For the last 8 years, since I became aware of them, I’ve struggled with ideas I might broadly categorize as “woke”. This is not an ideal classification by any means, but you get the idea, the meaning I’m trying to convey here.
It seemed to me that society was being pushed in a certain direction, a direction that was often quite bizarre and divisive. More and more I noticed various words and phrases enter the discourse.
white privilege
toxic masculinity
the gender pay gap
rape culture
microaggressions
hate speech
whiteness
white fragility
systemic
decolonization
safe spaces
trigger warnings
non-binary
oppression
emotional labour
diversity, inclusion and equity
cultural appropriation
the gender spectrum
identity
social constructs
lived experience
allyship
intersectionality
I could go on. What struck me wasn’t so much the truth (or otherwise) contained in each of these concepts, but the sheer number of new concepts and new emphases that had been generated. I later learned that many of these ideas had been bubbling away in academia for some time, but it seemed to me at the time there was a kind of explosion of new, and often quite baffling, ideas to struggle with.
It seemed like all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, a vast array of confusing terminology had arisen, and with it a whole bunch of confusing and perplexing attitudes.
I saw people with the ‘wrong’ skin colour being castigated for ‘appropriating’ certain hairstyles. I had no idea that it was possible for people of a certain skin colour to actually own a hairstyle - but there you go, you learn something new every day, as they say.
I tried to learn about some of these things. I read Peggy McIntosh’s “knapsack” paper from 1989 where the idea of white privilege emerged. I tried to understand it better and read articles trying to explain it - articles written by people who believed in it, and thought it important. Many of these articles introduced this apparently very important concept by talking about the difficulty of obtaining ethnically relevant hair products. Honestly, what is this weird fascination with hair?
More serious examples were discussed, but they tended to focus on things like crime or economic statistics to ‘prove’ their case. I could immediately see several confounders, other than skin tone, which might undermine the reasoning.
I’ve lived and worked, for many years, in a country where my skin tone and culture did not coincide with the majority at all - and, yes, that society was not geared up predominately to cater for me and my every need. I wondered whether this so-called ‘white’ privilege was really more about a kind of majority privilege.
Of course, as a white person, I could not possibly have access to the same kind of “lived experience” as some other sections of society. Fair enough, to some extent, but is there a kind of experience that is not lived? The framing with the superfluous “lived” here seemed curious to me.
The problem with many of these ideas, when I tried to come to terms with them more concretely, can be typified by the phrase “to some extent”. Most of these emerging concepts have some truth contained, to some extent. But therein lies the rub. There is, one might say, a spectrum of ‘truth’.
So, for example, I’m sure some white people have benefited by a kind of white privilege in operation, in certain circumstances, in what we might term “Western” societies. But this ‘truth’ gets amplified and applied to every white person - as some kind of natural law akin to Newton’s Laws of Motion. Unlike with gender, there’s no spectrum fluidity here, no nuance - it’s a straight wham, bam, thank you ma’am without any of the delightful foreplay.
Did I just promote “rape culture” there? Honestly, I have no idea. But maybe the confusion, the constantly-changing definitions and framings, are part of the strategy. I remember reading a BBC article on sexual harassment a few years ago. That was back in the day when I thought the BBC had something of value to say. I was surprised to learn that looking at a woman in the wrong way could be construed as harassment. I spent ages with a mirror trying to figure out how I looked to others - did my resting female dog face betray me? Was my usual state of reflective thoughtfulness coming off as predatory?
I thought I knew, pretty much, what sexual harassment was - it was an ugly and horrible blight that quite rightly needed to be stamped out. But, I found, a whole new range of allegedly inappropriate behaviours had been added to the list - including asking someone you liked for their phone number. Good Lord, I thought, I’d best just only talk about the weather to a woman, in future. Good job I’m from the UK - we’re good at that sort of thing.
Cocooned in my academic bubble of quantum mechanical confusion, the Earth had moved and I hadn’t noticed. Did the Earth move for you too?
One thing that became very obvious to me was that many of these ideas, these hypotheses, were being talked about as if they were fact. The discussion seemed to completely bypass the “that’s a fascinating hypothesis, let’s try to figure out whether it’s true, and to what extent it is” stage, and onto this shit is real and we need to radically re-structure society.
All I can see as a result of this new woke landscape is more division, more hatred, and less understanding. I really don’t know what to make of someone who feels “oppressed” if they are “mis-gendered”. Pre-woke, the response would have been to simply say grow a pair, but I imagine I’ve just committed an awful faux-pas of epic hatefulness to various minority groups there. Worse still, I am told I might have tipped someone over the edge into suicide.
