It’s possible that no American cultural trend has ever been so sweeping in its impact while remaining so mysterious to so many as what we’ve come to call wokeness. There isn’t an official woke manifesto or creed to help us understand it. It’s as much popular culture as political ideology. In part, this trend toward a more heightened sensitivity to racism, sexism, and other forms of unfair discrimination is just one more step along a road America has been travelling for generations. But the patterns of that older march are deeply familiar to us all by now. Whereas there are elements of this new push for social justice that can seem perplexing to the casual observer.
Why are leaders so eager to publicly pronounce their own organizations racist and white supremacist? Why is a white person who wears a Black hairstyle committing a sin called cultural appropriation? Why have microaggressions, like saying America is a melting pot or asking someone where they’re from, become a heated battleground in the struggle for equality? Why have websites begun to offer scores of gender options? Why are people asked to check their privilege? Why are ways of speaking and thinking that were ordinary a decade ago now grounds for outrage and cancellation?
It isn’t my aim to trace the intellectual lineage of wokeness. Most of the people whose attitudes approximate wokeness, as I describe it here, have absorbed its ideas gradually from the broader culture. They haven’t been convinced by reading academic books and articles, but by friends and family, the media, and memes. I don’t critique wokeness here, though I do believe it has important flaws. By describing it as it exists in the wild, with as much specificity and generosity as I can, I hope to improve my, and your, understanding of it, so that, with that understanding, we can better come to terms with its elements, both good and bad.
Cultural domination
White Culture defines what is considered normal—it creates the standard for judging values. For example—think about who and how these terms are defined: good parenting, stable family, well raised child, individual self-sufficiency, and effective leadership.
—M. Potapchuk, White Culture Worksheet
Wokeness is an awakening to power structures that are invisible to most, but vividly clear to the woke. Not to overt power, like laws or armies. That kind of power doesn’t require an awakening to perceive. Wokeness, rather, reveals soft cultural power: ways in which the ideas and assumptions that some people put into the cultural environment can exert an indirect force that controls the behavior of others.
Overt historical oppression—franchise limitations, lynchings, racist colonial administrations—was easy to see. Residual oppression is hard to see. It’s internalized inferiority, microaggressions, colonization of the mind. Its presence is difficult to prove. But becoming convinced that cultural oppression is pervasive is a key step in the woke awakening. If you express doubt about this proposition to a woke person, their certainty will be evidenced by their indignation, incredulity, or rolling eyes.
Anyone can see that culture is powerful. If you were born in Tang China or Mughal India, the character and constraints of your life would be fundamentally different than they are here and now. Wokeness directs our minds to those differences. What cultural elements define us and our times? Who constructed those cultural elements? Who benefits from them?
The feeling of wokeness is, maybe, most relatable as being similar to the feeling that all of the other kids in highschool have about the popular ones. Life is easy for them. They do well enough in classes. They’re good looking. They always have a date for the dance and something to do on Friday night. They love sports and they’re good at them. They seem to automatically know what’s cool. They have trendy things. Teachers and parents adore them. They fit into highschool effortlessly, like they were made for it and it was made for them. Every instinct they have is confirmed by their environment as good and right and true. They appear to be born for success and happiness.
Wokeness is an awakening to the understanding that the popular kids—or the rich, the powerful, the successful, the happy—are not that way by coincidence. It isn’t luck. The world actually is tailor made for them. If you feel left out, it’s not because there’s anything wrong with you. It’s just that the world was made by and for the powerful. Everything works out for them because it was designed to work out for them.
Group supremacy
I think whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privilege, as males are taught not to recognize male privilege . . . I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was "meant" to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks.
—Peggy McIntosh, White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
Another fundamental premise of wokeness is that the axes of cultural domination are structured along lines of personal identity: skin color, sex, gender, sexual orientation. People with power necessarily use that power to structure society in a way that makes life easy for themselves. Coincidentally or not, that also makes life easy for other people who happen to think and act and look like them. Power sticks to groups because, by enshrining their way of being in the dominant culture, they’ve stacked the deck in favor of themselves.
At the apex of the hierarchy of these intersecting lines of privilege are cis hetero white men. That might seem like too broad an assumption. Some white men are homeless. Asian Americans are more economically successful than whites. But woke power dynamics are cultural power dynamics, so the question is: who does the culture favor? Who do we make positive assumptions about? Who are we accustomed to granting positions of power to? Whose predilections are we taught to value? Whiteness, gender normativity, and heteronormativity are majority attitudes, historically dominant, and are culturally powerful as such. The fact that some privileged people still struggle in life does not mean that systemic cultural benefits weren’t, on balance, pushing them toward greater success. Just because some people from disadvantaged groups achieve visible success, doesn’t mean that they didn’t face headwinds on the basis of their identity.
