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weI am not woke, and I'm not anti-woke either. What do I mean by that?
I don't subscribe to the idea that demographic characteristics, such as race, trump human uniqueness or our ability to connect with one another within or across cultures. I don't believe that there need to be segregated spaces for "people of colour" (an expression many of us hate, though we—though not I—use it for expediency). I support feminism, anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights not because I want these things to be central to my identity; instead, it's because I want them to be less relevant.
"Cancelling" Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Molière will not lead us to liberation; instead, it will tear apart cultural narratives and leave us with a congeries of disconnected snippets in their place. Cultures, especially multi-ethnic cultures like Russia, Britain, China, America or France, share common histories as well as particular ones. We can tell the tales of Kievan Rus and Catherine the Great, as well as the histories of the Chechens and Buryats (and Pushkin straddles both sides of this debate, since he was biracial). We can talk of Lev Tolstoy, Thomas Paine, John Bunyan, Sojourner Truth, Cherríe Moraga and Sherman Alexie without sacrificing anything. To tell the whole story, we need to include the dominant and subaltern narratives. To omit both is to tell half a story—and make it impossible to share a common culture, whether within a nation-state or across humanity as a whole.
I want to read more criticisms of wokeness, but a lot of these critics are reactionary, right-wing thinkers who rely on racism and sexism (including homophobia and transphobia). This is where you find inchoate fascism, in the words of Vladimir Putin or Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump. These reactionary commentators are just as quick to "cancel" as their woke counterparts, though they call it different things: "standing up for parents' rights", "protecting our heritage" and so on. They are just as obsessed with demographics as the woke left, but from the other side.
In both the woke and anti-woke narrative, we split our opponents into black and white (or Black and white, or black and White), good and evil, worthless or inestimable. An obsession over phenotypic or chromosomal characteristics, whether race or genital configuration, leads to fascism. Although woke activists are rightly opposed to fascism, their conflation of phenotype and virtue will not drive off, and has not driven off, reactionary forces. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, you cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools, and biological essentialism is where fascism comes from.
No, woke activists are not fascists, and I know they won't kill me. But their approaches may embolden those who do. I worry that the United States in particular will have a second civil war if they continue down this path.
What shall we do instead? We need to focus on what unites us, rather than divides us. In the classroom, we must read and talk about the historical figures that have shaped our cultures, both the virtuous and less-than-virtuous. We must fight against essentialist ideas that treat men as superior to women (or women as superior to men), that treat white people as superior to black people or members of other races (or the other way around), that treat straight or non-trans people as superior to their LGBTQ+ counterparts (or the other way around). We must emphasise our common humanity, our shared desire to make the world better than it was before, our need to raise children safely to become happy, fully integrated adults. We must care for our wounded, feed the hungry, abolish poverty, educate our peoples. And to do this, we must put a stop to this kind of essentialist thinking that leads to dehumanisation.
I don't subscribe to the idea that demographic characteristics, such as race, trump human uniqueness or our ability to connect with one another within or across cultures. I don't believe that there need to be segregated spaces for "people of colour" (an expression many of us hate, though we—though not I—use it for expediency). I support feminism, anti-racism and LGBTQ+ rights not because I want these things to be central to my identity; instead, it's because I want them to be less relevant.
"Cancelling" Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Molière will not lead us to liberation; instead, it will tear apart cultural narratives and leave us with a congeries of disconnected snippets in their place. Cultures, especially multi-ethnic cultures like Russia, Britain, China, America or France, share common histories as well as particular ones. We can tell the tales of Kievan Rus and Catherine the Great, as well as the histories of the Chechens and Buryats (and Pushkin straddles both sides of this debate, since he was biracial). We can talk of Lev Tolstoy, Thomas Paine, John Bunyan, Sojourner Truth, Cherríe Moraga and Sherman Alexie without sacrificing anything. To tell the whole story, we need to include the dominant and subaltern narratives. To omit both is to tell half a story—and make it impossible to share a common culture, whether within a nation-state or across humanity as a whole.
I want to read more criticisms of wokeness, but a lot of these critics are reactionary, right-wing thinkers who rely on racism and sexism (including homophobia and transphobia). This is where you find inchoate fascism, in the words of Vladimir Putin or Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump. These reactionary commentators are just as quick to "cancel" as their woke counterparts, though they call it different things: "standing up for parents' rights", "protecting our heritage" and so on. They are just as obsessed with demographics as the woke left, but from the other side.
In both the woke and anti-woke narrative, we split our opponents into black and white (or Black and white, or black and White), good and evil, worthless or inestimable. An obsession over phenotypic or chromosomal characteristics, whether race or genital configuration, leads to fascism. Although woke activists are rightly opposed to fascism, their conflation of phenotype and virtue will not drive off, and has not driven off, reactionary forces. To paraphrase Audre Lorde, you cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools, and biological essentialism is where fascism comes from.
No, woke activists are not fascists, and I know they won't kill me. But their approaches may embolden those who do. I worry that the United States in particular will have a second civil war if they continue down this path.
What shall we do instead? We need to focus on what unites us, rather than divides us. In the classroom, we must read and talk about the historical figures that have shaped our cultures, both the virtuous and less-than-virtuous. We must fight against essentialist ideas that treat men as superior to women (or women as superior to men), that treat white people as superior to black people or members of other races (or the other way around), that treat straight or non-trans people as superior to their LGBTQ+ counterparts (or the other way around). We must emphasise our common humanity, our shared desire to make the world better than it was before, our need to raise children safely to become happy, fully integrated adults. We must care for our wounded, feed the hungry, abolish poverty, educate our peoples. And to do this, we must put a stop to this kind of essentialist thinking that leads to dehumanisation.
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—V.
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Oh! Also Liana Kerzner (games journalist). Just Google them. :)
Being at all centrist on the issue gets you dogpiled so it's... very find to find a well-written or nuanced take. much more money to be made for producing simple us-vs-them content. :( so it's all just their perspectives.
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—V.
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I was just thinking earlier about how frustrated I get with rhetoric that treats being gay/bi/queer/etc. as a virtue in contrast to boring, conservative straight-cisness, where queerness or LGBTQ+ness becomes a cipher for coolness, originality, radicalism, and so on. This bothers me on so many different levels - for one, I'd rather be judged on my own merits rather than have them assumed on the basis of my sexuality/gender identity/presentation (and I am NOT cool at all, as proven by my use of the word "cool" in 2023). I'm absolutely with you on the dangers of essentialism in this and similar discourses.
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I hate the idea of being queer as a virtue too. Yes, I'm trans/queer, but I... I don't want that to be the centre of who I am. The problem is that the right fixates on demographics as a pretext for discrimination, and a lot of the left focuses on demographic identity as a virtue in itself. And the "anti-woke" contrarians use their opposition to identity politics as a way to practise the same old sexism and racism we know and hate, thereby imitating their right-wing opponents.
—V.