Defining "Woke" and "Wokeness"

And whether this is a good use of our time.

Photo by jean wimmerlin on Unsplash

The arguments about what is and isn’t “woke,” how to properly define “woke” and whether it is a positive term originating in African American Vernacular English to describe being alert to social injustice and particularly racism, or a pejorative created by the far-right to denigrate & dismiss anybody who opposes racism or other bigotries are extremely tiresome. These arguments also get in the way of discussing the pros and cons of a specific theoretical approach to addressing issues of social justice which currently has significant social power.

I could take the time to go into this theoretical approach in depth as I did with Critical Race Theory and make an argument for what precisely the term should be used to refer to. However, I already wrote a book doing that and an essay. I could condense the core tenets of what Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo call the “specific theoretical perspective” that makes up what they (and I) call “Critical Social Justice” (CSJ) but is more commonly known as “wokeness” into a list. In fact, I will. Here it is, if anyone wants it:

1)    Knowledge is a social construct created by groups in society. These groups are determined by their identity in terms of race, gender, sexuality and more and deemed to have dominant or marginalised positions in society.

2)    The dominant groups – white, wealthy, straight, Western men – get to decide which knowledges are legitimate and which are not. They choose the ones that serve their own interests.

3)    These legitimised knowledges then become dominant discourses in society and simply the way to speak about things. Everybody is unavoidably socialized into them and cannot escape being so.

4)    People at all levels of society then speak in these ways – this creates and perpetuates systems of oppressive power like white supremacy, patriarchy and transphobia.

5)    Most people cannot see the systems of oppressive power that they are complicit in because they have been socialised into having those very specific biases unconsciously.

6)    Therefore, the systems of oppressive power are largely invisible and their existence and means of operation need to be theorised by Critical Social Justice activists.

7)    Those who have studied Critical Social Justice theories – particularly the marginalised groups who subscribe to them – are then more able to see the invisible power systems and convey them to everybody else. (This is why they are often referred to as ‘the woke.’)

8)    Social justice can only be achieved by making everybody believe in these theories. This entails seeing and affirming these invisible power systems and their own complicity in them, as well as committing to dismantling them.

9)    Any disagreement with or resistance to affirming the above beliefs is evidence of either ignorance or selfish unwillingness to accept one’s complicity in the oppressive power systems and is automatically invalid.

10) Therefore, the liberal belief in the individual’s agency to evaluate a range of ideas and accept or reject them is a self-serving myth and liberalism, above nearly all other ideologies, is a major impediment to achieving social justice.

The thing is, however, that the constant arguments about what “woke” means cannot be resolved by simply citing the relevant theorists and activists unambiguously listing the core beliefs of their ideology. Nor can they be settled by people like me gathering them together to do so as I do in the essay “What Do We Mean by Critical Social Justice?”. This is because the confusion over what is meant by “woke” as exhibited by people passionately defending it or deploring it incorrectly is rarely genuine. Anybody who dedicates significant amounts of their time to talking about “wokeness” (I still prefer “Critical Social Justice)” and yet does not seem to know what its core tenets are, has made a deliberate choice not to know or to appear not to know. They clearly have an interest in the subject so they could very easily have read the theorists or activists themselves telling them if they wished to speak about the framework as it actually is. Showing them yet another primer or condensed explanation or attempting to explain it yourself is unlikely to help.

People who want to define ‘woke’ as simply being kind or being alert to and caring about issues of social justice won’t be convinced that nearly every politically engaged person with a social conscience does that, including those described as “anti-woke.” You can stick Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo explaining the difference between their “specific theoretical concept” and the broader aim for social justice under their noses and they will not look at it. You could barrage them with Derald Wing Sue, Layla Saad, Saira Rao, Alison Bailey, Kristie Dotson or a million others and they will still not acknowledge a recurring framework of very specific beliefs. You could even suggest they try Cynical Theories as a primer containing many primary sources and this will very likely just convince them that you are a far-right bigot who hates everybody who isn’t a straight, white man. (They can just tell that that’s what its contents really mean even though they say nothing of the kind because they can just hear its racist, transphobic “dogwhistles” which are audible to the enlightened).

