A Black American folk singer, Lead Belly, enjoined listeners in 1938 to ‘stay woke’ in a song about a false accusation against a group of young black men in Alabama. A century later and the word is exclusively used as an epithet, a code word that identifies its speaker as someone who has some opposition to left-wing politics.
That isn’t how the anti-’woke’ would put it, of course. Champions of the liberal value of free speech, right-wing anti-wokes believe that left-wing orthodoxies have gone too far and stifled these once widely available liberal freedoms. When asked for examples, the anti-wokes will generally present examples like drag shows, pronoun etiquette, and trans women competing in sports.
There are details and ongoing areas of study and work when it comes to how to implement these values in a way that allows everyone to be who they are (trans rights, sex and gender equality, etc.) There’s a lot to know about these issues and readers know this isn’t my lane. But to my eyes, comparatively untrained on these issues, the selected anti-woke examples look like a distraction or an outrage engine, like the way most of these same anti-wokes talk about immigration, crime, or terrorism.
Anti-imperialism is, and like all left-wing ideologies is based on the core value of equality. And the anti-’wokes’, whether they justify it as naturally ordained by science or divine will, generally hold a core value of hierarchy. It’s an irreconcilable difference.
Almost all anti-woke criticism is just right-wing politics and therefore holds nothing of interest for leftists.
There is one legitimate complaint in the antiwoke arsenal, which is against the language-policing that takes place in mainstream, liberal institutions. But language-policing in such corporate environments has nothing to do with equality and therefore nothing to do with anything truly left-wing. It is nothing more than an office game, in which the winner is the one who can master the language and the bureaucratic rules. Words and concepts that were developed in communities fighting for liberation – or even survival – have been stolen, appropriated by liberal professionals for use in their office power games. But the theft of these words and concepts doesn’t discredit the projects of liberation from which they emerged.
Now we can come back to my lane. You know the old saying that when you scratch a liberal a fascist bleeds? The Gaza genocide has scratched the liberals and the fascists alike. Turns out that when Palestine comes up, the right wing (squealing for police to crush speech and deport protesters) doesn’t care about free speech or assembly and liberal professionals didn’t mean anything they said about the liberation of oppressed groups by race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Anomalous exceptions aside, both antiwokes and the liberal professionals they claim to despise have revealed themselves to be enthusiastic supporters of genocide who hate us much more than they hate one another. There’s no use contemplating alliance with these people or searching for common ground.
I have over the decades, every few years, written something to protest left-wing language-policing and the adoption of liberal professional games. But leftists will find no allies among the anti-’woke’. They don’t want us and we don’t want them. They mock social justice warriors and they mock being woke, but it’s better to be a warrior than a coward and it’s better to be awake than asleep.
False friends are everywhere. Lead Belly warned us about them, and told us the state we need to be in, to remain vigilant.
