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How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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In the 1960s, ‘right on’ was a positive thing, a compliment. But over time it changed and things became ‘too right on’, or people would use the phrase with a roll of the eyes.

How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democ…

The values promoted by woke are today most associated with an emergent elite that is socially and geographically mobile, highly educated and social-media savvy. Woke may not be this elite’s self-descriptor of choice, but woke ideas underpin establishment decision-making and corporate mission statements. ‘Woke’ refers to the side of the culture war that denies it is waging a culture war, yet which repeatedly fires the opening salvos.” (p. 15) All too often, the sense of virtue that comes from claiming to act on behalf of the disadvantaged and oppressed legitimises a refusal to countenance dissent – and a ruthlessness at dealing with those seemingly in opposition to the woke mission. HOW WOKE WON: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason. Joanna Williams, (London: Spiked, 2022) Welcome to the world of ‘woke’ anti-racism; just one manifestation of the phenomenon of wokeness that has swept across the West, transforming school curricula, workplace relations, competitive sports, policing, politics, history, free speech, and the administration of justice. British author Joanna Williams thinks this transformation is so complete that she is provoked to declare woke has triumphed in her important new book, How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason. And it’s no coincidence that so many of the negative references to ‘wokeness’ are directed towards Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

The other day, in a bar in London frequented by students of the infamously ‘woke’ Goldsmiths University, I met a young white cis-male who said that the English were to blame for his inherited trauma because of their historic oppression of the Irish. The only problem was, he wasn’t Irish – he was American and so were his parents and probably grandparents. ‘Pain lasts a long time,’ he assured me. At the same time, the charge of “antisemitism” can itself be stretched to punish or silence critics of Israel. An exhibition by Brian Eno was recently cancelled in Germany because of his support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Many critics of “woke cancel culture” are happy to applaud the cancelling of the wrong kind of criticism. Another form of blindness. Where this book stands out is when it focuses on how wokeness is an elitist movement. When the author discusses it from this angle, I’m like, “YES!”. She dives into how elites have altered language and other aspects of life to signal their status and then compares it to what’s going on now. I also really enjoyed when she wrote about how major companies are capitalizing on the woke movement while also mistreating and exploiting workers around the world. I’d say that this is maybe 30% of the book. Other than that, if you’re familiar with the topic, you’ll hear a lot of arguments that have been presented before and stories of why they’re issues. It was interesting learning a little bit more about how this is unfolding in the UK as well. While the ways ‘wokeness’ makes itself known today are not obscure, its evolution from an aspirational concern with racial justice to a zealous obsession with overcoming all forms of social injustice is more hazy. But How Woke Won also points to a way forward. The good news is that whenever woke thinking is subjected to free speech and democratic scrutiny, it falls short.

the word ‘woke’ was weaponised by the right How the word ‘woke’ was weaponised by the right

Many view such blindness to antisemitism as a product of “wokeness”. But the unwoke can be equally unseeing. It’s hardly surprising so few of us encounter racism on a daily basis. According to the latest report from one of the most reliable barometers of Australian society, the Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion survey, that segment of the population with racist or xenophobic views is shrinking rapidly. Even during the long months of the pandemic — when Mr Tan insists that instances of race hate spiked — the Scanlon survey reported high levels of harmony in the community. But there was a puzzling spike of 20 per cent in the number of those who did think racism was a problem; a finding that baffled report author, Andrew Markus, seeing as how it conflicted with Scanlon’s findings in all previous years. I like reading about this topic to better diagnose what the problem is, because it’s a tough one to understand. The problem that authors face right now is that this topic is extremely saturated, so it’s difficult to write something new. But when I saw Joanna Williams’ subtitle to this book, it definitely caught my interest with it’s focus on this being an elitist movement. This is something Rob K. Henderson discusses with his theory of “luxury beliefs”. While this is a great book, there’s a lot in it that’s already been said.Far from being progressive, woke twists older ideas of racial and sexual equality beyond all recognition. It leaves us unable to defend women’s rights and pushes us to judge people according to the colour of their skin. Woke thinking benefits only a small minority at the very top of society.

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