In the end, it all comes out in the averages. To the woke, group disparities are the proof that the deck is stacked. The continuing eminence of groups with historical privilege in our society is evidence of the countless subtle ways that the dominant culture works better for them than for historically marginalized groups. White cisheteropatriarchy is baked into everything and people who don’t fit the mold are constantly beset by insults, frustrations, and obstacles which, while each appearing small from the outside, taken together, constitute an almost insurmountable barrier to progress. A video by Kimberly Crenshaw’s African American Policy Forum envisions these invisible advantages as a moving walkway, whisking the privileged to inevitable success.
Mainstream culture often characterizes young woke people as snowflakes, who appear fragile in their demands that people cater to the special needs of narrow identity groups. Jonathan Haidt, a prominent critic of many elements of woke culture, says that we should prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. Wokeness would retort that the road has already been prepared for the privileged, and we should want the same advantage for everyone else. If the actions wokeness demands seem like special dispensations, it’s only because we’re blind to the particularity of the benefits that our supposedly fair and meritocratic processes are handing out to the privileged people they were designed to serve.
The power of privilege
I’m a poisonous snake—not inherently bad, but I carry a poison that can kill, and I need to do everything in my power every day not to bite people of color, and I need to, just like a snake, shed my skin, not that I can get rid of my white skin but shed the embedded white supremacy that lives with me and in my community.
—Molly Sweeney, How to be a good white ally, according to activists
Wokeness assumes that cultural privilege and marginalization are overwhelmingly powerful. Privileged people have immense destructive potential that they don’t realize. In her book White Fragility, Robin Deangelo recalls her African American collaborators often repeating: “When a white woman cries, a black man gets hurt.” Karens—white women who wield their privilege with malign carelessness—rampage through Black lives like Godzillas. More broadly, mostly-unconscious habits and thoughtlessly problematic behaviors on the part of privileged people are capable of keeping entire races, sexes, and genders in subjugation for generations. Even the silence of privileged people is interpreted as threatening.
Marginalized people, on the other hand, are often referred to as “bodies”. The dominion of cultural privilege is so complete as to effectively transform them into mere objects. They become helpless puppets for whom playing an active role in their escape from subjugation is an impossibility. Self empowerment is, for them, a pipedream, mocked by the woke as lifting oneself up by the bootstraps. The suggestion that such a thing is possible, blaming the victim, is itself seriously offensive.
The implication of these ideas is that even seemingly small cultural advantages can create a nearly absolute imbalance of power. The existence of microaggressions and subtle structural discrimination can completely deprive marginalized groups of agency. If we want equality for these groups, then liberating them from the oppression of the dominant culture is essential.
These perceived power imbalances can excuse behaviors that seem over the line to the unwoke. Marginalized people are perceived as being so powerless that it would be absurd to censure them for menacing or offensive language or actions.
For instance, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman recently praised Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, who he clerked alongside in the late 90s: “When assigned to work on an extremely complex, difficult case, especially one involving a hard-to-comprehend statutory scheme, I would first go to Barrett to explain it to me.” Displeased with Feldman’s praise of Barrett, Stanford law professor Michelle Daubner paraphrased his words in a tweet:
Noah Feldman: “I am stupid and get women to do my homework for me. Yet because of my white penis I had a job I apparently admit I did not deserve.”
It’s a case where, I’m certain that, if the sex markers were reversed throughout, the tweet would have been career ending for its author.
Or, when a writer at a college newspaper wrote an article titled Your DNA Is an Abomination, had the race which he referred to as “an aberration”, and of whom he said “I hate you”, not been white, I don’t think Inside Higher Education would have put “racist” in scare quotes in the byline of their coverage of the affair.
Or, recently, a New York Times columnist seemed to share Minneapolis resident Mitchell Erickson’s sentiment that calling the police on two Black minors who robbed him at gunpoint was a regrettable decision. “Thinking more about it,” Erickson said “I regret calling the police. It was my instinct but I wish it hadn’t been. I put those boys in danger of death by calling the cops.” Here, we’re led to believe that a white person, calling the police on a Black person, is a graver exercise of power than a Black person pointing a gun, at a white person.
Marginalized insights
Telling people to “assume good intent” is a sign that if they come to you with a concern, you will minimize their feelings, police their reactions, and question their perceptions. It tells marginalized people that you don’t see codes of conduct as tools to address systemic discrimination, but as tools to manage personal conflicts without taking power differences into account. Telling people to “assume good intent” sends a message about whose feelings you plan to center when an issue arises in your community.
In the woke worldview, people with different identities have intrinsically different and incompatible experiences of the world. The experiences are different, but not equal. The experiences of marginalized people are valid. The experiences of privileged people are, wherever disagreement may occur, invalid. The relevant truth can be determined by assessing who is the most oppressed, and hence, whose experience is most in need of validation.
