No One Is Confused by ‘Wokeness’ in Practice

R epublicans have no idea what they’re talking about when they use the word “woke.” That is the premise from which the Washington Post’s Ashley Parker and Liz Goodwin begin in a report on the torturing of this loaded word by its detractors on the right.

Aspirants for high office within the Republican firmament are quick to deploy the term, these reporters note, but its malleability renders the word meaningless. And yet, the term “originated in black culture before being co-opted by white people,” and conservatives only “began using ‘woke’ in pejorative terms to undermine black and liberal ideas,” according to the reporters’ restatement of Duke University professor Candis Watts Smith’s verdict. That was “not an accidental choice.”

So, the word “woke” is nonsensical, and those who use it have no shared understanding of what it means. But it’s also a racist sleight deployed deliberately to broadcast and popularize bigotry. An irreconcilable contradiction is an unpromising way to begin a piece designed to indict Republicans for being unclear.

In fact, Parker and Goodwin go on to quote a cavalcade of Republican elected officials who provide concise, real-world examples of the ways in which “woke” sensibilities fuel radical policy prescriptions.

Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders used the word to indict elements on the Left who “can’t even tell you what a woman is,” which would confuse only those who are unfamiliar with Democratic efforts to inject phrases such as “birthing people,” “pregnant people,” and “people who menstruate” into the discourse.

The Post reporters cite House Republicans who have singled out “wokeness” in the armed forces. Parker and Goodwin counter their claims by noting that “woke ideology was not one of their top challenges when it came to recruitment and retention,” which is a non sequitur. The only utility in this digression is that it deliberately avoids addressing Republican concerns about why, for example, West Point cadets are being treated to lectures about “Understanding Whiteness and White Rage” and “White Power at West Point” (the appropriateness of which Joint Chiefs chairman General Mark Milley defended).

From Trump-era budget officials to Kevin McCarthy and his allies in the House, many have pledged to strip the federal government of funding for “woke” initiatives. These reporters fail to elaborate on what those initiatives are, save to note that one politician — former OMB official Russell Vought — is circulating a ten-year budget proposal that guts federal spending across the board. That’s simpler than explaining where the millions that fund programs such as racially prioritized Covid-vaccine-distribution schedules or a pandemic-relief fund allocated only to racial minorities in violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal-protection clause came from.

Senator Ted Cruz advanced a positive definition of “wokeism” as a theory of social organization that is “characterized by demanding one uniform view on any particular topic, engaging in brutal punishment for any who disagree, including most simply being canceled.” Senator Tommy Tuberville offered up a negative definition insofar as the phenomenon applies to education, which he believes should be “about reading, writing and math, having an opportunity to grow up in an unbiased world.” Tuberville wouldn’t have to articulate this banal statement of principle in the absence of a pedagogy that recommends “dismantling racism in mathematical instruction” by teaching children that certain accidents of birth license flawed arithmetic.

Republicans can go on at length and in great detail about what “wokeism” is and how it manifests in policy. They don’t seem particularly confused. Where the Post’s reporters do find confusion over the term isn’t among Republican lawmakers but among the voters they’re targeting.

In particular, Parker and Goodwin cite the findings of a focus group of Florida voters published in the Bulwark who “either had no clue what ‘woke’ means or completely disagreed with each other on the term’s meaning.” That’s understandable. The policy dimensions around “wokeism” are generally indistinct from those associated with the concept of social justice, which also has no universal definition despite the efforts of generations of scholars, theologians, and policy-makers who dedicated their lives to its pursuit.

In the Rawlsian thought experiment, the pursuit of social justice obliges enlightened institutions to redistribute both economic and social goods up to the point at which, according to John Rawls, “a decrease in [the more fortunate’s] advantages would make the least fortunate even worse off than they are.” The American sociologist Carl Bankston later critiqued the “activists, social workers, and policymakers” who “may have absorbed only secondhand versions of Rawls.” They therefore see “people as positions rather than as individuals,” which “implicitly reduces them to categories.” As working definitions of “wokeism” go, it’s hard to do much better.

Adherents to this philosophical outlook benefit from the ambiguity around it, which helps explain why they heap condescension on those who seek to clear up the confusion they’ve cultivated. The vagueness of their proposition allows them to pretend as though their critics are simply ignorant. Their doctrine is both infinitely complex and intuitive — a conception of justice that a child can understand, but that only enlightened distributors operating from within remote institutions can seek.

Perhaps the most prolific critic of Rawlsian thought, Friedrich Hayek, illustrated the flaws of social justice in practice most succinctly in a 1977 interview with William F. Buckley Jr.: “Making people equal — a goal of governmental policy — would force government to treat people very unequally, indeed.” That is the fatal flaw in the effort to transform “equity” into a whole-of-government enterprise.

The pursuit of “equity” in policy led the Biden Justice Department to argue against litigating allegations of discriminatory university admissions practices designed to disadvantage Asian Americans, whose over-performance as a group can only be remedied with discrimination against its individual members.

That imperative convinced Marin County to approve the provision of a basic-income stipend only to “mothers of color” despite America’s constitutional proscriptions against racial preferences. It led California lawmakers to seek the codification of racial discrimination in the state’s constitution, and Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot to discriminate against white reporters in the name of combating “institutionalized racism.”

It has inspired a fashionable hostility toward “color blindness” in both society and law — the rejection of egalitarianism as a myth that serves as a smokescreen to preserve and conceal racial preferences. And all of it is backed by the superficial authority of social science.

For quite some time, proponents of this reimagining of the American social compact used terms such as “woke,” “social justice,” and “equity” interchangeably, their nuances notwithstanding. Only when opponents of this philosophy co-opted “woke” so that it “now carries the implication that social justice ideals are absurd or insincere” did an effort to anathematize the word pick up steam. But seeking to cure the ills of discrimination with more discrimination isn’t complex, and you don’t need a Ph.D. to know what you’re looking at. Much like porn, you know it when you see it.

An earlier version of this post identified Russell Vought as an elected representative.