How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left
Trump’s language wars. Turnabout is fair play, but we shouldn’t have been playing this game to begin with.
“Wokeness,” as it’s known, introduced the asymmetrical capitalization of the letter b in Black but not the w in white. It forced Romance languages like Spanish to submit to gender-neutral constructions such as Latinx. It called for the display of pronouns in email signatures and social-media bios. It replaced a slew of traditional words and phrases: People were told to stop saying master bedroom, breastfeeding, manpower, and brown-bag lunch …Almost immediately, the president did the opposite of what he’d promised and put together his own linguistic proscriptions.
Everybody on my Facebook knows how a lawyer from our DEI department came to my office to intimidate me because a student had complained that I used ‘All mothers are women’ as an example of an Aristotelian categorical proposition. I’m a tenured full professor and have the fanciest office on my hall. I let him know where he stood—with me and the AAUP. Unfortunately, most people don’t have the status, the office, or the pure cussedness I have.
The linguistic revision agenda eats me because I’m a person of the Left—or, at least, what used to be Left. It’s a program that promotes cheap, symbolic gestures in place of expensive, disruptive material improvement. I recall how in the early days of Second Wave Feminism employers burnished their feminist credentials by changing secretaries’ job titles to ‘administrative assistant’ and addressing them as ‘Ms.’ My husband applied for an administrative assistant job and was told that it was a ‘code word for woman’.
Nowadays ‘woman’ is verboten on both the Left and the Right. It now has to be scrubbed from documents and in papers published by scientists in US government service in compliance with the Trump administration’s Anti-Woke program. On the Left it’s been on the sh*t list for years, as I learnt in a class I attended last term. Apparently, amongst the cognoscenti it is understood as a term designating a social role rather than a biological category: to be a woman is to be oppressed. One of the papers I read for the class posed the question of what would happen if oppression ended. Would women cease to exist?
None of this is helping women or anyone else materially, where it matters, and as far as I can see it not only doesn’t help but is a distraction. It’s easier to say ‘your sins are forgiven’ than ‘arise and walk’. But I recall that after forgiving the sins of the paralytic Jesus said ‘arise and walk’. And he did. This hasn’t been happening locally.
It will be interesting to see how the Right Woke program plays out to the MAGA constituency. Right now, they’re delighted. They’re sticking it to the Libs. One Trump supporter exalted that that it was now ok to call people ‘retards’. But what will happen down the line when they see it that the anti-woke program hasn’t brought down the price of eggs?
How long, O Lord? I don’t have any high hopes. I don’t remember how long the woke agenda has been going on my side. I think it was about three years ago when some looney shot up a nail salon and faculty got racially segregated letters to sign—in my White Allies’ letter confessing to mispronouncing Asian names, not being able to name any Asians outside of the entertainment industry, and ‘pulling my eyes’ as a child. But it’s still cranking, with pronouns and land acknowledgements.
When, on my side, do we get it? And when, on the other side, does the price of eggs and gas kick in?
The anti-woke is about rarking up the woke, in a triumphalist and vengeful way, as the woke compression bands come off. My guess is that as workery recedes so will anti-wokery, because it is an attitude of reaction, and is not based on things that matter.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall when that lawyer turned up.
I think left woke is dying. This is what I am experiencing in my generation of the people between millennials and Z. There is an emerging consciousness that identity politics has distracted us from class consciousness and the general project of socialism.
The genocide in Gaza that is supported by the Democratic party has turned many away from left liberalism who had true moral principles. Those left in the woke space are being revealed as those who either are afraid of or actively frustrate social change.
There is also a rise of "left accelerationism" which forgoes the identity politics in favor of a full focus on forcing the social conditions to enact UBI and force an initiative for the development of "custodian AGI."
All that to say I think we are entering the era of the post-woke left. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing but it is certainly a welcome change in my opinion because I feel like identity politics was only a weight on the left that kept it paralyzed. My tinfoil schizo view is that companies push hard for "DEI" because it's an amazing political suppressant.
Alas. Thanks for taking the time to read the ramblings of a random 28 year old agender asshole with social ideals that are slowly but surely jading
I know it's scary, but I think it's time to admit that liberalism is a failed project, before we are swallowed by the oceans, ravaged by the water wars, sworn labor feality to our AI technofacist overlords, and lose access to personal property anyway.
We can socialize or we can let Amazon have all of it. Hopefully the youth make the right decision, whatever it is