Wokeness is absolutely a religion for the irreligious. There’s something in human nature that clearly craves concepts of sin, repentance, penance, and fighting the infidels.
Absolutely, and it a perfectly normal phenomenon that is more prevalent in what Sam Huntington called creedal passion periods. Wokism today, the various "new age" movements in the late 1960's and 1970's, Pentecostals, Fundamentalism, Marcus Garvey, Gurdjieff, Billy Sunday in the early 20th cent, Moody Bible Institute, Salvation Army, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian Science in the 1860's & 70's, and what Noah calls the Abolition era which includes things like the American Temperance Society (1826), Mormonism (1830), Millerites (7th day Adventists) (1831, Burned over district revivals (1835) along with Abolition events: Walker's 1829 "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World", The Liberator (1831) American Anti-Slavery Society (1833).
Abolition was part of a general creedal passion period/cultural awakening period.
Yes, and also sudden awakening -- the scales fell from Saul's eyes, "he received his sight at once; and he arose and was baptized."
"Awake and sing, you who dwell in dust; For your dew is like the dew of herbs, And the earth shall cast out the dead." Isaiah 26:19
I find Noah's analysis fascinating -- my own interests lead me more towards the metaphors of the awakening of the dead, salvation, eternal life in the light, and so forth. There are many lenses for understanding the meaning of wokeness. Deep roots in Christian doctrine.
Per Beijer, "wokeness" can't be a religion per se because it doesn't make otherworldly claims: "metaphysical, teleological, transcendental, cosmological, existential," etc. It even has a very weak theodicy (an explanation for the problem of evil).
It’s so much like mainline Protestantism that it probably just is that. (Not meant as an insult or a “lol it’s a religion” take.)
Eastern religions don’t have all those concepts the same way; not saying Buddhism is against war and some versions of it have sins, but it’s pretty different and much less into universal moralizing.
By that I mean Buddhism has personal morals (mainly "don't have sex" and "if you're a monk make sure to never enjoy anything") and if you get them wrong you'll be reincarnated as a slug or something. But it doesn't usually have morals you're supposed to push on other people, nor are you supposed to convert others like the newer monotheistic religions do.
Very very new forms of Buddhism are about being super-ethical; half of this is literally a marketing campaign for the Dalai Lama/Tibetan independence, the other half is that Buddhists converted Californian hippies by adopting all the philosophy they already had.
Does “almost every Asian” have experiences like that? 85% of Indian Americans say that racism against them is a minor problem or not a problem: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/16/miss-america-pageant-puts-indian-americans-in-the-spotlight/. That’s certainly my experience as a brown guy with a Muslim name that went to college in the south post 9/11. My precinct went overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016, and I’ve encountered zero racism in 6 years of living here. My dad, who travels a lot, was commenting about how little racism he’s experienced in 30+ years in America.
The story about your friend’s dad is unfortunate and unpleasant. But I think the takeaway depends on how you look at it. Anyone unhinged enough to beat someone up over a traffic altercation may well say whatever thinks will be hurtful and get a reaction. If there was some other notable characteristic of the victim the attacker may well have focused on that instead.
I would point out: why are Asians getting attacked in the Bay Area and NYC? I don’t think it’s because those places are hotbeds of racism, but rather hotbeds of crime and mental disorders. The only times in my life I’ve been called racial epithets have been from homeless black people in Atlanta. Are they yelling at me because of racism, or is racism what they happen to lash out with?
+1. I am an Indian-American and the most consequential anti-Asian racism I faced was committed by the Harvard admissions office.
It's true, sometimes people mispronounce my name, but that's not racism - that's a consequence of a whole generation being deprived of phonics education! And sometimes people are very nosy about my heritage, asking a string of questions starting with "where are you from?"; those people are *always* South Asian or Middle Eastern immigrants.
Same here. Out of a social circle of Asians living in US numbering in the mid-hundreds I've heard of one first hand example so far (friend of a friend distant, living in California). There may be more as haven't been running around asking every acquaintance, but it's definitely not something so prevalent that it comes up spontaneously as a topic of conversation. Also ironically if a white guy started making generalizations about other minority groups like that that he has no direct lived experience of he is liable to get considerable online blowback, but somehow with Asians it's ok.
edit: what i mean above is incidences of actual violence or threatened violence or other aggression. Stupid kids shouting konnichiwa or nihao to you randomly in the street? sure, has been happening for decades and still happens, albeit less (presumably because there are more or us here now to spread the stupidity around). As for jokes on TV dunno, one could see it as a form of microaggression i guess but i never felt it that way. Am fine with Leno making Asian jokes and laughing at them, am fine with Peter Russell making them, am fine with Constance Wu making them. If it's funny it's funny, if it's not it's not.
Yeah I was taken aback by the blunt assertion that almost every Asian American has a story akin to being viciously attacked. Hasn’t happened to me or any of my Asian friends and family that I am aware of. That story from the Bay Area is in fact quite special and unusual, and thank God for that.
As a corollary to this post, perhaps someone should dig into the cynical economic rationale for wokeness being absolutely pervasive in the west. Is it true cultural progress or the billionaire and corporate class want to distract the masses with identity issues while they continue to rob rest of society blind? No surprise that Occupy Wall St petered out just as wokeness became paramount.
I think the wealthy elites believe sincerely in wokeness, the masses copy them (this is what the masses do). Thus the distraction (Marxist "false consciousness") spreads.
Of course, the wealthy elite believe in wokeness sincerely. I’ve never doubted that. It is also in their economic best interests on many levels. People can sincerely believe in these things especially when it doesn’t cause any economic redistribution. It doesn’t hurt profit to let people choose their own pronouns. In fact, a brand can embrace it and be lauded plus increase their sales. Win win.
I’d argue that anything that doesn’t impact their own personal wealth, they’re all about. Be as woke as you want, just don’t tamper with the bottom line.
> As a corollary to this post, perhaps someone should dig into the cynical economic rationale for wokeness being absolutely pervasive in the west.
Absolutely pervasive, and yet e.g. racial discrimination in housing still happens. And is there more to the "cynical economic rationale" than the fact that "wokeness" is way more popular now than in, say, the 1960s?
> Is it true cultural progress or the billionaire and corporate class want to distract the masses with identity issues while they continue to rob rest of society blind?
Probably not the latter, considering that historically the upper classes have used SUPPORT for racism and xenophobia as their preferred way "to distract the masses of identity issues while they [...] rob the rest of society blind" for decades (LBJ mentioned this back in 1960, for instance).
> No surprise that Occupy Wall St petered out just as wokeness became paramount.
