Thank you Garrett. I've been wanting to write about wokeness, and you've helped provide some excellent history and perspective. And more than anything, I appreciate your closing statement: "Hatred is nearly impossible to transform. Fear isn’t, though. Fear is an ellipsis. Fear is an invitation. Fear is a desire to be heard. And hearing that fear, in turn, is a first step towards transforming it into empathy."
The tributes to Jen Angel have been really beautiful. I didn't know her, but we're pretty likely only a degree or two apart socially (zine world is small). It's awful to see her death and her values weaponized in culture war bullshit, but I hope it also causes at least a couple people to think about care and abolition and how to be a brighter light in the world.
This is so important. It made me realize that I have come to equate "woke" and "performative" in my mind, which is not actually how the fearful right is using it and so is a dangerous conflation for me to carry around. Thank you.
Beautiful. I've had an idea knocking around about the right's appropriation and redefinition of words like woke, fake news, and now even anti-war (siding with Putin against Ukraine). Invoking Orwell is cliche at this point but it does smack of doublethink.
I agree with you completely about the New York Post's Jen Angel story. The lede alone is pretty appalling.
Likewise, there are clearly conservatives in government and the media capitalizing on "wokeness" to advance what are sometimes dubious agendas, and I agree that their motivations and tactics are often deserving of criticism. But one of the reasons they gain traction, I would argue, is that many "woke" positions are not merely calls for a "more just, more caring world." Sometimes they're not that at all. But even when they are, many of them are also excessive and unpopular (including sometimes amongst the people they're intended to help), and like some of their "anti-woke" opposition, they are also often illiberal and intolerant of dissent.
That said, I think it's important to distinguish between the "conservative anti-woke chorus" and those of us who use the word "woke" as shorthand for lack of a better word and are critical of wokeness, not because "we’re afraid of loving more deeply," or because "we’re afraid of extending our care to somebody different than us," but because we see much of wokeness as harmful in and of itself. One way it and its excesses are harmful is the predictable backlash. Several examples are people's disillusionment with and departure from the Left, the elections of Trump and DeSantis, numerous bans and mandates, and bills like the Stop WOKE Act.
I'm not a conservative. I'm not afraid of loving more deeply. I'm not afraid of caring for anyone. And I'm not afraid of change. I have, however, been pushing back on aspects of wokeness for five or six years now, give or take, since before I even knew the w-word. Repeatedly during that time, I've heard that wokeness is effectively a movement/ideology that exists in support of kindness and compassion and a desire for a more just and caring world, and that any opposition to it must therefore exist in opposition to said kindness and compassion and so on. And that's just not true. It's a straw man argument.
My opposition to wokeness is full of love and kindness and caring and compassion and complexity and uncertainty and all the rest, I assure you. And I'm not alone. It's just that I, and many others like me, think that a lot of woke ideas are counterproductive and harmful.
Watch "Affirmation Generation," for example, a documentary about kids with gender distress by a liberal filmmaker with a son who said he was transgender, and look for the person in it who's NOT acting out of care. These are not transphobic people afraid of love or change. They're just normal people with valid concerns who see harm being done and want to stop it: https://lisaselindavis.substack.com/p/you-can-watch-affirmation-generation
The backlash that some warned about years ago is exactly the backlash we're seeing now, again, in the form of bills like the Stop WOKE Act. It's disheartening, I agree. But so is a lot of what's happening under the umbrella of wokeness. It's a perfect marriage of dysfunction.
To be clear, it's not my intention to put words in your mouth, and I don't mean to imply that your argument here was the straw man argument I mentioned above, that ALL critics of wokeness are afraid of loving and caring and whatnot (or that they're all conservatives, for that matter, as they're very clearly not). I don't believe that that was your argument at all. Again though, I think it's important to distinguish between the different criticisms. There are a lot of reasonable, good-faith criticisms of wokeness being made, and there have been for years, and just as "woke" ideas deserve to be met with charitable interpretation, so too do "anti-woke" ones.
