Wokeness is a real ideology that makes everything revolve around hierarchies of identity groups. Anyone who says it can’t be defined is hiding something.
Wokeness is a real ideology that makes everything revolve around hierarchies of identity groups. Anyone who says it can’t be defined is hiding something.
T here’s been a recent spate of efforts by progressives and liberals to claim that the term “woke” has no meaning and is impossible to define or use — so nobody should talk about it. Some go further to argue that saying “woke” is code for racism and other nefarious impulses.
Philip Bump of the Washington Post asserted that “‘woke’ simply describes anything that is inherently alarming to the right.” Amanda Marcotte of Salon argued that “‘woke’ is acknowledging that racism is a thing that ever happened and/or accepting that LGBTQ people exist.” Adam Serwer wrote that it was “a nebulous term stolen from Black American English, repurposed by conservatives as an epithet to express opposition to forms of egalitarianism they find ridiculous or distasteful.” Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the Working Families Party, told ABC News that the word is a “dog whistle”: “Because ‘woke’ is associated with Black people, it’s been a useful club for those who want to beat those seeking justice over the head with white grievance politics to win elections without deploying explicitly racist terms.”
Even some critics of woke excess, such as Thomas Chatterton Williams, contend that “the word is more confusing than useful, and we should make good-faith efforts to avoid using it.” Media Matters has compiled a list of different definitions used by critics on the right.
Wokeness Fears Debate
The controversy itself should tell us a few things. First, it is a distinct change of tune. As Abe Greenwald at Commentary details, the term “woke” was embraced for years by the political Left before conservatives examined it. Greenwald quotes a 2020 article by Aja Romano at Vox: “‘Woke’ has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of ‘woke’ is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.”
Second, the effort to un-define the term without suggesting a replacement aims at stifling debate rather than clarifying it. As I wrote back in 2021:
To name a thing is to give it form and definition. Our brains are wired for language. . . .Words are the clothing that ideas wear in public. If you disable the words we use to distinguish ideas, you make it harder for people to tell them apart. The result of this is that people lose the ability to say, “Those guys have ideas that are not like my ideas.” . . . Critics of using the terms such as “woke” and “critical race theory” never offer a more precise terminology for the ideology these terms describe, because their goal is not clarity but camouflage.
Anti-woke socialist writer Freddie deBoer put it more pungently: “Please Just F***ing Tell Me What Term I Am Allowed to Use for the Sweeping Social and Political Changes You Demand.”
Third, as Noah Rothman explains with many examples, the familiar habit of progressives renaming things and changing the meaning of words is typically a sign that they are losing an argument. When you’re winning, you don’t muddy the waters or change the subject. Even Ibram X. Kendi now says that, in his view of the state of his movement nearly three years after the death of George Floyd, “The momentum was just crushed by a pretty well-organized force and movement of people who are seeking to conserve racism.” The frantic effort to eliminate the word from public debate is assuredly not a sign that progressives believe that they benefit from people identifying the word “woke” with the ideology it represents.
The Woke Ideology
In fact, it is not hard to define “woke.” Wokeness represents both an ideology and a philosophical worldview. It has five core elements:
- Woke ideology elevates immutable identity-group membership over the individual.
- Woke ideology obsesses over hierarchies among identity groups.
- Woke ideology is all-encompassing in interpreting human interactions through the lens of identity-group hierarchy.
- Woke ideology is revolutionary in arguing that its preferred hierarchies must supplant current hierarchies.
- Woke ideology aims to be constantly evolving rather than a fixed doctrine.
While there are a number of other remarkable features of wokeness, really all of them can be classified under one of these five headings. Let’s unpack them.
Identity group collectivism: The core of woke ideology is its intensive focus on a person’s membership in certain identity groups based on immutable characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity. These are frequently treated as the defining features of a person’s identity, to which more individual characteristics are subordinate. Being black or gay is not just part of your life experience; it is who you are. You are expected to show solidarity with others who share your identity, and to share similar thinking. Identity-group membership determines whether you are worthy of opportunities, what topics you should be heard to speak upon, and how much weight or credibility is to be given to your views. Your identity is, like some pagan god, treated as a source of your success or failure in various endeavors.
By its very nature as a group-based classification, a focus on identity tends to obliterate the individual in favor of the collective. If a job requires “representation” by a South Asian person, then any South Asian person will do. Moreover, the logic of identity groups requires that identity be something that cannot be changed by individual free will: You stay where you are classified. Even “gender identity” is often treated as a matter without free choice for these purposes, because if identity is a choice, the choice can be questioned; if it is who you are, it is not subject to argument. And if all of our perspectives on anything are driven by our group membership, then really nothing is subject to debate: All debate is just a manifestation of a struggle between groups for power.