Occupy Wall St didn't simply peter out; it was intensely surveiled by the feds and subject to violent attacks by police (not exactly known for being High Priests Of Woke) in 2011, years before the 2014/2015 period to which Noah dates "the so-called 'Great Awokening'".
You underestimate the extent it which wokeness has inserted post-modern ideas into our way of thinking about the world. Post-modernism is radically skeptical, questioning the existence of an observer-independent reality and absolute truth. It is incompatible with the enlightenment emphasis on reason and evidence, which has been so important for human progress. I think you underestimate the threat this poses. The editorial staff of scientific journals and health care professionals are embracing practices that explicitly reject evidence and reason. That seems dangerous to me.
The Wokes rely on factual claims about an observer-independent reality all the time.
• The 1619 Project forwarded many assertions of historical fact.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Case for Reparations" opens with factual statements about the duration of slavery, Jim Crow, "separate but equal" and so on, before marching through a procession of empirical claims.
• The murder of George Floyd triggered national protests precisely because it was video recorded, documented as observable fact.
And scientists and healthcare professionals have rejected evidence and reason many times for decades — look at how long it took for randomized, controlled trials to become normal practice, and look at how many medical reversals there have been as a result.
The Big Bad Wokes put emphasis on reason and evidence, apparently more than you do. You're free to disagree with their factual claims, but you'd first have to recognize them as factual claims.
I think you underestimate the use of selective facts to further ideology, and the viewpoint bias where only people with a given “lived experience” have access to relevant folks.
I disagree. Someone who uses "selective facts" or has a bias towards taking "lived experience" as fact is still someone who recognizes the idea of facts and reality, not someone with a postmodern objection to the very notion of observer-independent truth.
Just because woke people accept facts that we agree on does not mean that they accept that we need to rely on all facts. They explicitly reject facts that conflict with their belief. A good example relates to gender and biological sex. They deny the objective reality of biological sex and it’s implications. Indeed the assertion transwomen are women, which one is required to accept, is a clear example of this. Instead of acknowledging that gender (a psychological state) is distinct from biological sex (on objective state) they make factually absurd claims about biological sex. This is actually harmful to transgender people and those with gender dysphoria. These individuals need compassion and care based on evidence and science. Indeed denying the distinction between gender and biological sex denies the existence of transpeople. Similarly, denying the reality of biological sex denies the existence of homosexuals, who are, by definition, attracted to people of the same biological sex.
Which is a different objection to your original one. Your original objection was that The Wokes are not even wrong: they're radical postmodern skeptics averse to the very idea of truth and falsity. Now your objection is that The Wokes are just wrong: Wokes embrace the idea of truth and falsity, and are simply incorrect about what's true or false.
Let me give you an example of where evidence is rejected. In the U.K. there was a study in racism in the educational system. They found that some minority groups performed less well than whites whereas others performed better, often much better. Partly on this basis the report concluded that there was not evidence systemic racism in the education system but that there was an urgent need to investigate the reason that some minority groups underperformed, and address these. There was widespread outrage at this report because it did not acknowledge that systemic racism was a problem in schools and responsible for the underperformance of some minority groups. There were ad hominem attacks on those who wrote the report, who were from minority groups. The whole thing was dismal. How can you ever solve the inequality problem if you cannot honestly investigate the reasons but have to accept a priori an explanation like systemic prejudice as THE cause of any disparity?
I can only repeat what I said nearby (https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-origins-of-wokeness/comment/8984101): that your new objection is different to your old one. You originally wrote that "wokeness" is a vector of radical postmodern skepticism about whether facts and reality even exist; now you write that its factual claims about reality are wrong.
Attacking the 1619 Project on factual grounds supports my point that the 1619 Project is built on factual assertions, not on radical postmodern skepticism about whether truth even exists.
I have no desire to defend the 1619 Project as history, but I seemingly can't resist weighing in on the nature of history. You might want to reconsider how you define it.
No practicing historian that I know of would describe it as entirely based on "digging into dusty old books" (although perhaps you use the term "books" in the way that postmodern thinkers use the term "texts"). Instead, history is based on the reading of primary sources, some of which are books, but most of which are aren't. In the area that I study (largely 19th century American), I spend more time in dusty old archives than in libraries, examining sources such as personal correspondence, government records, and newspapers.
I'd also invite you to consider the implications of your statement that "slavery was a very complicated catchall." This is true, and is something that contemporary historians of American slavery would acknowledge. However, someone like David Brion Davis uses this fact in order to observe how slavery in contexts such as imperial Roman latifundia and New World plantations differed in important ways from other systems of slavery. Check out his Inhuman Bondage the next time that you are in a dusty old library.
OK, knowing that you are using the term "books" more broadly, I need to address the second half of your definition: "reporting the who, what, when were, why as described by the writers."
I now suspect, given what you wrote about wrote about presentism, that you misphrased what you meant, but historians do not simply report what their primary sources say. If you were concerned about presentism, yes, the sources need to be read in the context of when and how they were created. But doing so also requires reading them skeptically and sometimes reading them for what they don't say, and sometime the context isn't the immediately obvious one.
For example, in my current project I'm looking at the rise of the Know-Nothings in a specific town. The normal context for interpreting Know-Nothing activity is an increase in nativist, particularly anti-Catholic, sentiments at the same time that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was dividing the Whigs along sectional lines. The sources that I have are full of anti-Nebraska rhetoric but show no real signs of nativism of anti-Catholicism. What I need to balance are specific local circumstances, the fact that my sources are produced by people who claim to have been unaware of what was said in the local Know-Nothing lodge, and the broader context. The argument that I'm working on will need to explain both the silent forces that were operating in 1855 and the more elite-driven forces that are visible in the sources in 1856.
The original “postmodernist” criticism of modernism was /correct/, which is why it replaced it in the first place. It isn’t possible to reach absolute truth through logical proofs and it’s also not practical to get close enough with it.
The usual example is Gödel’s theorem, but it’s easier to see with medicine. Enlightenment reasoning-based medicine wouldn’t accept the concept of handwashing because the guy who invented it couldn’t give a reasoning-based argument for why it worked, so they just went on killing every mother they could in childbirth.
Modern medicine is capable of using things that seem to work without a reason, which is why we have painkillers and antidepressants. We don’t know why either work or know for sure they even do work.
"And hey, guess what. As I type that list, it’s starting to sound like a typical “woke” litany of marginalized groups." surely you're joking. Asians are never included as part of marginalized groups unless convenient as tool to score some political point.
