Perhaps "Woke 1.0" is an Admission of Past Mistakes and a Commitment to Doing Better

So. Some progressive people, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are expressing measured regrets about their past embrace of the most extreme expressions of social justice insanity, and other people are feeling feelings about that. Meanwhile this tragic, absurd Jason Arday situation is thrusting the incredibly unhealthy culture of our university system into the public spotlight, drawing attention to academia’s incredible condescension towards Black scholars and the culture of fear within academic circles. This is a pregnant moment. There’s tons of prominent left-leaning people who for years have quietly harbored profound skepticism towards social justice politics, and they’ve been heartened by the loosening of social justice mores in the past several years, but they’ve still stayed quiet. I tell people with unapologetic social justice politics all the time - if you think that the “anti-woke” pundits are the only people who stand against you, you’re very mistaken. A lot of people are deeply uncomfortable about whatever remains of “woke,” but they’re afraid to say so. (And some are afraid to admit that other people are afraid, and pretend to not know why they would be….) Me, you can talk to. You know how I feel. I always thought that was better for everyone.

Now that events are conspiring to force some of these unhappy conversations back into the center of debate, a lot of people are scrambling for the safety of the old social justice two-step: “That’s not happening, but it’s good that it’s happening.” First you deny that something is happening, then you admit that it’s happening but act like you always thought it was good. That’s what happened with media and the campus social justice controversies of the early 2010s; as I’ve pointed out a thousand times, the average liberal journalist did not defend the absurdities of campus activists at first, but instead denied that they mattered… right up until the social costs of failing to stand with those activists became apparent, at which point they started pretending that they had always supported those students and their politics. An entire generation of Obama Democrat center-left pundits and reporters were suddenly quoting Gloria Anzaldua and pretending to have always used the term BIPOC. Well, we never had the woke postmortem, in media or anywhere else; we never actually had the conversation about how a majority of people who work in media had a sudden and massive ideological transformation that most have now quietly walked back without admitting to doing so. And until we do have those conversations, we’re stuck in this weird, confused space where we’re post-woke without actually hashing out what in woke 1.0 was worth keeping and what’s worthy of jettisoning.

For an example of the kind of confusion I’m talking about, here’s moral idiot Ryan Broderick. Broderick is a man who theatrically left Substack because he refused to share a network with far-right extremists but still participates on Elon Musks’s X, which tells you a couple things about Broderick - one, that he’s desperately invested in the approval of the internet strangers he calls his peers, and so can’t leave X despite the obvious absurdity of doing so while calling Substack a platform for bigots, and two, that he’s not very bright. His piece on woke 1.0 betrays the same kind of deep moral confusion: he knows he’s mad about something, he’s sure the right is getting a big boost out of all of this, but he’s utterly incapable of actually resolving the contradictions in his own perspective. Here he is responding to New York City council member Chi Ossé admitting that “woke 1.0” was a little crazy:

I’m actually his constituent, so I’d love to ask what woke 1 is and why it was crazy. Was #MeToo crazy? Was protesting police killing unarmed Black people live on camera crazy? Were the counter-protesters that were attacked and the one that was even murdered at Charlottesville crazy? Were all the women in politics, journalism, and entertainment that were SWATed and doxxed and chased off the internet — and out of their jobs — by gamergaters crazy? Was it crazy to spend a decade living in fear of incel spree shooters? Or are we just talking about stupid internet shit that you, personally, saw in 2021 and, therefore, it’s something no normal person needs to actually care about?

Let’s set aside the fact that it is indeed crazy to spend a decade living in fear of school shooters, given that you’re more likely to be killed by a lawnmower. I have to say, as much as I think Broderick is essentially like if the sheer sucking desire to be approved of by internet strangers was turned into a real boy by a mischievous genie, he kind of cooked here. Because this is a masterpiece of having it both ways, embedded in enough layers of meta nonsense to avoid actually declaring what he himself thinks; by defining this as a set of questions for Ossé, he doesn’t actually have to resolve the basic contradiction here. Broderick’s first sentences suggest strongly that woke 1.0 was good, actually - that it was a noble struggle against racism and sexism. OK. Some people think that and that’s fine, they can argue that. But his last sentence strongly suggests that in fact woke 1.0 was just irrelevant internet nonsense and that “normal” people don’t need to care about it. It may occur to you that these are utterly incompatible attitudes! If it was just Broderick, who cares, right. But many, many people are still trying to take this approach - stepping from one foot to another constantly, going from “that’s not happening” or “that doesn’t matter” to “that’s happening and it matters and it’s good.” But you can’t have both, guys. The woke moment was noble and correct or it was irrelevant internet nonsense, but it can’t be both. Hey, Ryan! Why don’t you answer your own question? Was woke 1.0 a noble struggle for justice, or was it internet nonsense? It can’t be both!

There is of course another option, which is to praise what deserves praise and to criticize what deserves criticism, to separate the good from the bad… which is exactly what Ossé and AOC are trying to do. But Broderick and the rest of the dead-enders, which happens to include a stunningly large portion of the people in our establishment media, can’t do that. They can’t say “X was good but, yeah, Y was bad” because it would violate the most sacred compact that media liberals have: the preeminence of not being owned. Before any moral or political commitment, that’s their ultimate law, that they can’t admit fault, can’t suggest failure, can’t introduce the possibility that they’ve ever been weak or vulnerable. Go look at BlueSky. Find any issue of controversy you please. What you will find, again and again, is the insistence that there’s no controversy at all, that no political questions are hard or challenging, that all decent people already know exactly what the right thing is and the only problem is that the world is full of cruel idiots who won’t let Michael Hobbes serve as the philosopher king. That sneering, smarmy, self-impressed attitude has become the core of modern liberalism. And so even though most of them won’t actually make the affirmative case for the immediate and total dismantling of all systems of law enforcement today, like they did six years ago, they also can’t admit that they got anything wrong when they demanded exactly that. So we’re stuck.