Similarly people who want to define “woke” as Marxism or leftism, any support for LGBT rights, any rejection of socially conservative gender roles, a belief that climate change is a real thing, any support for Covid vaccines or masks or a failure to be scandalised by a mermaid being depicted as black are unlikely to be convinced by attempts to show them what it really is. You can explain that Critical Social Justice scholars often dismiss Marxism as “class reductionism,” & criticise liberalism very strongly, point out that people all over the political spectrum really don’t see being gay as a moral issue or believe in rigid gender roles, that climate science, epidemiology & critical theories of race have very little in common and that getting all worked up about the skin tone of mythical beings is a bit silly, but it won’t help. You will just be identified as a Marxist, liberal wokeist who wants to trans their children, prevent women from being mothers, enforce draconian lockdown rules, replace all white actors with black ones and generally bring about the death of “Western Civilisation.”

Of course, I am being somewhat facetious and uncharitable here. In reality, there are many people who have a mistakenly positive view of what “wokeness” is and believe it to be a much more liberal thing than it is. They genuinely haven’t grasped its core tenets and how implausible and unfalsifiable they are or its authoritarian nature, intolerance of dissent, refusal to accept any criticism as legitimate or the fact that implementing policies and trainings around it doesn’t work. They are well-intentioned people who think that anything attempting to improve social justice must be good. Similarly, many of the people who confuse wokeism with Marxism or liberalism are genuinely trying to get their heads round a counterintuitive framework and think they can achieve this by understanding wokeism as an expansion of Marxist concepts of oppressed and oppressor groups and/or liberal concepts of individualism into the realms of race and gender identity. Most are not extreme social conservatives with ethnonationalist beliefs but well-intentioned people who see that something is wrong but misconceive what that is and misattribute blame.

However, many people talking nonsense about what woke means are not well-intentioned or honest people who are just failing to grasp its central features. They are tribalists taking a side and using dishonest tactics to make it harder to discuss the ideas as they really are. “Motte and Bailey” moves abound on the dishonest pro-woke side while hyperbolic conspiracy theories abound on the dishonest anti-woke side. These people should not be enabled to derail conversations between honest people with opposing views who actually know what they are talking about by getting everybody to argue about definitions forever.

I would suggest that having a preprepared concise explanation of the theoretical framework that you are criticising and presenting this as needed is more useful than being drawn into endless arguments about what Woke means. For example, this exchange, standing alone, was not very useful.

Here Mr Walsh is giving the most benign and expansive definition of wokeness possible while Mr Yang is selecting the most radical views put forward by the Critical Social Justice movement and their worst outcomes.

As the Twitter user, Kevin, who posted the image said,

Words have scopes of definition and those definitions are dictated by usage. You can dictate what you mean by them but you don’t have the authority to dictate what others must. Only allowing one strict definition doesn’t change the word; it just limits your ability to communicate.

This does not mean we should go full Derrida and assert that words can generate infinite meaning and the interpretation of the hearer is as valid a representation of what the speaker meant as the speaker’s own knowledge of what they meant. It means that we recognise when people are using the same word to describe different things and that, rather than squabble about the meaning of the word, we move past it to discuss substance.

To Mr Walsh, I would respond that nobody complaining of their institution being overtaken by wokeness is concerned that it has become too empathetic, tolerant, willing to listen & open to learning. On the contrary, they are generally complaining that it has become ideologically captured by the ideas of Critical Social Justice, closed its mind to the possibility that any other other viewpoints could have merit and become intolerant of anyone who dissents from the central tenets of CSJ. In fact, they would like their workplace, university, school etc to resolve this by becoming more empathetic and tolerant by being willing to listen to alternative viewpoints and open to learning about the real-life impact of having one ideology imposed upon everybody, but particularly the people whom it is intended to help. As one individual, Tom, who came to me for support with raising this issue, said in his letter to his manager:

Recently, you expressed commitments to listen to BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic] employees. I am one such employee and I have done a lot of listening to you tell me how I should feel about race. I am hoping that you might make some time listening to me telling you how I actually do feel about it. Not just because you’re white, not just because I’m not, but because if you are serious about your commitment to anti-racism, it does require listening to people of different races having different views about how to address racism. I wish to have a more open discussion about the ongoing politicisation in our company and the implications of defining our strategy on diversity and inclusion by applying one particular anti-racist methodology.