Separately, am confused by "I feel like the America I grew up in could learn a thing or two from Japan in this regard.". I think your experience of living in Japan may have been extremely atypical vs. lived local experiences. Social stratification between "elitos" and arubaito level losers? bullying in schools and workplaces? oppression of minorities like ethnic korean ainu etc? casual racism? rampant sexism? check check check check check. Just because people bow a lot (especially when interacting with white male americans) doesn't mean there is more respect to go around. I do realize you wrote that quoted sentence some years ago but given you didn't repudiate it just now am afraid your understanding of the country hasn't progressed since.
As I read through some of the pushback you are receiving in the comments perhaps its worth reconsidering some of your own biases that show through in this article. Inevitably, you as the writer make choices about what facts to omit or include. This is fine, but to pretend that only others have biases is naive.
I think you will address many of these in the follow up article as your conclusion showed, wokeness has begun to have many negative side effects. To me the contradictions in the idealized version of wokeness that you present and the actual experience of people today comes down to that the movement is about power currently (maybe it didn't start that way).
"But actually, I think my post had one additional huge, fatal flaw. I framed it as a question of redistribution, as if respect is a zero-sum quantity. That was a mischaracterization; respect is something that you can produce more or less of, in the aggregate."
This is the salient point. The Japanese could produce more respect, even in a hierarchical society, if lower valued groups, the Ainu, Koreans, etc., were respected to the extent that the overall level of respect for all persons in Japanese society increased.
The issue with "wokeness" in American society today, and I disagree that it has decreased since the mid 2010s, is that the level of "disrespect" among classes (or races) has increased due to factional fighting. The Golden Rule is being violated more and more due to the perfidious effects of social media, wherein no one has a "dislike" button to press on their neighbors Facebook feed.
Note: I read a commentator somewhere who noted that a "dislike" function is performed in real life by silence, downward eyes, uncomfortable silences and other means of social opprobrium that is difficult to replicate online.
So I think we need to define what we mean by respect. If it's general politeness and tendency to avoid overly aggressive social expressions (like say my earlier comment above that Noah appreciated so much) then sure Japan is a lot better than US (with some exceptions but generally pretty true). If however we mean the inner feeling that other people have inherently similar value to us, and willingness to hear out their viewpoints even if they are not our social equals/superiors and/or in our in-group, and occasionally let oneself be persuaded by such, dunno. I mean i know i'm profoundly ignorant on the topic, but from my experience living and working in the country just can't see it. There are admirable examples for and horrible counter-examples against, but overall wouldn't say one country is clearly better than the other. Separately, one thing that one definitely notices after living in Japan is the oversupply vs. other places, for whatever reason, of westerners who go there and start worshiping the country/culture and form certain opinions on the place while only being able to access it in superficial ways (inability to read or often even speak the local language, interact with Japanese mostly in formal social settings, meet mostly just the middle-class sarariman type social strata etc.). Is Noah one of them? dunno haven't read enough of his total body of work to know but his opinion in the post above reeked of it which is why i (over) reacted like i did. Of course you are also free to adopt his viewpoint and say I'm the stupid gaijin spewing opinions about Japan i've got no clue about... btw any native Japanese reading this blog please feel free to chip in (respectfully please)!
I'm fairly sure Noah speaks Japanese and while he's a fan of some anime, it's not the typical weeb stuff. As a non Japanese Asian, I do tend to think a lot of commentary on Japan by westerners tend to gravitate to cultural essentialism. Even the likes of Henry Kissinger.
Asians can be included in marginalized groups under “brown people”, since American racial groups are based on what total strangers assume you are when they look at you.
> Asians are never included as part of marginalized groups unless convenient as tool to score some political point.
That's a tautology, since publishing lists of marginalized groups IS a tool to score some political point. It's equally accurate to complain that blacks are never included as a marginalized group unless convenient as a tool to score some political point, that Muslims are never included as a marginalized group unless convenient as a tool to score some political point, that women are never included...
what i meant is that the people who talk about marginalized groups don't normally include asians as part of them in their mental map (presumably because they view some Asian subgroups as too economically successful to qualify), unless there is something in the news like the Atlanta spa shootings (which anyway didn't seem racially motivated at all) where attacks against Asians can be weaponized against the enemy, then they start talking about Asians as a marginalized group.
The non-tautologous part of that is about the mental state of people who talk about marginalized groups, so a bit hard to decide, but it's certainly plausible that such people don't include Asians in toto — because who does? Basically no Americans include Kyrgyz or Qataris or the Bamar in their mental map (I doubt Noah had any of those 3 come to mind while writing any of the stuff up top!).
Another likely factor is the advent of cheap smartphones making anyone a potential videographer, meaning that racial incidents that used to go unreported are now out in the open. As Will Smith once said in an interview, "racism isn't getting worse, it's getting filmed."
You did not read the paper I cited. It states that "greater academic effort" is the determinant, not inherent cognition.
"Our findings show that the Asian-American advantage in academic achievement is primarily attributable to greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive ability or socio-demographic characteristics. "
It doesn’t matter. A group of immigrant Asians systematically outstudying and then outperforming the supposedly privileged caste without running into arbitrarily defined discrimination mechanisms is already something that shouldn’t exist in the world dreamt up by progressives.
Maybe they have higher IQ, maybe they study harder because they like it a lot, maybe there are positive cultural pressures in their communities. It does not matter. What matters is that they somehow get ahead.
People don't care about differences between Englishmen and Frenchmen because these differences are small and not politically salient. It's very hard to care about non-existing differences, obviously.
I never said group performance was completely unimpacted by historical discrimination.
You did say, however, that discussing "benign" causes for group disparities was allowed in polite society. As you now seem to acknowledge, it by and large is not.
I posit that declining religious adherence in the United States [1] is leaving the door open for other methods to proclaim purity, salvation and other traditional Christian values. In fact, one can observe the rise of "purity circles" among insular, online communities.[2] This issue, combined with the storied American tradition of "grifting" [3] [4], in the Second Gilded Age [5], combine to orient a hierarchy of what can be considered American "virtue signaling" ala classism in the normal sense.
I am proudly anti-woke, not because I do not recognize that some of their criticisms are valid but because the prescriptions they offer are no medicine for the disease. Liberalism provides the solutions we need to make America a more respectful place. Liberalism has already brought us quite far, and we do not need to root out the foundations of our nation in order to fix these problems. I would add: I completely agree that respect is a renewable and endless resource. The woke do not agree. They act and demand the rest of us recognize that respect and status are limited, and that white people need to give it up. If not voluntarily than by cultural force. This, to me, in unacceptable. You build a nation by expanding it.
The woke have no respect for conservatives, no respect for many religions (which is ironic since I agree that this is an American phenomenon and quite religious, not unlike Marxism), and no respect for any who disagree even slightly from their dogma.
I hope we can take the best of their ideas and work to improve the country. I am fearful that this is now impossible.
