Stand-up for the Woke!
. . . And for all at the forefront of working to actualize democracy
I just read another essay by a self-identifying moderate liberal criticizing the supposed intolerant and belligerent “wokeness” of the left. I’m not going to cite the post because I don’t want to name names, but one can easily find similar treatments throughout the mainstream press and social media.
And frankly, it triggered me. It’s time to challenge this framing of “Wokeness” for its facile, ahistorical, and ultimately illiberal essence.
The label, “Woke,” has been essentially “packaged for purposes of disparagement” (to coin a phrase). It has become little more than a label used to caricature, stigmatize, and marginalize an important, multi-dimensional phenomenon critical to understanding the moment we inhabit and are authoring as a people.
So, here’s the deal: What has become broadly defined as (the scourge of) wokeness instead should be understood and respected as the often heroic, at times petulant, at other times clumsy, and always tendentious efforts of a new generation to take seriously the very mainstream American project of exploring, and further defining and developing, the core ideas of our national experiment in democracy.
And of all the things to criticize in this, the criticizing of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts is perhaps the most disingenuous.
The reason DEI became a “thing” in the first place, and has come to permeate not simply social media and youth-oriented groups and activities, but to be taken-up by the leadership of our largest institutions, is because the brutal treatment (murder) of George Floyd was captured and broadcast to the world. And not just his murder, but the abuse and murder of other black lives in communities across the nation.
These unrelenting and unconscionable actions, recorded in real time over and over again, spurred a generalized outrage and sympathy for the cause of taking clear, affirmative action to address what we all broadly came to understand as a major, unacceptable, non-democratic over-/under-current of racism in our land. This understanding was abetted and confirmed by the scenes of peaceful protesters in Washington, DC and elsewhere, being brutally beaten by highly militarized police forces (sometimes without identifiable uniforms) for the simple and supposedly legally protected act of calling for justice and basic human rights for black lives.
As a result, in a wonderful development of which we should be extraordinarily proud as a nation, the pleas and, yes, the DEMANDS, of abused black people and their allies for affirmative action to address this evidence of abject racism, still embedded throughout our society, were taken seriously in so many ways. The subsequent efforts to embrace and re-dedicate so many institutions, and our society at large, to the values and democratic imperatives of diversity, equity, and inclusion were, and continue to be, REMARKABLE.
We should be celebrating the re-awokening of such robust engagement on behalf of democratic values rather than dismissing and ghettoizing it as some sort of leftist cultural blight.
Similar perspective can and mustbe shed on the efforts of the various other identity movements. These are (often young) people trying to explore, develop, and realize the promises of their avowedly democratic polity. However uncomfortable such nascent explorations and efforts may be for people not afflicted by the deprivations and disrespect experienced by those with second- or third-class status, they deserve to be supported and engaged.
Their efforts are not perfect but they are worthy of our respect as being well within the best traditions of the quest to realize the imperfect but aspirational commitments to basic human rights and democracy upon which our nation was founded.
So, please: Stand up for our experiment in democracy. Probe and push at the boundaries of actually existing democratic values and practice. Defend this work as critical and fundamental to who we are as individuals, as a shared community, and as a nation.
Stand-up for the Woke!