Identity group hierarchy: If woke ideology was truly individualistic and egalitarian, it could acknowledge the existence of past tendencies to classify people in groups, but it would do so only in order to object to giving so much importance to those classifications. This was the appeal made by black American leaders such as Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King Jr.: Their desired end state was one in which racial classifications would not matter, and even when they considered it unrealistic to pursue a completely color-blind policy in the short term, they maintained a consistent theme that reducing the importance of group identity was a goal to be pursued. Generations of feminists made similar arguments. Liberal same-sex marriage proponents such as Andrew Sullivan framed their case for “marriage equality” largely in such terms as well.
Woke ideology, by contrast, divides people into groups with the explicit aim of elevating some groups over others — just different groups from those seen as benefiting from the current or past hierarchy. All of the invocations of “oppressor” and “oppressed,” of “privilege” and “fragility” and “representation” and “appropriation,” require frameworks that not only divide people up by groups, but apply different rules to people on one side of the divide than to those on the other. Thus, for example, we are told that only black voices should be heard on certain topics of black–white relations, even though the topic, by definition, affects both groups.
The use of the term “people of color” is a tell. Black, Hispanic, Asian, South Asian, and Native Americans have little enough in common in terms of their history, culture, traditions, religion, or ancestral languages — unless the entire point of the term is to express a hierarchical distinction between white and non-white. It is an entirely negative identity.
The obsession with group hierarchies explains why, in spite of its collectivist and identity-group orientation, woke thinking tends to treat some identity characteristics as far less important than others. Differences of ethnicity and national origin are frequently treated as inconsequential unless they can be fit into a racial structure of hierarchy: Thus, most white ethnicities are just “white,” and most Hispanic ethnicities are just “Hispanic” or, better, “Latinx.” It may matter a great deal to your family and culture whether your heritage is Chinese or Japanese, but to the woke, you’re just part of the agglomerated mass of “Asian American and Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islander” or AANHPI. The tendency to clump together varied groups under these unwieldy and ever-growing acronyms (see also LBGTQI+) makes little sense if one thinks in terms of individual self-understanding, but a lot if one thinks in terms of group hierarchies and political coalitions.
Religion is likewise analyzed, in woke ideology, mainly as if it is a race. Thus, Muslims or in some situations Jews may be treated as an oppressed class — or an oppressor class, when Jews and Muslims are in conflict — but the actual religious beliefs of religious people are treated as something separate from their identities. When believers act on those beliefs, this is interpreted solely as part of the struggle among identity groups for hierarchical position.
Because identity is a valued source of position in the hierarchy, and because identity is seen as immutable and not chosen, there is a huge incentive to fake the most desired identities. A movement that was honest about this would rigorously police such fraud, but instead, it is encouraged by framing what people “identify as.” That creates a permission structure in which more people can gain the higher statuses within the woke world, while also allowing a form of shunning-style punishment by which, say, a black conservative suffers the stripping of his or her black identity.
Totalizing: Woke ideology is not just a set of ideas, but an all-consuming framework for seeing the world — once you’re “awakened,” it is the tool used to explain everything. For example, it’s not possible that we read Shakespeare because he was a good writer; it must be about his race.
Wokeness treats the personal as political: All aspects of life are to be analyzed through a political lens, and all behavior should be aimed at political ends, from how you speak to what you eat or buy. Wokeness also treats the political as personal: Because woke politics sees politics as a struggle between identity groups rather than a contest of ideas, any political disagreement must be treated as an attack on your identity, which must be taken personally. It is this feature of woke ideology that makes it unable to accept dissent. Disagreement is assault, which is indistinguishable from violence. Agreeing to disagree is impossible. The only reasonable response to a dissenting speaker is to shout him down.
This is an inherently illiberal way of seeing the world, which is why it places such pressures on the liberal values of tolerance, free speech, and pluralism. Wherever wokeness grows, it seeks to stamp out all of those things — and that, in turn, means that the enemies of wokeness are put to difficult choices in attempting to combat it without having to themselves engage in suppressing speech and eradicating a toxic ideology by forceful means.
Revolutionary: When you view everything as a matter of hierarchies and the current hierarchies as pervasively unjust, the necessary next step is to want everything to change and be replaced with a new set of more just hierarchies. This is what makes wokeness revolutionary and opposed to everything that Burkean conservatism values: tradition, experience, gradualism. It is why institutions that are captured by the woke undergo a fundamental change of character that frequently involves self-abnegating criticism of their own history and abandonment of their traditional roles and reasons for existence — turning the institutions into enemies of themselves.
