To adequately answer the question “Is woke dead?,” it should first be asked, “What was woke?” Maybe more important, “Was it ever alive?” As a Gen Zer, I’m observing the cadaver, my pathologist’s scalpel in hand. I wasn’t there, in 1930, when the Pittsburgh Courier proclaimed “The Negro is Woke” in response to the Jim Crow-era intellectual awakening; I didn’t witness the moment when, in 1938, Lead Belly told Black southerners to “stay woke” in Alabama after the Scottsboro Boys trial; and I never saw Marcus Garvey and the Back-to-Africa movement. Nor did I reinterpret Erykah Badu’s 2008 song “Master Teacher” for internet culture wars, put #woke in my Instagram bio, or post a picture of a black box on my Snapchat story because “silence is violence.” However, I think it’s safe to say that woke’s power as a good-faith instrument for combating racial injustice and spurring social change is long gone.
In part, this is due to pejoration, piggybacking, and the overall ubiquity of the term. It’s also because of social media and the fact that the modern civil rights struggle pales in comparison to that of the mid-20th century. Let’s be honest—when anyone can feel like a civil rights leader by venting online, a social movement loses its potency. Events like Bloody Sunday and the March on Washington have no modern equivalents. Racial disparities still exist; the percentage of Black people killed by police is 8% higher than their share of the population. However, when Erykah Badu urges people to “stay woke” in a #FreePussyRiot post about a Russian rock band, the term loses its integrity as the battle cry of a generations-long civil rights struggle.
And that’s just the problem. All we’ve been left with are the loose ends of good intentions. To start, woke inspired a pretentious subculture of low-quality parlance. It’s the left-wing equivalent of “based” and “redpilled.” Moreover, its co-opting by everyone and their mother has turned woke into a religion of social grievances. And it’s just that, a religious moral tribalism with social justice as its chief virtue. It polices its membership with an ideological conventionalism of compelled virtue signaling, holds the writings of postmodern deconstructivists like Foucault and Derrida as its Bible, and prostrates “privilege” as its original sin.
Don’t let people fool you. Wokeness is a form of social currency; it’s an enterprise to upend the natural Pareto distribution of a free society by abusing the social calculus of the bottom 80%. The entire cultural movement is essentially Leninist, but far displaced from its roots as a genuine human rights struggle. And following suit, the typical white finance bro, who lived a comfortable childhood in a stable family and who takes success as a fact of life, is the chief antagonist of society.
Woke really lost all credibility as a serious social movement in the late 2010s when DEI proved to be, at heart, the result of a collective “enough white guys already.” The entire stunt was about optics, and it’s clear that fair hiring practices were—and still are—in no way a priority. There are countless examples in academia and media that expose just how superficial and vacuous wokeness has become. Since 2018, just six out of 76 tenure-track professors hired at Yale University have been white men, and only three out of 45 at Brown University. Over the past decade, the Disney Writing Program, which hires most fellows as staff writers, has hired no white men, despite them accounting for 30% of the population. These sorts of hiring practices are not aligned with efforts to combat bias but rather are only meant to cultivate the appearance of being socially aware and ethically driven. It’s clearly gotten carried away. This isn’t to discredit efforts to elevate marginalized groups in American society, but these sorts of hiring practices are clearly highly ideologically motivated.
I agree with Bill Maher’s statement two years ago that woke, rather than building on
liberalism, is instead undoing it. When “inclusivity” becomes a dogma, it perpetuates an illiberal system of belief. The honest truth is that woke’s role as a genuine impetus for positive social change within the Black community never lived past the 20th century. I’ll take after Mark Carney and Václav Havel and call for all the greengrocers of progressive America—Yale, Brown, The New York Times, and the elephant in the room—to take down their signs.
Artwork by Hayes Stewart