Microaggressions, for instance, are not a thing to be debated or adjudicated. Harvard Business Review provides these guidelines for receiving feedback on microaggressions you’ve committed:
Remember that intent does not supersede impact.
Seek to understand the experiences of your Black peers, bosses, and employees without making them responsible for your edification.
Believe your Black colleagues when they choose to share their insights; don’t get defensive or play devil’s advocate.
Get comfortable rethinking much of what you thought to be true about the world and your workplace and accept that you have likely been complicit in producing inequity.
A privileged person won’t necessarily agree that what they’ve said is problematic. But it isn’t important how it felt to them. Marginalized people’s experiences are intrinsically valid, regardless of whether they can explain them or not. Where there is disagreement, the privileged person’s understanding of the world is the one that needs to be revised. Ijeoma Oluo, in her book So you want to talk about race puts it directly: “If you are looking for a simple way to determine if something is about race, it is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race.”
Effectively, the experience of oppression transcends empathy. Everyone understands the experience of white men, because, whether we like it or not, we’re all immersed in a white male culture. But a man can’t know what it feels like to experience oppression as women do. White people can’t understand the feelings of Black people. A white lesbian can’t enter the experience of a Black lesbian. For this reason it’s essential that people give credence to the feelings of people who are more oppressed than themselves. If a marginalized person says that a particular experience is one of the sources of their feelings of marginalization, that’s a unique insight into the rules of power that invisibly govern our society. If a privileged person can’t comprehend why that event would trigger such feelings, that’s not relevant to the truth of the hurt that was experienced. The expression of suffering is not a point of contention. It’s an opportunity for privileged people to learn how the dominant culture, their culture, hurts people. As a Black student explained to white Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, “Your experiences will never connect to mine. Empathy is not necessary for you to understand that you’re wrong.”
The taxonomy of identity
To engage with the lives of others, white audiences would have to encounter something far more frightening: their irrelevance. They would have to reckon with the fact that the work will not always speak to them, orient them, flatter them with tales of their munificence or infamy, or comfort them with stereotypes. If there is an opposite of erasure, it is allowing for full personhood in all its idiosyncrasies.
—Parul Sehgal, Fighting ‘Erasure’
Wokeness implies that inequality is the product of marginalized experiences being underrepresented in the dominant culture. That’s literally what it means for them to be marginalized. That’s why “centering” is such an important verb in wokeness. Moving underrepresented experiences from the margin to the center is perceived to be the solution to social injustice.
Wokeness reveals to a marginalized person that there are elements of her own experience which she has been taught not to see. She learns that her acquiescence in the suppression of her experience is a concession to a system of privilege which excludes her. By remaining silent, by being complicit in the system of oppression, she betrays her true self. And she fails her identity group, by not giving voice to their way of experiencing the world. Proudly expressing her identity, forcing it into the mainstream, is the only way to end its marginalization.
But experiences can’t be incorporated into the culture if words don’t exist to describe them. The need to represent marginalized experiences is what gives rise to the ever growing specialized vocabulary of wokeness. It shouldn’t surprise us that the dominant culture has failed to produce words to describe the unique experiences of the people it suppresses. It’s up to marginalized people to invent terms to describe themselves, their experiences, and the problems they face. As Kimberly Crenshaw has said “When there’s no name for a problem, you can’t see a problem. And when you can’t see a problem you pretty much can’t solve it.”
Nowhere has the terminology grown faster than in the realm of sexuality and gender. LGBT expanded to LGBTQIA, before settling into the more elastic LGBTQIA+.
Interestingly, the Q itself was intended to serve as a release valve of sorts. Queer, meaning people who don’t fit neatly into the other categories, was meant to be a sort of “and so forth”. But it didn’t arrest the proliferation of identities, because that notion misses the central idea of wokeness: people are oppressed precisely because their way of being isn’t expressly represented in the dominant culture. Tolerance—”Don’t worry! We’ve got no beef with you. We love everyone. That’s what the Q is for!”—isn’t enough. Positive recognition and accommodation are necessary. You can’t just sweep those extra sexualities under the Q.
If a lengthy discussion is required in order to explain your gender identity to people, your way of being clearly lacks representation in the dominant culture. Defining a new gender category is a way to recognize your unique experience and declare it to the world. The scores of new gender identities, and the new pronouns that allow them to be formally acknowledged in speech, are examples of marginalized groups filling the vacuum that exists in mainstream culture around their experiences.