There really does seem to be some hierarchy of oppression these days, where people compete for their place and status on the victim podium. Seeing yourself as a perpetual victim cannot possibly be good for your mental health, or your own personal development. Life deals some people a shitty hand. Biology or circumstance conspire to make things more difficult for some. But the moment you place your happiness and inner well-being into the hands of some external agent, you’re on a fool’s errand.
I will caveat the above with the recognition that some people do have an almost impossible “inner” hill to climb. In my travels, for example, I’ve seen some desperate poverty. Truly heart-rending. These people have not had anything like the opportunities I had growing up in the UK. No amount of “inner” work will materially change their situation - some external change is required to make a real difference.
But those of us, sitting comfortably in a Starbucks, sipping our soy lattes, tweeting on our iPhones about how the systemic bits and bobs of society are “oppressing” us, are not quite in this situation.
It’s complicated. There are no easy “one size fits all” answers - as much as we might yearn for simple solutions. Human beings are extraordinarily complex. So too is society and the web of interactions that drive it. It’s easy to tear things down, to “deconstruct” to your heart’s content - far less easy to devise a fairer and more just system to replace things. If your proposed solution essentially boils down to “wouldn’t it be nice if everyone were nice” I might suggest it needs a modicum of polishing. It’s even worse if your solution involves thinking “I know what is good and nice, and we’re going to have to force people to be good and nice, according to my vision”.
These days the hate is palpable. JK Rowling wrote a very thoughtful piece on the whole “I identify as a woman” issue. It’s not in the slightest bit hateful, in my view. Yet she received an extraordinary number of what can only be described as hateful responses including some wishing death or that she would be raped. The piece itself was partly about these kinds of hateful responses to which she had become well-accustomed before she wrote it. Whether or not you agree with JKR here, what is evident is the sheer emotion this issue causes.
Maybe the issue is important and maybe it’s worth spending time figuring things out. But I struggle to understand the degree of emotion expended when there are millions of people across the world literally “struggling for their very existence” - and not for their “existence” as some self-proclaimed identity, but their actual physical existence on this planet, and the existence of their families. Surely this is an issue more deserving of our angst and ire?
I’m not suggesting we neglect certain issues because they are deemed of lesser importance, but there really is, as far as I can see, a definite hierarchy of importance to these issues - and even there it might not be quite so straightforward either. In any complex system it’s going to be extremely difficult to properly appreciate the various interdependencies.
Some people seem to have driven themselves crazy with the focus on oppression. Everything is seen from the frame of interacting systems and hierarchies of power and oppression. Trying to “erase” hierarchies is like trying to invent a perpetual motion machine - it can’t be done.
The problem when everything is framed in terms of oppression is that everything becomes about the (alleged) oppressor. There is some external agent responsible for everything. People need to be made ‘safe’ against this oppression and this oppressor. If you’re not for toppling the oppressor, you’re part of the problem and making everyone less safe.
There are (or can be) external sources of oppression - I don’t think most of us would have too much difficulty with people like Stalin or Mao being described as oppressors. But people’s own thought and thinking can be oppressive too - a sort of self-oppression. There is no prison as strong as the one we construct for ourselves, goes the saying.
I would argue that this whole focus on oppression has engendered an implicit focus on being made safe from oppression. And who is to make us safe? Why, governments and corporations, of course. Laws proscribing speech must be written, diversity quotas established, misinformation and hateful speech censored and removed (etc). Governments, and other people, are responsible for establishing this safety.
By now, I hope, you’re beginning to see why this might be important for understanding the response to the Dread Rona. There has been so much focus on safety, and in keeping other people safe. This has happened in a way, and to an extent, never seen before with other pandemics.
Corona might be a deadly virus, but I think the woke virus, wokarona, will ultimately prove to be far more deadly.
Wow! I expect a trigger warning before reading written hate speech. I would have read it anyway but would have been in a safe space. Totally toxic.
This stuff has come out of the elite universities in the US, where the ruling class send their kids, to become the new ruling class. And in order to remain the ruling class, because they are greedy and incompetent screwups, they need to neutralize any sort of opposition in the working and middle classes. The way to do this is something they copied from the British in India - divide up the population into various defined groups, and set them at each others' throats, that way they will not come after their colonialist oppressors. It's called "Divide and Rule", and it worked extremely well for over 100 years, until people figured out what was going on and drove the British out. And while Gandhi may have been peaceful, Singh was most decidedly not...