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

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Rather than posing a challenge to institutions, the decolonise movement simply confirms mainstream academic thought. In the woke university, both staff and students share the same intention: to decentralise the western intellectual tradition in favour of teaching content that can be shown to represent biological, rather than intellectual, diversity. The premise of all these books is that people are defined, first and foremost, by their skin colour. Needless to say, this is not an appropriate lesson for children. Far from teaching kids to treat others with kindness, tolerance and respect, pushing this worldview on them will only lead to a build-up of guilt and resentment among pupils of all races and ethnicities. To be woke is less about identifying with a label and more about holding a particular ideological outlook. Students assumed to be vulnerable need the campus to be a safe space free from offensive speech, emotional distress and intellectual confrontation. Never mind that confronting unfamiliar and seemingly offensive ideas can be educational; what students rapidly learn is that cries of psychological harm often lead to political wins. A prime example of this tactic in operation is the now widespread movement to decolonise higher education. The curriculum is of particular interest to the decolonisers because, in the woke university, education is not primarily to inform, still less to challenge, but to affirm. Students expect to have their identity validated through their course material.

Biden is zipping between Belfast and Louth and Dublin. He’s mixing politics and genealogy. In Belfast he pretty sternly ‘advised’ all parties to sign up to the Windsor Framework, the new British-EU deal that would keep Northern Ireland beholden to certain rules of the EU’s Single Market. In County Louth he went to the pub with his fifth cousins. (This gives a sense of how historically distant his links to Ireland are: the average person has around 17,000 fifth cousins.)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 in the culture war that denies it is waging a culture war, yet which repeatedly fires the opening salvos. From radical to mainstream

To be woke, then, is less about identifying with a label and more about holding a particular ideological outlook. As we have seen, to be woke requires far more than simply being aware of racism or being against racism. It is not woke to insist that people should be judged by their character rather than the colour of their skin. To be woke is to hold a very particular position, one that insists upon seeing both race and racism everywhere. Complaints that this view may rehabilitate racial thinking and racist practices such as segregation can be safely ignored: it’s far more important for the woke set that race is discussed using the correct language. To be woke is to police the language and behaviour of others, calling out not just those who are racist but those who hold the wrong form of opposition to racism and have not kept up with the latest vocabulary. Following the electoral collapse of the Labour Party, in the UK’s Hartlepool by-election, Labour MP Khalid Mahmood quit Keir Starmer’s frontbench, arguing that the party had lost touch with working class voters and become more concerned with the interests of ‘woke social media warriors’. Mahmood noted: One important difference between today’s elite and an older establishment is the readiness of today’s cultural gatekeepers to deny their status. Many figureheads of the new woke elite […] enjoyed middle-class, privately educated upbringings, yet they use their identities to distract from their social-class privileges and claim victimhood.”

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So the reading scheme adopted by schools in South Ayrshire at least has the benefit of honesty: Read Woke takes proud ownership of the opinions it seeks to promote. Yet the issues its chosen authors raise, about a ‘dominant culture of white supremacy’ and ‘the trap of labelling ourselves in ways that centre whiteness’ are racially divisive and steeped in a highly contested idea of critical racial theory.

Titling her book on the assumption that it has, Joanna Williams delivers a powerful critique against this cultural cancer which has now metastasised itself into every aspect of our lives. This is a really good book – with smart writing and (despite the polarizing seeming title) a truly inclusive (classically liberal) message about the current stage of the culture war where cultural distinctions and criticisms have gone way beyond concerns of preference and taste to moral evaluations and proclamations on the right to even exist (ie. The Cancel Culture). The book is a comprehensive and detailed survey of the ways in which woke thought and practice have corrupted so many of the institutions comprising civil society. It has done this by adopting the intellectual architecture of Critical Theory which holds that imbalances of power in society are hidden from view by dominant cultural structures, such as language and the way knowledge is imparted. Only by exposing these structures is it possible to reveal the extent to which the ‘oppressed’ are held in subjugation by the ‘oppressors’. US universities began to use affirmative action programmes to increase representation of groups historically excluded from educational opportunities because of their race or sex as the Civil Rights movement took off in the 1960s. Many agreed this was a necessary corrective to decades of legal discrimination and its lasting legacy of social and economic disadvantage. More controversially, at some institutions, affirmative action included the use of ‘racial quotas’ to ensure recruitment of a certain proportion of students from different ethnic groups. Critics of woke capitalism claim businesses that ‘get woke, go broke’ because attempts at virtue signalling often end up insulting customers who, unsurprisingly, shop elsewhere. However, woke can make good business sense. It not only serves as a preemptive strike to deflect criticism, it also allows unprecedented management reach into the lives of employees. Through unconscious bias training, anti-racism and diversity training, enculturating staff into woke values permits bosses unprecedented access to and control over not just their employees’ time, but their personal, political and emotional lives too. More generally, woke ideology overides social class, divides workers according to identity, and allows employers to act as a neutral arbitrer in workplace conflicts. Woke capitalism, perhaps more than anything else, reveals the elite beneficiaries of woke politics.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. These lists unwittingly reveal what passes as offensive on today’s campuses. Universities are not having to outlaw swear words, racial epithets or gross insults. Staff and students are far too polite and well-intentioned to utter such phrases in public. No; universities are proscribing common words that are part of most people’s everyday vocabulary. Staff employed to write linguistic guides dictate the limits of acceptability according to their own political perspectives. The upshot is that spontaneous interactions are replaced by a stilted deference to the rules. I’ve invented this monologue. But every single thing described is happening in our universities right now. The woke campus makes headlines when particularly outrageous examples of censorship come to light or when over the top punishments are handed out to staff or students who say the wrong thing. More often than not however, woke is taken for granted; it’s so much a part of the campus culture as to be barely noticeable. This essay makes the woke university visible, shows where it came from and why it is a problem.