I promised last time to clarify the meaning of the word ”woke.” In fact, it has two meanings — and they’re so different, they contradict each other.
By one of them, any liberal can be proud to be called woke, because to be woke in this sense is to recognize bigotry and oppose it.
But by the other meaning, liberals can’t be woke, even if they want to. That’s because if you’re this kind of woke, you reject liberalism.
Here’s how this simple word ended up with two opposing definitions.
“Woke“ was first used as an adjective long ago by some black Americans. It was roughly synonymous with “awake,“ and like that word it could signify more than just “not sleeping.” It could mean “awake to what’s really happening.” And often, what was really happening to black people was racial injustice.
In a 1938 recording, the blues singer Lead Belly sang and talked about the notorious case of the Scottsboro Boys. They were nine young black men who faced imprisonment and death sentences after they were convicted on trumped-up charges of raping two white women, an all too common kind of excuse for lynchings in the Jim Crow era. In the recording, Lead Belly warns listeners to “stay woke” to the injustice that so damaged and nearly ended the lives of the Scottsboro Boys.
Documented uses of “woke” in this sense appear sporadically in the following decades, but rise after 2008. That’s when Erykah Badu recorded the song “Master Teacher,” with its refrain of “I stay woke.”
Not long after, “Stay woke” became a slogan in protests against the killing of Trayvon Martin and other black people by police and vigilantes.
Liberals could hear those words as compatible with their values, and as fulfilling them. Without generations of civil rights protests awakening everyone to racial injustice, the promise of liberal freedom would have remained hollow for many Americans — a check that had been written, but not honored, as Martin Luther King said.
But some on the left believe that America’s check will always be bad and its promise of liberal freedom will always be hollow, unless America changes radically. And when they adopted the word “woke,” they adapted its meaning to match that belief.
Members of this woke left see liberalism as a source of the oppression it claims to oppose. Not the only source, though: they believe oppression is embedded throughout the Western worldview from which liberalism emerged.
They see that worldview as something like the Matrix in the movies by the Wachowskis, who in fact were partly inspired by some of the ideas that inspire the woke left. (For example, a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation is featured in one scene.) Like characters in the Matrix, Westerners only think they’re free. They don’t realize they’re trapped within an all-encompassing illusion.
According to this woke left, everything Westerners think they know is actually determined by whatever serves the interests of people with power. Everything they’ve been taught is true or false is no more than what serves power. The same goes for everything they think is morally right or wrong.
Liberalism is seen as a part of the illusion. The liberal promise of freedom is a lie, offering only meaningless choices, like which product to consume or which of two parties to vote for, when both serve the powerful. The only true freedom is gained by exposing the hidden workings of power.
To become woke in this second sense is to learn how to do that. That requires learning a particular way of thinking.
It relies on what might be described as “postmodern critical theory,” although it’s often referred to simply as “theory,” sometimes spelled with a capital T. (For clarity, I’ll use capitalization when I’m referring to it here.)
According to Theory, oppression isn’t ultimately caused by individual oppressors. Those oppressors can hardly help themselves, because oppression is built into Western culture, Western thought, and even Western languages.
For example, the argument goes, in Western culture, male dominates female; in Western thought, science dominates nature; and in Western languages, subjects dominate objects. So for people immersed within the Western worldview, even to speak can be an oppressive act.
This critique was developed over a long time; its sources can be traced at least to the 18th century. in earlier forms, its influence rose and fell dramatically. But in recent years, in the form of Theory, it’s found new influence, especially after the horrifying murder by police of George Floyd in 2020.
Some on the left felt that liberalism failed to explain how such things could still be happening in a supposedly free and equal society, but that Theory did explain it.
Even many liberals began adopting Theory-based views on America’s social problems, especially as Theorists began consulting with corporations and other organizations on how they could address bias within their own cultures. Increasingly, the word “woke” came to be defined according to Theory, not liberalism.
And so did concepts central to both Theory and liberalism, including freedom, equality, and anti-racism, among others.
According to the Theory-inspired woke left, the liberal versions of those concepts have been discredited.
So if you want to stand up for liberalism, you’re going to need to be able to answer the woke challenge to liberalism.
That means understanding something about Theory.
But here we run into another obstacle to clarity. Theory can be complicated to the point of opacity.
For starters, there is no one Theory. As I say it’s more of a way of thinking, a meta-theory that shapes other theories, such as cultural, gender, or postcolonial theory, or probably the best known, Critical Race Theory.
Furthermore, the source works of these theories are often expressed in academic prose that can seem impenetrable.
An often-cited example is the work of the gender theorist Judith Butler, who has some very interesting ideas, but a very dense style. One of her sentences won first prize in an annual Bad Writing contest run by the journal Philosophy and Literature. Here it is:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
I’ll just give that a moment to sink in.
Butler isn’t alone. There’s no shortage of other examples of writing like this, by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and lots of others.
To be fair, writing by experts in any field can often make hard reading for non-experts. Most of us are stumped by academic works on quantum physics, for example.
Still, I think the particular form of complexity found in much of the writing about Theory is significant in itself, and I’ll have more to say about it later.
But I won’t ask you to struggle with much of it. For our purposes here, we only need to focus on a few key concepts, the ones that have been most influential on our politics, and which have been adopted for the most part by non-experts.
I’ll start by looking at why Theorists believe oppression is inherent in liberalism and the Western worldview, and whether liberalism has an answer.
That’s coming up in the next chapter.
(Painting: Girolamo Savonarola, by Fra Bartolomeo, Public domain, via Wikimedia.)
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