Mr Walsh is simply not addressing the real-life impacts of what people mean by “woke” in his definition, even if this is how he understands the underlying ethos. If he wishes to define his ‘wokeness’ in this way, he would need to be empathetic, tolerant, willing to listen and open to learning from people like Tom - a mixed race man (likely to just be considered ‘black’ in the US). Hopefully, he would be and I do not suggest that he, as an individual, would not. However, often people who claim a commitment to ‘listening’ and ‘learning’ from people of colour are only referring to those who already share their views. That is the conversation it would be useful to have with Mr Walsh or with anybody defining wokeness in such a benign and expansive way and the one that won’t happen if we get bogged down in definitions of “woke.”

To Mr Yang, I would respond that he is speaking to many issues all at once and, while it is good that he is raising issues of substance rather than offering a vague, fluffy, feel-good definition of woke, he would need to break these down into individual issues and show them to be underlain by a specific ideology. I realise, of course, that Mr Yang could not do this in a tweet and hopefully he does do so elsewhere. The advocacy of identity-based affirmative action is not, in itself, inherently imbedded in a theoretical belief in invisible systems of power, but is often advocated for by those who believe in such systems and criticised by others on the left for benefitting wealthy and privately educated members of minority groups. As Eric London, of the World Socialist Website writes:

The academic architects of postmodernism and identity politics occupy well-paid positions in academia, often with salaries upwards of $100,000–$300,000 or more. As a social layer, the theoreticians of what the World Socialist Web Site refers to as the “pseudo-left” are in the wealthiest 10 percent of American society. Their political and philosophical views express their social interests.

The obsession with “privilege,” sex, and racial and gender identity is a mechanism by which members and groups within this layer fight among themselves for income, social status and positions of privilege, using degrees of “oppression” to one up each other in the fight for tenure track jobs, positions on corporate or non-profit boards, or election to public office. A chief purpose of the #MeToo campaign, for example, is to replace male executives and male politicians with women, while ignoring the social needs of the vast majority of working class women.

…

Nor have the politics of racial identity improved the material conditions for the vast majority of minority workers. Inequality within racial minorities has increased alongside the introduction of affirmative action programs and the increasing dominance of identity politics in academia and bourgeois politics. In 2016, the top 1 percent of Latinos owned 45 percent of all Latino wealth, while the top 1 percent of African-Americans owned 40.5 percent and the richest whites owned 36.5 percent of white wealth.

The aim to dismantle law enforcement has been expressed mostly by the Black Lives Matter movement and again, does not rely on believing in invisible systems of power. This is a belief in the inherent badness of a very visible form of power - law enforcement - although the belief that racism (unconscious or otherwise) straightforwardly and consistently explains incidences of police brutality often relies on a belief in white supremacy permeating everything and ignoring statistics on the races of victims and perpetrators of police brutality. Policing speech and thought is definitely in accordance with the CSJ belief that oppression is perpetuated by dominant discourses established by the powerful and must be stopped. Concerns about medicating children who will not actually turn out to be trans in ways which can lead to infertility are also valid. The lack of rigorous psychological services for gender dysphoric youth which investigate a number of explanations for their feelings of ‘wrongness’ in their own bodies can also be convincingly traced back to the influence of a form of trans activism rooted in queer theory which definitely falls under the umbrella of ‘woke.’

Mr Yang, therefore, is conflating a number of different things, even if his understanding of the ethos of woke can be argued to run through all of them given enough time and space to carefully set out and evidence his concerns. That is the conversation it would be useful to have with Mr Yang or with anybody defining wokeness using a collection of examples of radical beliefs and worst consequences and the one that won’t happen if we get bogged down in definitions of “woke.”

