejects the disabled in favor of people living with disabilities, for the same reason that enslaved person has generally replaced slave : to affirm, by the tenets of what’s called ‘people-first language,’ that ‘everyone is first and foremost a person, not their disability or other identity.’

“Although the guides refer to language ‘evolving,’ these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people. They are handed down in communiqués written by obscure ‘experts’ who purport to speak for vaguely defined ‘communities,’ remaining unanswerable to a public that’s being morally coerced.

“This huge expense of energy to purify language reveals a weakened belief in more material forms of progress. If we don’t know how to end racism, we can at least call it structural. The guides want to make the ugliness of our society disappear by linguistic fiat. Even by their own lights, they do more ill than good—not because of their absurd bans on ordinary words like congresswoman and expat, or the self-torture they require of conscientious users, but because they make it impossible to face squarely the wrongs they want to right, which is the starting point for any change. Prison does not become a less brutal place by calling someone locked up in one a person experiencing the criminal-justice system. Obesity isn’t any healthier for people with high weight. It’s hard to know who is likely to be harmed by a phrase like native New Yorker or under fire; I doubt that even the writers of the guides are truly offended. But the people in [Katherine Boo’s] Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity know they’re poor; they can’t afford to wrap themselves in soft sheets of euphemism. Equity language doesn’t fool anyone who lives with real afflictions. It’s meant to spare only the feelings of those who use it.

“The project of the guides is utopian, but they’re a symptom of deep pessimism. They belong to a fractured culture in which symbolic gestures are preferable to concrete actions, argument is no longer desirable, each viewpoint has its own impenetrable dialect, and only the most fluent insiders possess the power to say what is real. What I’ve described is not just a problem of the progressive left. The far right has a different vocabulary, but it, too, relies on authoritarian shibboleths to enforce orthodoxy. It will be a sign of political renewal if Americans can say maddening things to one another in a common language that doesn’t require any guide.”

Another criticism of this movement comes from philosopher Susan Neiman, who notes this about the history leading up to the current identity-based consensus:

“Identity politics embodies a major shift that began in the mid twentieth century: the subject of history was no longer the hero but the victim. Two world wars had undermined the urge to valorize traditional forms of heroism. The impulse to shift our focus to the victims of history began as an act of justice. History had been the story of the victors, while the victims’ voices went unheard. This condemned the victims to a double death: once in the flesh, once again in memory. To turn the tables and insist that the victims’ stories enter the narrative was just a part of righting old wrongs. If victims’ stories have claims on our attention, they have claims on our sympathies and systems of justice. When slaves began to write their memoirs, they took steps toward subjectivity and won recognition – and slowly but certainly, recognition’s rewards.”

She adds, however:

“What concerns me most are the ways in which contemporary voices considered to be leftist have abandoned the philosophical ideas that are central to any left-wing standpoint: a commitment to universalism over tribalism, a firm distinction between justice and power, and a belief in the possibility of progress. All these ideas are connected…”

“Woke demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. In the process it often concludes that all history is criminal…”

“Those who have learned in college to distrust every claim to truth will hesitate to acknowledge falsehood.”

Finally, Eboo Patel, an American Shi’ite Muslim of Gujarati Indian heritage and founder and president of Interfaith America, made the following observation in a recent interview with Yascha Mounk:

“What’s happened is an interesting critique morphed into a paradigm which then shifted into a regime. Anti-racism is an interesting critique. ‘Here’s what you’re not talking about: you’re not talking about structural racism; you’re not talking about oppressed peoples; you’re not talking about oppressors, etc.’ So I think that’s an interesting critique. But when it becomes a paradigm, it seeks to explain all of the facts of the world. And now you’re in trouble, because there’s lots of things that anti-racism doesn’t explain. It doesn’t explain why 57% of the people in higher education are women and only 43% are men, right? That is not usefully explained by any kind of classic left-wing perspectives of patriarchy, structural racism, etc. It doesn’t explain the opioid epidemic in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, rural Ohio, etc.

“Once you lock yourself into an explanatory framework or a paradigm, well, now you’re in the situation of kind of twisting the facts of the world to fit your worldview, which, by the way, I think is the cardinal sin of an intellectual. But actually what’s happened is in some places it became even worse than a paradigm; it became a regime. Now, all of a sudden, it has coercive force and the ability to punish: ‘We are going to require you to write a DEI statement that agrees with our perspective for you to be considered a faculty member at this university. We are going to advertise our bias response team and we are going to encourage you to report what we think of as bias in order for us to kind of launch an investigation.’”