Thank you Garrett. I've been wanting to write about wokeness, and you've helped provide some excellent history and perspective. And more than anything, I appreciate your closing statement: "Hatred is nearly impossible to transform. Fear isn’t, though. Fear is an ellipsis. Fear is an invitation. Fear is a desire to be heard. And hearing that fear, in turn, is a first step towards transforming it into empathy."
Beautifully said.
The tributes to Jen Angel have been really beautiful. I didn't know her, but we're pretty likely only a degree or two apart socially (zine world is small). It's awful to see her death and her values weaponized in culture war bullshit, but I hope it also causes at least a couple people to think about care and abolition and how to be a brighter light in the world.
This is so important. It made me realize that I have come to equate "woke" and "performative" in my mind, which is not actually how the fearful right is using it and so is a dangerous conflation for me to carry around. Thank you.
Beautiful. I've had an idea knocking around about the right's appropriation and redefinition of words like woke, fake news, and now even anti-war (siding with Putin against Ukraine). Invoking Orwell is cliche at this point but it does smack of doublethink.
My goodness so beautifully said!
I agree with you completely about the New York Post's Jen Angel story. The lede alone is pretty appalling.
Likewise, there are clearly conservatives in government and the media capitalizing on "wokeness" to advance what are sometimes dubious agendas, and I agree that their motivations and tactics are often deserving of criticism. But one of the reasons they gain traction, I would argue, is that many "woke" positions are not merely calls for a "more just, more caring world." Sometimes they're not that at all. But even when they are, many of them are also excessive and unpopular (including sometimes amongst the people they're intended to help), and like some of their "anti-woke" opposition, they are also often illiberal and intolerant of dissent.
That said, I think it's important to distinguish between the "conservative anti-woke chorus" and those of us who use the word "woke" as shorthand for lack of a better word and are critical of wokeness, not because "we’re afraid of loving more deeply," or because "we’re afraid of extending our care to somebody different than us," but because we see much of wokeness as harmful in and of itself. One way it and its excesses are harmful is the predictable backlash. Several examples are people's disillusionment with and departure from the Left, the elections of Trump and DeSantis, numerous bans and mandates, and bills like the Stop WOKE Act.
I'm not a conservative. I'm not afraid of loving more deeply. I'm not afraid of caring for anyone. And I'm not afraid of change. I have, however, been pushing back on aspects of wokeness for five or six years now, give or take, since before I even knew the w-word. Repeatedly during that time, I've heard that wokeness is effectively a movement/ideology that exists in support of kindness and compassion and a desire for a more just and caring world, and that any opposition to it must therefore exist in opposition to said kindness and compassion and so on. And that's just not true. It's a straw man argument.
My opposition to wokeness is full of love and kindness and caring and compassion and complexity and uncertainty and all the rest, I assure you. And I'm not alone. It's just that I, and many others like me, think that a lot of woke ideas are counterproductive and harmful.
Watch "Affirmation Generation," for example, a documentary about kids with gender distress by a liberal filmmaker with a son who said he was transgender, and look for the person in it who's NOT acting out of care. These are not transphobic people afraid of love or change. They're just normal people with valid concerns who see harm being done and want to stop it: https://lisaselindavis.substack.com/p/you-can-watch-affirmation-generation
Here are a bunch of other valid (on the whole) criticisms of wokeness from just the past few weeks: https://symbolsandrituals.substack.com/p/i-didnt-say-that-24
The backlash that some warned about years ago is exactly the backlash we're seeing now, again, in the form of bills like the Stop WOKE Act. It's disheartening, I agree. But so is a lot of what's happening under the umbrella of wokeness. It's a perfect marriage of dysfunction.
To be clear, it's not my intention to put words in your mouth, and I don't mean to imply that your argument here was the straw man argument I mentioned above, that ALL critics of wokeness are afraid of loving and caring and whatnot (or that they're all conservatives, for that matter, as they're very clearly not). I don't believe that that was your argument at all. Again though, I think it's important to distinguish between the different criticisms. There are a lot of reasonable, good-faith criticisms of wokeness being made, and there have been for years, and just as "woke" ideas deserve to be met with charitable interpretation, so too do "anti-woke" ones.