This is a very good article. Noah, is always very thoughtful and it’s very welcome to see him revisiting his perspective on supporters of social justice in the US. I have some real issues with the framing of this article including the core language, but he comes at it in good faith and so I appreciate the exposure to his perspective.
But I did want to share two concerns. For example, “woke” is becoming a right wing term that seeks to be dismissive at best, and an epithet at worst to tar the straightforward tenets it seeks to promote. It’s hard see if you’re not it’s intended target, but “woke” honestly has just become a cheeky negative way to say “black” “female” “gay” “liberal” interests and people. If someone says something has gone “woke” it literally just means a woman, black person, etc. exists in a way they don’t like. The danger of normalizing that should be obvious. And yes, you can be anti-woke of any persuasion, but the essentialism that’s become embedded within the term is clear imo - Chris Rufo and Ron DeSantis wins again. I understand the challenge, but the term is now “cringe” and may put off folks who’d benefit from your perspective.
The other thing that is just funny to me is that the idea that pursuing social justice and respect as Noah states has “excess” that can be measured on a scale anywhere near the illiberal threat the right represents today. Like, unleash the most cringe, tone deaf, cumbaya DEI garbage and help me understand where that leads us to vs. democratic backsliding needed to keep the momentum from having real impact.
Those are my quibbles, and want to be clear about those, but the clarity around this being about social justice, respect and is deep within American traditions is important (with the 1619 criticism the most important). Making white people or other people who don’t fit entirely within the label feel like they are excluded if they don’t accept the approach of this movement to its universal goals *is* dangerous. Better to have Noah and others like him inside the tent vs outside the tent as it were.
I do think the “anti-woke” backlash is not only typical, but expected, and it’s impressive how effective it is able to create fissures inside a coalition that wants the same goals.
My question is why are we ignoring the most obvious source of this cultural moment? The United States is diversifying incredibly quickly and will only become more diverse in the future. Women who are more educated than ever, Black Americans as well along with various waves of immigrants and their kids who are now in places of relative privilege even vs. 20 years ago. Those people are now trying to empower themselves and helping people who share their experience. This is the American dream in action! The surprise to me is that we hit a cultural tipping point where power structures in the US basically said “We agree!” Anti-woke folks were caught on the back foot and are trying to assert themselves back in the other direction and I believe they will ultimately fail. They use “excess” and “woke BS” as cover imo, “but diversity printer go ‘brrrr’” and so what’s the alternative but to support that integration?
The moment I realized I probably couldn't live there, was when the new CEO of Firefox (the creator of Javascript, not a nobody) was forced to quit because he had supported proposition 8 in California by donating money.
It seemed very unreasonable to me, after all Proposition 8 had won in California, and even Obama said he was against gay marriage at that time. I don't think it's a honest position to be fine with making money from clients with belief A (such as the majority of the population of California in 2008), while thinking that having an employee with that belief should not be tolerated.
Fair enough, but I strongly disagree that gender ideology should be thought of in the past tense. Calfiornia just passed the odious SB107 (kids, come to sunny California to get yourselves mutilated and sterilized!) on a straight party-line vote.
The police problem doesn’t actually exist. The data shows it doesn’t. The George Floyd situation had nothing to do with race. Woke is just about power and money.
The George Floyd situation had nothing to do with race? Tell it to the right-wingers complaining that George Floyd protesters weren't angry enough about police-on-white brutality or black-on-white crime.
Holy cremoly, the fact that I can guess the gender and race of most of the nay-sayers in these comments says a lot right off the bat. But then, I was around for RaceFail '09 and been able to observe the results since then. The arguments are definitely not new; neither are the talking points.
But as someone in a non-academic pursuit--speculative fiction writing--the so-called "wokeness" had its rise in the SFF genre with the emergence of RaceFail, aka a lot of big arguments back in 2009 about whether SFF was the genre of white men or if there was more to it than that (this is very grossly oversimplified). No links; a quick search of "RaceFail 2009" will give you plenty.
RaceFail had two results: a HUGE swarm of recognition of people of color writing SFF which has led to a massive renaissance (in my opinion) of superb writers who had been unacknowledged before then and is still showing results. An awareness of intersectionality which has expanded to gender awareness. It's still happening and as a result, more BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and women are getting published and winning awards. That's the positive side.
On the negative side, RaceFail triggered the Sad/Rabid Puppies, which had their heyday in 2015 with slating at the Hugo Awards. Their degree of influence is present and pops up in internet battles.
But. As a result, the genre of speculative fiction is overall a LOT more representative of the overall population than it was before 2009.
The issue also opened my eyes to the degree that leftist thought is in itself racist and sexist. There are a lot of socialists who reject "identity politics" and claim that the class revolution solves racism and sexism. Um. Yeah. When someone who is a white male tells me that, what they're saying is that they don't understand the dynamics to which racism drives social inequality in the US.
The powerful have always used racism to divide the less-powerful. The "anti-woke" backlash is just one example of that.
It should be remembered that the main issue that led to the creation of the first Communist International (which still featured anarchists, ended up split between Marx&Engels and Bakunin) was about English capitalists using immigrant workers (IIRC Polish, though also Irish previously ?) to break strikes. And I'm pretty sure that it was mainly ethnic tensions that were fanned to prevent the workers from uniting ! (Women's rights were also paid attention to with a feminist woman joining the General Council 3 years after its creation.)
Wokeness is absolutely a religion for the irreligious. There’s something in human nature that clearly craves concepts of sin, repentance, penance, and fighting the infidels.
Absolutely, and it a perfectly normal phenomenon that is more prevalent in what Sam Huntington called creedal passion periods. Wokism today, the various "new age" movements in the late 1960's and 1970's, Pentecostals, Fundamentalism, Marcus Garvey, Gurdjieff, Billy Sunday in the early 20th cent, Moody Bible Institute, Salvation Army, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian Science in the 1860's & 70's, and what Noah calls the Abolition era which includes things like the American Temperance Society (1826), Mormonism (1830), Millerites (7th day Adventists) (1831, Burned over district revivals (1835) along with Abolition events: Walker's 1829 "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World", The Liberator (1831) American Anti-Slavery Society (1833).
Abolition was part of a general creedal passion period/cultural awakening period.
Yes, and also sudden awakening -- the scales fell from Saul's eyes, "he received his sight at once; and he arose and was baptized."
"Awake and sing, you who dwell in dust; For your dew is like the dew of herbs, And the earth shall cast out the dead." Isaiah 26:19
I find Noah's analysis fascinating -- my own interests lead me more towards the metaphors of the awakening of the dead, salvation, eternal life in the light, and so forth. There are many lenses for understanding the meaning of wokeness. Deep roots in Christian doctrine.