Consequently, I suggest that we try not to get distracted from addressing issues of substance and the ideological framework underlying them by arguing about definitions of words. I am certainly not advocating that we all embrace Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty’s view of language “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” I am much more likely to be accused of pedantry in my need for precision in language. I agree fully with Uberman21 here:

It would be wonderful if we could all agree on the precise meaning of words and it would make conversation about important issues so much easier. It is not how humans and language work generally, however, and we are currently living in a time of particularly rapid semantic shift and concept creep. We can each try to limit this by being precise in our own language but we cannot realistically hope to clearly define cultural phenomena and then hold those terms stable for everybody else, especially when so many people are determined not to let that happen.

When we have a term like ‘woke’ which people can define as anything from ‘caring about others’ to ‘genocidal communism,’ it is generally a waste of time to try to sway them from that definition. Instead, say something like:

I agree that caring about others is good/genocidal communism is bad. However, I am speaking about the belief system which holds that all of society is permeated by systems of power and privilege like white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, hetero/cisnormativity, fatphobia and ableism, but that most people cannot see these systems. This is the belief system that insists that we are all unavoidably socialised into holding racist, sexist, homophobic etc beliefs as unconscious biases. It asserts that we need to be trained to see them, affirm our own complicity in them and commit to dismantling them using the methods of people calling themselves ‘social justice activists’ or ‘diversity, equity and inclusion trainers.’ It does not generally focus very much on issues of socio-economic class unless it is as a compounding factor in the oppression of people who are not straight, white men.

This is the belief system that regards any disagreement as ignorance, fragility or a wish to hold on to one’s own privilege, and does not support viewpoint diversity or think any criticism could be legitimate. It explicitly rejects the position that individuals vary greatly in their views and may or may not be racist, sexist or homophobic and that they can evaluate ideas for themselves and oppose racism and other bigotries using their own ethical frameworks and should have the right to do so. It is usually referred to by both proponents and detractors as “Social Justice,” “Critical Social Justice” or “Being Woke.” It is highly influential and supported by major corporations netting trainers an estimated 8 billion dollars a year in the US alone. Can we discuss this belief system?"

Have something concise and to the point like this prewritten and ideally link evidence like Sensoy and DiAngelo’s description of Critical Social Justice in Is Everyone Really Equal or “The Core Tenets of Anti-Racist Scholarship Activism” at the National Race and Pedagogy Conference (transcribed below) so that you can just present this to anyone who wants to quibble about definitions or pretend not to know what you are talking about. It is also very useful for those who have managed to escape having any of this inflicted on them and genuinely do not know what you are talking about.

Having something like this to show anyone inclined to argue that “woke” means being kind and tolerant and listening to minority groups (despite its complete intolerance of dissenting voices and use of vicious racial slurs if that voice belongs to someone of racial minority) and anyone inclined to argue that “wokeness” is Marxism (despite the ample evidence that it is being funded by capitalist corporations) helps you to skip the semantic quibbling and get to the point.

The point is whether this ideological framework is ethical, evidence-based and fit for purpose in addressing serious issues of social justice. I’d suggest the answer to that is “No.”

Core Tenets of Anti-Racist Scholarship-Activism.

• Racism exists today in both traditional and modern forms

• Racism is an institutionalized, multilayered, multilevel system that distributes unequal power and resources between white people and people of color, as socially identified, and disproportionately benefits whites.

• All members of society are socialized to participate in the system of racism, albeit in varied social locations.

• All white people benefit from racism regardless of intentions.

• No-one chose to be socialized into racism so no-one is bad, but no-one is neutral.

• To not act against racism is to support racism.

• Racism must be continually identified, analyzed and challenged. No-one is ever done.

• The question is not Did racism take place? but rather How did racism manifest in that situation?

• The racial status quo is comfortable for most whites. Therefore, anything that maintains white comfort is suspect.

• The racially oppressed have a more intimate insight via experiential knowledge into the system of race than their racial oppressors. However, white professors will be seen as having more legitimacy, thus positionality must be intentionally engaged.

• Resistance is a predictable reaction to anti-racist education and must be explicitly and strategically addressed.