But the absurdities of the peak woke era were indeed many and were indeed corrosive. Some of them were just absurd; some were more actively destructive. As time passes, more and more people are invested in letting the excesses fall into the mists of history. (Because they’re practicing the politics of avoidance.) But it’s true that, to pick more or less at random, a white woman’s painting of Emmett Till inspired not just calls to remove it from a gallery but demands that it be destroyed; that a Mexican utilities worker was fired for supposedly giving the “white supremacist OK symbol” in his truck despite the fact that the whole thing was a 4chan prank played on gullible liberals; that a UCLA lecturer was suspended for declining to grade Black students more leniently in the wake of George Floyd’s killing; that a curator at SFMOMA was forced to resign after defending the practice of continuing to acquire works from white artists; that a professor lost her position at Hamline University after she showed a 14th-century devotional painting of Muhammad in an Islamic art history class despite giving advance warning and students the right to opt out; that a framework for how to teach ethnic studies in math in Seattle public schools called for using math class time on how Western culture has appropriated math and how math has been used to oppress people of color, a framework which was celebrated by the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics; that corporate training PowerPoint slides said explicitly that white employees should “try to be less white,” maximizing controversy for zero gain; that a Portland burrito shop closed after massive controversy over “cultural appropriation”; and on and on.

Maybe my first overall pick would be the idea, expressed by two different Ivy League public health experts in this New York Times piece, that white people should be disadvantaged in receiving Covid vaccine access by explicit policy because they’re privileged. That’s a little extreme! Most of anyone would find that extreme - not just most conservatives, not just most white people, but most of all kinds of people. I assure you that “essential medical care should be distributed based on a hierarchy of racial desert” is a pretty wild thing to say in the eyes of people of all races and political parties and value systems. And it’s exactly the sort of thing that people now like to pretend never happened. But it did happen. Would Broderick support that now? I don’t know; his piece (titled “What Was Woke?”) is so busy practicing avoidance that it takes no stance on the two options it advances itself, the possibility that the woke era was a righteous fight for justice and the possibility that it was an irrelevant internet moment. And I’m afraid he’s in good company. The absurdities of that period were too stupid to associate oneself with, but also we can’t ever show weakness in front of the Republicans,. and we can never, ever be owned, for to be owned is the worst thing we could ever be. So we can’t do what AOC and Ossé are doing, however clumsy and self-serving they may be, and offer some acknowledgment that our broad ideological tendency got some things badly wrong.

I think woke actually was and is a thing. I don’t think it’s undefinable. I don’t think it’s uniquely difficult to parse. I don’t think, actually, that the term is particularly vague or loose in a world where people navigate terms like “liberal” and “conservative” every single day without issue despite the obvious breadth and complications inherent to them. I think that what we call woke, and what I prefer to call social justice politics, refers to a specific political and intellectual movement. It’s a movement that took abstruse concepts from the academic humanities and social sciences and aggressively introduced them into conventional American liberalism, casualized accusations of racism and sexism and other bigotries, demanded that anyone who criticized their idea and tactics was necessarily guilty of racism and sexism, and created a condition of massive mutual surveillance where everyone constantly policed everyone else’s morals. And it was bad. Some people, like me, were willing to say that it was bad at the time. That racism and sexism and homophobia and assorted other ills are real and need to be remedied doesn’t excuse the groupthink, the power games, the vindictiveness, the illiberalism, and the absolute lack of grace that emerged from that moment. We don’t have to condemn everyone who participated. We can learn and move on and do better next time. But to do that, we have to have these conversations, and we’re not helped by people like Broderick practicing avoidance with the two-step routine, the “Uh, being woke just meant being opposed to cops killing innocent Black people!, but also it was all a silly internet moment that didn’t mean anything, OK?”

In an NYT piece on the collapse of Jason Arday’s lies and its sad consequences, an education professor that had served as a mentor towards him said that “he had been ill-served by university administrators’ carelessness in their efforts to demonstrate their commitment to diversity.” I can quibble with the implied assignation of blame, here - forgetting which cancer you’re lying about having overcome seems like some sort of moral failing, to me - but the suggestion that Arday and this tragic outcome were the product of structures he didn’t build is exactly right. Academia has, in its zeal to be antiracist, adopted a vision of Black people that is galactically insulting towards them; after all, “You are not capable of behaving like an adult, you are not capable of producing like a professional, you are not strong enough to be subject to the same basic standards that we apply to everyone else” is about as insulting as it gets. That’s what Cambridge and academia said to Jason Arday, that was the implicit but unmistakable, undeniable message contained in their refusal to subject him to adult review, to allow him to be criticized, to bother to investigate a single wild claim that he made. The fact that this all stemmed from opposition to racism, and that some of the people behind it were sincere in that opposition? Well, that just goes to show that things are complicated, and when things are complicated you have to hash them out. And too many people aren’t willing to hash anything out, a half-decade after the peak of woke 1.0. Because they only care about not being owned.

Maybe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made that reference to woke 1.0 because she’s running for president in 2028 and needs to distance herself from past crazy bullshit that would disqualify her from winning a general election. Maybe - and these are not mutually exclusive - she said that because she recognizes that she got some things wrong in the past, wants to do better, and is willing to change. Imagine that! Imagine that.