DAE wokeness is a religion?? https://www.carlbeijer.com/p/a-brief-history-of-comparing-wokeness
It's funny, but also very good.
Per Beijer, "wokeness" can't be a religion per se because it doesn't make otherworldly claims: "metaphysical, teleological, transcendental, cosmological, existential," etc. It even has a very weak theodicy (an explanation for the problem of evil).
Certainly, the Republican Party makes me hope that Hell is a thing, or at least karma.
I liked this piece, though I wish there was more about how these ideas got conflated with “cancel culture”
It’s so much like mainline Protestantism that it probably just is that. (Not meant as an insult or a “lol it’s a religion” take.)
Eastern religions don’t have all those concepts the same way; not saying Buddhism is against war and some versions of it have sins, but it’s pretty different and much less into universal moralizing.
By that I mean Buddhism has personal morals (mainly "don't have sex" and "if you're a monk make sure to never enjoy anything") and if you get them wrong you'll be reincarnated as a slug or something. But it doesn't usually have morals you're supposed to push on other people, nor are you supposed to convert others like the newer monotheistic religions do.
Very very new forms of Buddhism are about being super-ethical; half of this is literally a marketing campaign for the Dalai Lama/Tibetan independence, the other half is that Buddhists converted Californian hippies by adopting all the philosophy they already had.
right evolution in progress
Does “almost every Asian” have experiences like that? 85% of Indian Americans say that racism against them is a minor problem or not a problem: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/09/16/miss-america-pageant-puts-indian-americans-in-the-spotlight/. That’s certainly my experience as a brown guy with a Muslim name that went to college in the south post 9/11. My precinct went overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016, and I’ve encountered zero racism in 6 years of living here. My dad, who travels a lot, was commenting about how little racism he’s experienced in 30+ years in America.
The story about your friend’s dad is unfortunate and unpleasant. But I think the takeaway depends on how you look at it. Anyone unhinged enough to beat someone up over a traffic altercation may well say whatever thinks will be hurtful and get a reaction. If there was some other notable characteristic of the victim the attacker may well have focused on that instead.
I would point out: why are Asians getting attacked in the Bay Area and NYC? I don’t think it’s because those places are hotbeds of racism, but rather hotbeds of crime and mental disorders. The only times in my life I’ve been called racial epithets have been from homeless black people in Atlanta. Are they yelling at me because of racism, or is racism what they happen to lash out with?
+1. I am an Indian-American and the most consequential anti-Asian racism I faced was committed by the Harvard admissions office.
It's true, sometimes people mispronounce my name, but that's not racism - that's a consequence of a whole generation being deprived of phonics education! And sometimes people are very nosy about my heritage, asking a string of questions starting with "where are you from?"; those people are *always* South Asian or Middle Eastern immigrants.
Sorry that’s me! Whenever I see another brown person I want to know exactly what kind they are.
Same here. Out of a social circle of Asians living in US numbering in the mid-hundreds I've heard of one first hand example so far (friend of a friend distant, living in California). There may be more as haven't been running around asking every acquaintance, but it's definitely not something so prevalent that it comes up spontaneously as a topic of conversation. Also ironically if a white guy started making generalizations about other minority groups like that that he has no direct lived experience of he is liable to get considerable online blowback, but somehow with Asians it's ok.
edit: what i mean above is incidences of actual violence or threatened violence or other aggression. Stupid kids shouting konnichiwa or nihao to you randomly in the street? sure, has been happening for decades and still happens, albeit less (presumably because there are more or us here now to spread the stupidity around). As for jokes on TV dunno, one could see it as a form of microaggression i guess but i never felt it that way. Am fine with Leno making Asian jokes and laughing at them, am fine with Peter Russell making them, am fine with Constance Wu making them. If it's funny it's funny, if it's not it's not.
Yeah I was taken aback by the blunt assertion that almost every Asian American has a story akin to being viciously attacked. Hasn’t happened to me or any of my Asian friends and family that I am aware of. That story from the Bay Area is in fact quite special and unusual, and thank God for that.
As a corollary to this post, perhaps someone should dig into the cynical economic rationale for wokeness being absolutely pervasive in the west. Is it true cultural progress or the billionaire and corporate class want to distract the masses with identity issues while they continue to rob rest of society blind? No surprise that Occupy Wall St petered out just as wokeness became paramount.
I think the wealthy elites believe sincerely in wokeness, the masses copy them (this is what the masses do). Thus the distraction (Marxist "false consciousness") spreads.
Of course, the wealthy elite believe in wokeness sincerely. I’ve never doubted that. It is also in their economic best interests on many levels. People can sincerely believe in these things especially when it doesn’t cause any economic redistribution. It doesn’t hurt profit to let people choose their own pronouns. In fact, a brand can embrace it and be lauded plus increase their sales. Win win.
I’d argue that anything that doesn’t impact their own personal wealth, they’re all about. Be as woke as you want, just don’t tamper with the bottom line.
> As a corollary to this post, perhaps someone should dig into the cynical economic rationale for wokeness being absolutely pervasive in the west.
Absolutely pervasive, and yet e.g. racial discrimination in housing still happens. And is there more to the "cynical economic rationale" than the fact that "wokeness" is way more popular now than in, say, the 1960s?
> Is it true cultural progress or the billionaire and corporate class want to distract the masses with identity issues while they continue to rob rest of society blind?
Probably not the latter, considering that historically the upper classes have used SUPPORT for racism and xenophobia as their preferred way "to distract the masses of identity issues while they [...] rob the rest of society blind" for decades (LBJ mentioned this back in 1960, for instance).
> No surprise that Occupy Wall St petered out just as wokeness became paramount.
Occupy Wall St didn't simply peter out; it was intensely surveiled by the feds and subject to violent attacks by police (not exactly known for being High Priests Of Woke) in 2011, years before the 2014/2015 period to which Noah dates "the so-called 'Great Awokening'".
Counterpoint: The masses have agency.
Somebody already has
https://mikebert.neocities.org/America-in-crisis.pdf
You underestimate the extent it which wokeness has inserted post-modern ideas into our way of thinking about the world. Post-modernism is radically skeptical, questioning the existence of an observer-independent reality and absolute truth. It is incompatible with the enlightenment emphasis on reason and evidence, which has been so important for human progress. I think you underestimate the threat this poses. The editorial staff of scientific journals and health care professionals are embracing practices that explicitly reject evidence and reason. That seems dangerous to me.
Nah, that's obviously false.
The Wokes rely on factual claims about an observer-independent reality all the time.
• The 1619 Project forwarded many assertions of historical fact.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Case for Reparations" opens with factual statements about the duration of slavery, Jim Crow, "separate but equal" and so on, before marching through a procession of empirical claims.