However, he also adds:

“I think things are getting better. And I think that it’s because there are a set of really kind of solution-oriented leaders in lots of places, including DEI departments, that are leading things towards the better. But for a period of time, there was no doubt that the dominant diversity paradigm is what I would call ‘demonize, demean, and divide.’

“You demonize some groups of people based literally only on their identity—because they’re white, male, straight. They are only ever bad. You require other groups of people to demean themselves, to only tell a victim’s story. I mean, I want to tell you all the ways that I’m inspired by Islam. It is not Islamophobia that makes me a Muslim. It’s Islam that makes me a Muslim. I don’t want to tell a victim story. That’s demeaning. I want to tell an inspiring story. Identities are principally sources of pride, not status as a victim. So you demonize some people, you demean other people, and then you divide everybody. And it’s a battlefield approach to diversity.

“It’s not that I want that perspective entirely excluded. I just don’t want it to be the paradigm or the default position, right? I think a much better way of approaching diversity work is what we call at Interfaith America ‘respect, relate, cooperate.’ You respect people across their differences. You build relationships between diverse communities and you cooperate on concrete projects to serve the common good.”

Zimmer, for his part, along with others in the progressive camp, consider commentators such as Packer, Mounk, and Friedersdorf to be part of an “alliance of reaction between the far right and the center,” in which “self-regarding centrists or liberals…have all presented slightly more polite versions…about the corrosive effect of dangerous leftist, ‘woke’ ideas.'” In so doing, they wittingly or unwittingly serve the interests of those who seek to reestablish the privilege of traditional hierarchies—specifically those asserting white Christian male hegemony:

“[T]he story George Packer presents…is very much in line with what [Christopher] Rufo has been propagating. Last summer, Rufo published his manifesto in book form – and the title serves as the rallying cry for the counter-revolutionary Right: America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo needs us to believe radical leftism is so ubiquitous, so dangerous, that nothing but an equally radical counter-revolution to seize control of the state and all major institutions in order to impose proper American values on the country will do to save the United States. His sole mission is to convince enough people that there is such a thing as “The Left” – a unified, homogeneous, devious, radical force – that is dominating nearly all aspects of life in America by imposing a dangerous, subversive ideology on the country. And the genealogy of that leftist ideology is very close to the one Packer presents: A straight line of evil ideas from the “cultural Marxism” of Critical Theory (Marcuse) to the protests of 2020.”

Given these elements of backlash from both ends of the spectrum, will DEI and other programs aimed at battling prejudice and spotlighting the contributions of previously marginalized voices fade away or even disappear altogether? Absent the use of governmental power to silence them, which is happening in many states and which some conservative commentators like Christopher Rufo advocate, it seems highly unlikely that BIPOC writers and commentators will go gently into the dark night. And thank goodness for that. But that doesn’t guarantee the movement toward greater equality and inclusion will continue unimpeded. In fact, its detractors can ill afford to lose “wokism” as a an agenda item for rallying the base.

The question now, in my humble opinion, is how can we retain the goals of anti-discrimination and pursue a multicultural pluralistic egalitarian society without encouraging destructive polarization on the one hand and an even greater backlash invigorated by government oppression on the other?

Possible Strategies for Forging Ahead

One of the first things I think we should all try to do is denounce the online “mobbing” that seeks to shame people into silence. Disagreement is not only okay, it’s important—as John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, “He who knows only his own side of the case hardly knows that.”

But to make sure that disagreement doesn’t devolve into self-congratulatory preening, vindictive shaming, or moral narcissism, a few principles to keep in mind would be:

• Principle of charity: Give people the benefit of the doubt, and don’t condemn their motives absent clear evidence that they knowingly serve a pernicious agenda.
• Mutual respect: In the words of Eboo Patel, “respect, relate, cooperate.” Colin Marshall, an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, recently wrote: “In his final book on ethics, The Doctrine of Virtue, Kant writes that each of us has a certain duty when we try to correct others’ beliefs. If we think they’re mistaken, we shouldn’t dismiss them as ‘absurdities’ or ‘poor judgment,’ he says, but must suppose that their views ‘contain some truth.’ What Kant is describing might sound like humility – just recognizing that other people often know things we don’t. But it goes beyond that. This moral duty to find truth in others’ mistakes is based on helping the other person “preserve his respect for his own understanding,” Kant claims. In other words, even when we encounter obviously false points of view, morality calls on us to help the person we’re talking to maintain their self-respect – to find something reasonable in their views.”
• Speaking of humility: There are some who simply reject the idea of a person from the dominant cultural group—especially white men—being able or even allowed to represent members of another group in their fiction. I prefer the advice of John Coltrane, who remarked, “When there is something you do not understand, you must go humbly to it.” This applies especially to the task of portraying characters from a cultural, religious, ethnic, or gender identity group different from one’s own. Although “sensitivity readers” aka “authenticity readers” have problems of their own—for example, what grants a single person with a specific cultural makeup the right to claim expertise when addressing issues concerning the entire group to which they belong?—there are groups such as Salt and Sage that have a good track record of helping authors with research into culturally diverse matters. This is simply another form of editorial review, not Maoist reeducation.
• Avoid name-calling: Labelling someone a sexist, a racist, a Marxist, a fascist, a Nazi, etc., may feel good in the moment but it makes us guilty of the same crime we’re trying to pin on somebody else. That crime is objectification, denying the complex humanity of the other person in service of rejecting their right to be heard. Ideas can be racist, programs can be sexist, institutions can be fascist, etc., but to say the same of a human being is to reduce them from a subject with agency and insight to a mere thing.
• Clear statement of values: You may or may not believe in universal value (or neutral rules to enforce them) but for your own sake if nothing else, think deeply about what you yourself believe when it comes to issues of race, religion, culture, discrimination, etc. Otherwise, we’re all too easily swayed by the loudest, most fearsome voices in a conversation, rather than guided by our own convictions.
• Focus on excellence not recrimination: Resist the temptation to accuse others of committing some unforgivable sin (especially in service to self-congratulation) and instead seek to emphasize how a work under consideration does or does not strive for artistic, intellectual, or moral excellence. This does not mean viewing art in purely aesthetic terms—nor does it mean prioritizing style over content. It means honestly trying to appreciate the work on its own terms.
• Avoid absolutes: In a 2021 essay titled, “The Illusion of Ideology: Christian Nationalism, Critical Theory & the Battle for America,” retired missionary and educator Ronald P. Hesselgrave, PhD argued that the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer provided guidance on resisting the allure of perfection. “[C]hoosing what one perceives to be the ‘absolute good’ may sometimes be the very worst course of action. This assumes that we can avoid guilt, when, in fact, ‘every person who acts responsibility becomes guilty.’ Recognition of our own moral fallibility and fallenness calls for humility and openness toward those with whom we may disagree, thus reversing the great untruth of ‘Us’ vs ‘Them’. Bonhoeffer recognized that one of the great temptations is moral self-righteousness. In the days before his execution [by the Nazis], he wrote: ‘Nothing that we despise in the other is entirely absent from ourselves.’”
• Try forgiveness: Given that last quote, we might follow up with the simple truth that we all make mistakes, sometimes glaring ones. To attack others while not recognizing one’s own capacity for error is to be morally dishonest. Should someone make what you consider to be an unacceptable breach of moral norms, first take a deep breath. Try to find a way to connect with the person, not demonize or vilify them. As simple a technique as saying, “I just want to be sure I understand what you’re saying,” can help defuse what might otherwise be a heated and ultimately unproductive confrontation.

Will acting in accordance with principles such as these eliminate the entrenchment of various identity groups and the hostilities among them? As long as one group sees an advantage in demonizing another, something humans have done since they first started forming groups as a survival mechanism, it’s doubtful that any peace effort will be permanent. But for those of us who embrace the ideals that animate the drive for greater diversity, equality and inclusion, a simple lowering of the temperature and a willingness to listen and not just condemn would be a positive step, and one well within our power to make.

What say you—do you believe that the “war against woke” is waning, changing, or just getting started?

Is the backlash against DEI and related efforts even legitimate or just another symptom of systemic racism?

Should we rethink issues of diversity and equality and inclusion due to the bitter divisiveness that exists, or should we accept those divisions as part of the natural consequence of renegotiating speech codes and the realignment of power?

Finally, in fiction, have we created an environment in which imagination and empathy are secondary to lived experience, and what does that mean for representation of characters outside one’s own cultural, ethnic, religious, or gender identity group?