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

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I would have liked a more elaborate conclusion on how to tackle woke in society, particularly in schools. Vox magazine notes that a 1923 book by the Jamaican-born philosopher, black nationalist and political activist Marcus Garvey included the rallying cry: ‘Wake up Ethiopia! Everyone on the planet has their own, unique, ‘lived experience’ so it is not useful for forming generalities. Demonstrating membership requires a social media profile complete with one or all of the following: your pronouns; an LGBTQ flag; an EU flag; and the acronyms FBPE (Follow Back Pro-EU), BLM (Black Lives Matter) and ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards); as well as clenched fists in an assortment of colours. It is also anti-democratic, woke activists try to impose change from top down, while denying that woke even exists.

there will always be an elitist entity in charge of society, and there will always be a part of that elite who stamps all over the "little people" at the bottom. A language, an ideology, a grand narrative that only some possess and whose ownership demarcates the elites from the masses. Yet any attempt to challenge these specific campaigns will see one branded not just anti-feminist but, worse, suffering from internalised misogyny.Joanna will be known to spiked readers as a prolific author and one of our longest-running and most cherished columnists. Those who are labelled woke deny being anything of the sort, but almost everyone can readily identify a set of woke concerns and values. For example, rather than campaigning for all parents to have access to free childcare for young children, woke activists focus instead on encouraging teachers to use gender neutral language in nursery schools.

Woke’ refers to the side in the culture war that denies it is waging a culture war, yet which repeatedly fires the opening salvos. As she shows, it has gained a grip over many public institutions from primary schools to universities, the civil service, and cultural institutions.She has appeared on BBC 1’s Sunday Morning Live and Daily Politics and has reviewed the newspapers for Sky News. According to King, the white elite sought to challenge nascent populism because ‘the leaders of this movement began awakening the poor white masses and the former negro slaves to the fact that they were being fleeced by the emerging Bourbon interests’. It’s the elastic definition of woke that has allowed it to shift from aspirational, to insulting and (almost) back again, while its key assumptions quietly gain ground within cultural institutions. One of Williams’ principal concerns about wokedom is that it represents the imposition on the rest of us of an ideology to which only a narrow band of professional-managerial elites subscribes. Her previous books include Women vs Feminism (Emerald, 2017), Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (Palgrave, 2016) and Consuming Higher Education (Bloomsbury, 2012).

In 2014, widespread protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri following the police killing of Michael Brown. The tax-payer funded Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), with Race Discrimination Commissioner Chin Tan in the vanguard, is determined to extirpate all vestiges of racism and discrimination — even from among people who say they have no direct experience of either. However, they insist that the problem that needs to be addressed is not so much the individual sort of racism mouthed by bigots. In ‘If you’re woke, you dig it’, Kelley described the appropriation of black slang by white beatniks.Yet the success of Black Lives Matter hinges upon the meaning of the movement and the slogan being blurred. By these means woke activists inculcate a new generation with woke values and separate them from the cultural legacy of the past. but you need to try to find more to your personality than your labels, be they orientation or identity, religion or political stance, etc, to make you a more rounded humane being. How Woke Won’ provides a fresh and fascinating insight into the development of woke politics and its eventual triumph over the course of several decades. This means conforming to a quite specific set of views that fall under the rough heading of critical race theory.

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. The more woke language and principles are adopted by a social and cultural elite, the more they are assumed to be mainstream and the more those who use outdated terminology stand out. From Innocent Smoothies, to Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, to Gillette razors, companies parade woke credentials and sell products based not on anything so crass as quality or value for money but on holding the correct values. Teachers are offered advice on ‘keeping your classroom woke’ and the Guardian gives readers dating tips on how to find ‘Mr Woke’. The elastic definition of woke has allowed it to shift from aspirational to insulting and back again, while its key values have quietly gained ground.

With clear thinking and gripping storytelling, Williams explains how how a minority of the elites in Britain and America were able to intimidate the rest of the elites into silence or complicity, imposing a "revolution from above" that is anti-democratic and cruel. British author Joanna Williams thinks this transformation is so complete that she is provoked to declare woke has triumphed in her important new book, How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason. The online Urban Dictionary of street slang had defined ‘woke’ two years earlier as ‘being aware… knowing what’s going on in the community (related to racism and social injustice)’. By the following year, ‘woke’ had become so mainstream that the Oxford English Dictionary listed it as one of its new words of note.