• The murder of George Floyd triggered national protests precisely because it was video recorded, documented as observable fact.
And scientists and healthcare professionals have rejected evidence and reason many times for decades — look at how long it took for randomized, controlled trials to become normal practice, and look at how many medical reversals there have been as a result.
The Big Bad Wokes put emphasis on reason and evidence, apparently more than you do. You're free to disagree with their factual claims, but you'd first have to recognize them as factual claims.
I think you underestimate the use of selective facts to further ideology, and the viewpoint bias where only people with a given “lived experience” have access to relevant folks.
I disagree. Someone who uses "selective facts" or has a bias towards taking "lived experience" as fact is still someone who recognizes the idea of facts and reality, not someone with a postmodern objection to the very notion of observer-independent truth.
Just because woke people accept facts that we agree on does not mean that they accept that we need to rely on all facts. They explicitly reject facts that conflict with their belief. A good example relates to gender and biological sex. They deny the objective reality of biological sex and it’s implications. Indeed the assertion transwomen are women, which one is required to accept, is a clear example of this. Instead of acknowledging that gender (a psychological state) is distinct from biological sex (on objective state) they make factually absurd claims about biological sex. This is actually harmful to transgender people and those with gender dysphoria. These individuals need compassion and care based on evidence and science. Indeed denying the distinction between gender and biological sex denies the existence of transpeople. Similarly, denying the reality of biological sex denies the existence of homosexuals, who are, by definition, attracted to people of the same biological sex.
Which is a different objection to your original one. Your original objection was that The Wokes are not even wrong: they're radical postmodern skeptics averse to the very idea of truth and falsity. Now your objection is that The Wokes are just wrong: Wokes embrace the idea of truth and falsity, and are simply incorrect about what's true or false.
Let me give you an example of where evidence is rejected. In the U.K. there was a study in racism in the educational system. They found that some minority groups performed less well than whites whereas others performed better, often much better. Partly on this basis the report concluded that there was not evidence systemic racism in the education system but that there was an urgent need to investigate the reason that some minority groups underperformed, and address these. There was widespread outrage at this report because it did not acknowledge that systemic racism was a problem in schools and responsible for the underperformance of some minority groups. There were ad hominem attacks on those who wrote the report, who were from minority groups. The whole thing was dismal. How can you ever solve the inequality problem if you cannot honestly investigate the reasons but have to accept a priori an explanation like systemic prejudice as THE cause of any disparity?
I can only repeat what I said nearby (https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-origins-of-wokeness/comment/8984101): that your new objection is different to your old one. You originally wrote that "wokeness" is a vector of radical postmodern skepticism about whether facts and reality even exist; now you write that its factual claims about reality are wrong.
Attacking the 1619 Project on factual grounds supports my point that the 1619 Project is built on factual assertions, not on radical postmodern skepticism about whether truth even exists.
Whut
I have no desire to defend the 1619 Project as history, but I seemingly can't resist weighing in on the nature of history. You might want to reconsider how you define it.
No practicing historian that I know of would describe it as entirely based on "digging into dusty old books" (although perhaps you use the term "books" in the way that postmodern thinkers use the term "texts"). Instead, history is based on the reading of primary sources, some of which are books, but most of which are aren't. In the area that I study (largely 19th century American), I spend more time in dusty old archives than in libraries, examining sources such as personal correspondence, government records, and newspapers.
I'd also invite you to consider the implications of your statement that "slavery was a very complicated catchall." This is true, and is something that contemporary historians of American slavery would acknowledge. However, someone like David Brion Davis uses this fact in order to observe how slavery in contexts such as imperial Roman latifundia and New World plantations differed in important ways from other systems of slavery. Check out his Inhuman Bondage the next time that you are in a dusty old library.
OK, knowing that you are using the term "books" more broadly, I need to address the second half of your definition: "reporting the who, what, when were, why as described by the writers."
I now suspect, given what you wrote about wrote about presentism, that you misphrased what you meant, but historians do not simply report what their primary sources say. If you were concerned about presentism, yes, the sources need to be read in the context of when and how they were created. But doing so also requires reading them skeptically and sometimes reading them for what they don't say, and sometime the context isn't the immediately obvious one.
For example, in my current project I'm looking at the rise of the Know-Nothings in a specific town. The normal context for interpreting Know-Nothing activity is an increase in nativist, particularly anti-Catholic, sentiments at the same time that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was dividing the Whigs along sectional lines. The sources that I have are full of anti-Nebraska rhetoric but show no real signs of nativism of anti-Catholicism. What I need to balance are specific local circumstances, the fact that my sources are produced by people who claim to have been unaware of what was said in the local Know-Nothing lodge, and the broader context. The argument that I'm working on will need to explain both the silent forces that were operating in 1855 and the more elite-driven forces that are visible in the sources in 1856.
The original “postmodernist” criticism of modernism was /correct/, which is why it replaced it in the first place. It isn’t possible to reach absolute truth through logical proofs and it’s also not practical to get close enough with it.
The usual example is Gödel’s theorem, but it’s easier to see with medicine. Enlightenment reasoning-based medicine wouldn’t accept the concept of handwashing because the guy who invented it couldn’t give a reasoning-based argument for why it worked, so they just went on killing every mother they could in childbirth.
Modern medicine is capable of using things that seem to work without a reason, which is why we have painkillers and antidepressants. We don’t know why either work or know for sure they even do work.
"And hey, guess what. As I type that list, it’s starting to sound like a typical “woke” litany of marginalized groups." surely you're joking. Asians are never included as part of marginalized groups unless convenient as tool to score some political point.
Separately, am confused by "I feel like the America I grew up in could learn a thing or two from Japan in this regard.". I think your experience of living in Japan may have been extremely atypical vs. lived local experiences. Social stratification between "elitos" and arubaito level losers? bullying in schools and workplaces? oppression of minorities like ethnic korean ainu etc? casual racism? rampant sexism? check check check check check. Just because people bow a lot (especially when interacting with white male americans) doesn't mean there is more respect to go around. I do realize you wrote that quoted sentence some years ago but given you didn't repudiate it just now am afraid your understanding of the country hasn't progressed since.
This comment reflects blithe, flippant self-assurance about things you are profoundly, deeply ignorant about.
As I read through some of the pushback you are receiving in the comments perhaps its worth reconsidering some of your own biases that show through in this article. Inevitably, you as the writer make choices about what facts to omit or include. This is fine, but to pretend that only others have biases is naive.
I think you will address many of these in the follow up article as your conclusion showed, wokeness has begun to have many negative side effects. To me the contradictions in the idealized version of wokeness that you present and the actual experience of people today comes down to that the movement is about power currently (maybe it didn't start that way).