Woke ideology is not necessarily Marxist. It does not demand that its devotees, for example, prescribe public ownership of industry. It is in some ways anti-Marxist because its division of society into hierarchies of race, gender, etc. is irreconcilable with orthodox Marxist ideas of dividing society into hierarchies of economic class while promoting solidarity within those classes. But the revolutionary group dialectics of woke ideology are all directly descended from Marxist methods of analyzing society in terms of group power dynamics and the urgency of overturning the dominant class by means of a revolution led by a vanguard that champions the “oppressed” class.
Permanently evolving: The final characteristic of woke ideology is that it is not a fixed set of doctrines but a method of thinking that is designed to continue evolving over time. It aims to continually find new grievances, mint new terminology, and even reassess the desired hierarchy of groups. This is not incidental: If you see the world as a perpetual struggle among groups of fixed membership whose position in the hierarchy can change over time, then you must not only engage in a perpetual process of “interrogating” reality to find signs of hierarchical malfeasance at work; you must also constantly reevaluate which groups have the greatest claim to the desired status of “oppressed.”
This characteristic of wokeness serves four basic purposes: It ensures perpetual revolutionary movement, assures a prominent place for academics as leaders in dictating new doctrines, keeps everyone in a perennial state of insecurity lest they become the next target or fall behind on the lexicon, and — of course — makes it harder for opponents of woke ideology to precisely describe or define it. Like the future, it is always in motion.
Alternative Definitions
Once we accept this five-pronged definition, other aspects of wokeism make sense, and we also see the uses and limits of alternative definitions. For example, deBoer’s excellent analysis ascribes to woke ideology a number of characteristics: It is academic, immaterial, structure-oriented, emotionalist, fatalistic, utopian, and virtue-obsessed. These are all facets of the kind of movement that this ideology creates, but in many cases, he is describing the symptoms rather than the underlying conceptual framework (and this is also true of Jeff Blehar’s explication of why the theory as described by deBoer is a kind of substitute religion). Wilfred Reilly, Christopher Rufo, and Ross Douthat all get pretty close to the right answer in discussing hierarchies of structural oppression and a conspiratorial insistence on attributing all observed group differences to outside forces, but they don’t quite define immutable identity group membership as the core of the ideology.
Armed with this definition, we can see what woke is, and what it is not. Critical-race and gender theories, for example, are fairly explicit efforts to systematize woke ideology. So is the whole apparatus of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” in academia and corporate America.
By contrast, other forms of social-justice left-wing politics might be considered woke-adjacent and incorporate some of wokeism’s characteristics, but are not inherently woke if they do not depend upon identity-group distinctions. Apocalyptic fear of climate change, for example, is often framed in the same emotional disagreement-is-violence terms as woke politics, and like other progressive causes, it sometimes draws on woke arguments about how the worst consequences of refusing progressive policy prescriptions will affect some groups more than others. One could say the same of anti-gun rhetoric. Both get classified within the larger project of “woke capital” when prioritized by business because they represent the totalizing tendency to treat left-wing politics as the primary purpose of all institutions. But neither of these is an inherently woke cause.
Words and Reality
The effort to stamp out any words in which to describe this ideological movement is a bad-faith project. Perspective is in order. Words used to describe a set of political ideas and the people who hold them have always been contested ground, and always will be. Just try to get a room full of Marxists to define “Marxist,” or a room full of libertarians to define “libertarian.” And those are two of the easier ones. Debates over the definitions of “conservative,” “liberal,” “neoconservative,” “progressive,” “socialist,” “fascist,” or “authoritarian” are endless both within and outside of those movements. And yet, we commonly recognize that each of those words describes a real set of ideas that join together a real group of people in a generally common project.
That is why dictionaries can produce workable definitions. Merriam-Webster defines “woke” as “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” Dictionary.com defines the word as “having or marked by an active awareness of systemic injustices and prejudices, especially those involving the treatment of ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities.” These are not perfect definitions, but they confirm that wokeness is an observable reality, for which the English language should properly have a word.
Likewise, not everyone who internalizes the woke worldview will act consistently to take that ideology to its full and most extreme conclusions. That, too, is common to all ideologies: Some people are more wired than others to take things to a philosophical extreme, and the more demanding an ideology is, the more it conflicts with the other impulses of humanity. It does not mean that wokeness does not exist. It simply means that we live in a world that does not consist solely of Platonic ideal forms of everything.
But we still use words to describe ideas. Wokeness is an idea, which has power in our society and menaces that society’s fundamental precepts. We should not fear to name it.