"But actually, I think my post had one additional huge, fatal flaw. I framed it as a question of redistribution, as if respect is a zero-sum quantity. That was a mischaracterization; respect is something that you can produce more or less of, in the aggregate."
This is the salient point. The Japanese could produce more respect, even in a hierarchical society, if lower valued groups, the Ainu, Koreans, etc., were respected to the extent that the overall level of respect for all persons in Japanese society increased.
The issue with "wokeness" in American society today, and I disagree that it has decreased since the mid 2010s, is that the level of "disrespect" among classes (or races) has increased due to factional fighting. The Golden Rule is being violated more and more due to the perfidious effects of social media, wherein no one has a "dislike" button to press on their neighbors Facebook feed.
Note: I read a commentator somewhere who noted that a "dislike" function is performed in real life by silence, downward eyes, uncomfortable silences and other means of social opprobrium that is difficult to replicate online.
In more extreme cases, the dislike button is fulfilled by KiwiFarms or Gamergate.
So I think we need to define what we mean by respect. If it's general politeness and tendency to avoid overly aggressive social expressions (like say my earlier comment above that Noah appreciated so much) then sure Japan is a lot better than US (with some exceptions but generally pretty true). If however we mean the inner feeling that other people have inherently similar value to us, and willingness to hear out their viewpoints even if they are not our social equals/superiors and/or in our in-group, and occasionally let oneself be persuaded by such, dunno. I mean i know i'm profoundly ignorant on the topic, but from my experience living and working in the country just can't see it. There are admirable examples for and horrible counter-examples against, but overall wouldn't say one country is clearly better than the other. Separately, one thing that one definitely notices after living in Japan is the oversupply vs. other places, for whatever reason, of westerners who go there and start worshiping the country/culture and form certain opinions on the place while only being able to access it in superficial ways (inability to read or often even speak the local language, interact with Japanese mostly in formal social settings, meet mostly just the middle-class sarariman type social strata etc.). Is Noah one of them? dunno haven't read enough of his total body of work to know but his opinion in the post above reeked of it which is why i (over) reacted like i did. Of course you are also free to adopt his viewpoint and say I'm the stupid gaijin spewing opinions about Japan i've got no clue about... btw any native Japanese reading this blog please feel free to chip in (respectfully please)!
I'm fairly sure Noah speaks Japanese and while he's a fan of some anime, it's not the typical weeb stuff. As a non Japanese Asian, I do tend to think a lot of commentary on Japan by westerners tend to gravitate to cultural essentialism. Even the likes of Henry Kissinger.
ha, never heard of the term "weeb" before. The thing even has a word for it funny. thanks for teaching me something today!
Noah had a good post about weebs: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/weebs
Asians can be included in marginalized groups under “brown people”, since American racial groups are based on what total strangers assume you are when they look at you.
> Asians are never included as part of marginalized groups unless convenient as tool to score some political point.
That's a tautology, since publishing lists of marginalized groups IS a tool to score some political point. It's equally accurate to complain that blacks are never included as a marginalized group unless convenient as a tool to score some political point, that Muslims are never included as a marginalized group unless convenient as a tool to score some political point, that women are never included...
what i meant is that the people who talk about marginalized groups don't normally include asians as part of them in their mental map (presumably because they view some Asian subgroups as too economically successful to qualify), unless there is something in the news like the Atlanta spa shootings (which anyway didn't seem racially motivated at all) where attacks against Asians can be weaponized against the enemy, then they start talking about Asians as a marginalized group.
The non-tautologous part of that is about the mental state of people who talk about marginalized groups, so a bit hard to decide, but it's certainly plausible that such people don't include Asians in toto — because who does? Basically no Americans include Kyrgyz or Qataris or the Bamar in their mental map (I doubt Noah had any of those 3 come to mind while writing any of the stuff up top!).
Another likely factor is the advent of cheap smartphones making anyone a potential videographer, meaning that racial incidents that used to go unreported are now out in the open. As Will Smith once said in an interview, "racism isn't getting worse, it's getting filmed."
Noah, your posts on wokeness have really shaped my thinking and they deserve a large audience. Thanks
Thanks!
There is a very simple explanation for wokeness. It goes like this:
1. The only explanation acceptable in polite society for differences in group performance is discrimination.
2. Groups differ markedly in socioeconomic performance, interests, rates of anti-social behaviour, and many other things.
3. These differences must be explained, and the only explanation educated people allow themselves to have is the one outlined in 1.
4. The discrimination must come from some place. Since group differences are so large, these sources must be omnipresent in societies.
5. “Being on time is White Supremacy”.
At the risk of sounding like an ass, I confidently believe most everything else written on this topic is sophistry.
Children of poor Asian immigrants in NYC outperform native-born whites which refutes that line of argument.
See https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1406402111
I think you and I agree on that. No need to send me papers proving IQ is real.
You did not read the paper I cited. It states that "greater academic effort" is the determinant, not inherent cognition.
"Our findings show that the Asian-American advantage in academic achievement is primarily attributable to greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive ability or socio-demographic characteristics. "
And you also didn’t read my comment, it seems.
It doesn’t matter. A group of immigrant Asians systematically outstudying and then outperforming the supposedly privileged caste without running into arbitrarily defined discrimination mechanisms is already something that shouldn’t exist in the world dreamt up by progressives.
Maybe they have higher IQ, maybe they study harder because they like it a lot, maybe there are positive cultural pressures in their communities. It does not matter. What matters is that they somehow get ahead.
The key word is immigrant. Immigrants tend to outperform, when controlling for education and economic class, because they are self selected.
Paige explicitly says that her half-hearted defence of mainstream psychometric research implies nothing for group differences.
People don't care about differences between Englishmen and Frenchmen because these differences are small and not politically salient. It's very hard to care about non-existing differences, obviously.
I never said group performance was completely unimpacted by historical discrimination.
You did say, however, that discussing "benign" causes for group disparities was allowed in polite society. As you now seem to acknowledge, it by and large is not.
"What was once a Cambrian explosion of memes and ideas has now been canonized, standardized, and institutionalized."
Just want to say that I love this sentence.
I posit that declining religious adherence in the United States [1] is leaving the door open for other methods to proclaim purity, salvation and other traditional Christian values. In fact, one can observe the rise of "purity circles" among insular, online communities.[2] This issue, combined with the storied American tradition of "grifting" [3] [4], in the Second Gilded Age [5], combine to orient a hierarchy of what can be considered American "virtue signaling" ala classism in the normal sense.
[1] See https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/01/14/measuring-religion-in-pew-research-centers-american-trends-panel/
[2] See https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/
[3] See https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/01/black-lives-matter-finances.html
[4] See also the Duke and the Dauphin, Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
[5] See https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/buffalolawreview/vol66/iss5/1/
I am proudly anti-woke, not because I do not recognize that some of their criticisms are valid but because the prescriptions they offer are no medicine for the disease. Liberalism provides the solutions we need to make America a more respectful place. Liberalism has already brought us quite far, and we do not need to root out the foundations of our nation in order to fix these problems. I would add: I completely agree that respect is a renewable and endless resource. The woke do not agree. They act and demand the rest of us recognize that respect and status are limited, and that white people need to give it up. If not voluntarily than by cultural force. This, to me, in unacceptable. You build a nation by expanding it.
The woke have no respect for conservatives, no respect for many religions (which is ironic since I agree that this is an American phenomenon and quite religious, not unlike Marxism), and no respect for any who disagree even slightly from their dogma.
I hope we can take the best of their ideas and work to improve the country. I am fearful that this is now impossible.
This is a very good article. Noah, is always very thoughtful and it’s very welcome to see him revisiting his perspective on supporters of social justice in the US. I have some real issues with the framing of this article including the core language, but he comes at it in good faith and so I appreciate the exposure to his perspective.
But I did want to share two concerns. For example, “woke” is becoming a right wing term that seeks to be dismissive at best, and an epithet at worst to tar the straightforward tenets it seeks to promote. It’s hard see if you’re not it’s intended target, but “woke” honestly has just become a cheeky negative way to say “black” “female” “gay” “liberal” interests and people. If someone says something has gone “woke” it literally just means a woman, black person, etc. exists in a way they don’t like. The danger of normalizing that should be obvious. And yes, you can be anti-woke of any persuasion, but the essentialism that’s become embedded within the term is clear imo - Chris Rufo and Ron DeSantis wins again. I understand the challenge, but the term is now “cringe” and may put off folks who’d benefit from your perspective.
The other thing that is just funny to me is that the idea that pursuing social justice and respect as Noah states has “excess” that can be measured on a scale anywhere near the illiberal threat the right represents today. Like, unleash the most cringe, tone deaf, cumbaya DEI garbage and help me understand where that leads us to vs. democratic backsliding needed to keep the momentum from having real impact.
Those are my quibbles, and want to be clear about those, but the clarity around this being about social justice, respect and is deep within American traditions is important (with the 1619 criticism the most important). Making white people or other people who don’t fit entirely within the label feel like they are excluded if they don’t accept the approach of this movement to its universal goals *is* dangerous. Better to have Noah and others like him inside the tent vs outside the tent as it were.
I do think the “anti-woke” backlash is not only typical, but expected, and it’s impressive how effective it is able to create fissures inside a coalition that wants the same goals.
My question is why are we ignoring the most obvious source of this cultural moment? The United States is diversifying incredibly quickly and will only become more diverse in the future. Women who are more educated than ever, Black Americans as well along with various waves of immigrants and their kids who are now in places of relative privilege even vs. 20 years ago. Those people are now trying to empower themselves and helping people who share their experience. This is the American dream in action! The surprise to me is that we hit a cultural tipping point where power structures in the US basically said “We agree!” Anti-woke folks were caught on the back foot and are trying to assert themselves back in the other direction and I believe they will ultimately fail. They use “excess” and “woke BS” as cover imo, “but diversity printer go ‘brrrr’” and so what’s the alternative but to support that integration?
I'm not American and don't live there.
The moment I realized I probably couldn't live there, was when the new CEO of Firefox (the creator of Javascript, not a nobody) was forced to quit because he had supported proposition 8 in California by donating money.
It seemed very unreasonable to me, after all Proposition 8 had won in California, and even Obama said he was against gay marriage at that time. I don't think it's a honest position to be fine with making money from clients with belief A (such as the majority of the population of California in 2008), while thinking that having an employee with that belief should not be tolerated.
An analysis of wokeness that does not mention gender ideology is incomplete.
And this analysis is incredibly incomplete. It's just a start.
Fair enough, but I strongly disagree that gender ideology should be thought of in the past tense. Calfiornia just passed the odious SB107 (kids, come to sunny California to get yourselves mutilated and sterilized!) on a straight party-line vote.
I'm not wholly convinced by the exposition, but there are some interesting time series in Astral Codex Ten's "Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars" (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-online-culture).
The police problem doesn’t actually exist. The data shows it doesn’t. The George Floyd situation had nothing to do with race. Woke is just about power and money.
The George Floyd situation had nothing to do with race? Tell it to the right-wingers complaining that George Floyd protesters weren't angry enough about police-on-white brutality or black-on-white crime.
Holy cremoly, the fact that I can guess the gender and race of most of the nay-sayers in these comments says a lot right off the bat. But then, I was around for RaceFail '09 and been able to observe the results since then. The arguments are definitely not new; neither are the talking points.
But as someone in a non-academic pursuit--speculative fiction writing--the so-called "wokeness" had its rise in the SFF genre with the emergence of RaceFail, aka a lot of big arguments back in 2009 about whether SFF was the genre of white men or if there was more to it than that (this is very grossly oversimplified). No links; a quick search of "RaceFail 2009" will give you plenty.
RaceFail had two results: a HUGE swarm of recognition of people of color writing SFF which has led to a massive renaissance (in my opinion) of superb writers who had been unacknowledged before then and is still showing results. An awareness of intersectionality which has expanded to gender awareness. It's still happening and as a result, more BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and women are getting published and winning awards. That's the positive side.
On the negative side, RaceFail triggered the Sad/Rabid Puppies, which had their heyday in 2015 with slating at the Hugo Awards. Their degree of influence is present and pops up in internet battles.
But. As a result, the genre of speculative fiction is overall a LOT more representative of the overall population than it was before 2009.
The issue also opened my eyes to the degree that leftist thought is in itself racist and sexist. There are a lot of socialists who reject "identity politics" and claim that the class revolution solves racism and sexism. Um. Yeah. When someone who is a white male tells me that, what they're saying is that they don't understand the dynamics to which racism drives social inequality in the US.
The powerful have always used racism to divide the less-powerful. The "anti-woke" backlash is just one example of that.
It should be remembered that the main issue that led to the creation of the first Communist International (which still featured anarchists, ended up split between Marx&Engels and Bakunin) was about English capitalists using immigrant workers (IIRC Polish, though also Irish previously ?) to break strikes. And I'm pretty sure that it was mainly ethnic tensions that were fanned to prevent the workers from uniting ! (Women's rights were also paid attention to with a feminist woman joining the General Council 3 years after its creation.)