To outsiders, the explosion of genders seems like an indicator of something amiss in woke land. But it’s a feature, not a bug. Internalizing all of the new terms and rules isn’t easy, but that’s the point. That’s the work that woke people are asking us to do. Only when everyone is as comfortable with, and familiar with, and actively accepting of, trigenders and neutrois as they are of regular old cis boys and girls will we be able to begin reaping the fruits of the age of wokeness.
Speech-wise, you might think it would all be a lot easier if we had the good fortune to speak a language that had never invented gendered pronouns. But, if wokeness is all about indicating to people that we see and accept who they really are, it’s actually fortunate that gender is differentiable by pronouns in English. It’s a convenient way to say “I see you and I accept you.” Pronouns let you acknowledge a person’s category every time you refer to them.
Bantu languages have tons of noun classes that can indicate all sorts of stuff about the thing being referred to beyond just sex-gender. Small things, big things, long things, languages, and many more noun categories get their very own pronouns. It’s a woke dream. We could have different pronouns for Black women and white women, for able people and disabled ones. You could know everything about a person’s identity the very first time you heard anyone refer to them in speech. And, by mastering the endless maze of pronouns, we could all convincingly demonstrate our awareness of, and respect for, the full range of ways that people can experience life.
Absent such pronoun magic, we aren’t relieved of our duty to find ways to be linguistically inclusive of marginalized ways of being. The byzantine particularities of woke speech function so as to make subtle shoutouts to various marginalized identities whose distinctions lack an existing marker in the English language. Again, this isn’t a side effect. It’s cultural inclusion itself. It is wokeness.
One could even think of microaggressions as sometimes playing a similar role, but by creating negative spaces rather than additions to speech. I validate your existence by not stepping where you prefer I not. I see you.
Progress as partnership
Ally - Someone who makes the commitment and effort to recognize their privilege (based on gender, class, race, sexual identity, etc.) and work in solidarity with oppressed groups in the struggle for justice. Allies understand that it is in their own interest to end all forms of oppression, even those from which they may benefit in concrete ways.
—Harvard, Anti-Racism Resources
Wokeness sees the world as defined by oppression-privilege polarities marked out along identity lines. Privileged identities are powerful, overrepresented in mainstream culture, and blind to the truth about marginalization. Oppressed identities lack power, are underrepresented in mainstream culture, and have special access to insights about marginalization.
Interestingly, this dichotomy means that, in general, woke progress depends on people from both ends of the privilege spectrum getting woke and coming together to serve a useful progressive purpose. Not only are privileged people not always the enemy, woke people of privilege—allies—are indispensable.
Privileged people have the power to change things, but they’re incapable of seeing what needs to be changed. Oppressed people have insight, but no power. If you bring the two together, power meets purpose, progress becomes possible. When allies act under the direction of marginalized people, they can dismantle systemic discrimination.
Oppressed people can discover and express their authentic selves, but without the attention of their privileged counterparts, who represent sizable majorities on many identity dimensions, that expression will fail to change mainstream culture. When marginalized people are centered and vocally express their identities to a willing audience of allies, inclusion can undo marginalization.
Directors and actors
The letter reads as a caustic reaction to a diversifying industry—one that’s starting to challenge institutional norms that have protected bigotry. The writers of the letter use seductive but nebulous concepts and coded language to obscure the actual meaning behind their words, in what seems like an attempt to control and derail the ongoing debate about who gets to have a platform. They are afforded the type of cultural capital from social media that institutions like Harper’s have traditionally conferred to mostly white, cisgender people. Their words reflect a stubbornness to let go of the elitism that still pervades the media industry, an unwillingness to dismantle systems that keep people like them in and the rest of us out.
Call-outs, though often uncomfortable and frightening to people of privilege, are indispensable to the woke partnership. The call-out is how the oppressed person communicates experiences of oppression to the powerful. It’s how they bring their lived experience to the table. They signal that they’ve discovered something problematic. And, hopefully, an ally will receive the call-out and use their agency and power to address the situation.
One of the broader points that Jonathan Haidt makes in his book The Coddling of the American Mind is that oversensitivity is harmful. But, in their role as directors, oppressed peoples’ sensitivity to victimization is key to the woke project. As long as any vectors of oppression go undetected, wokeness suggests, it will be impossible for people to escape oppression.
When privileged people don’t correctly understand their role as allies, insights expressed through call-outs go to waste. It’s the failure of many privileged people to recognize their role in this process that Robin Deangelo addresses in White Fragility. Rather than accept the validity of the discoveries Blacks reveal to them “whites characterize themselves as victimized, slammed, blamed, and attacked.” They avoid the work that must be done, and preserve their privilege, by “claiming that it is they who have been unfairly treated—through a challenge to their position or an expectation that they listen to the perspectives and experiences of people of color.”
Once a white person properly internalizes wokeness, they see that residual racism isn’t something they can be blamed for. They’re insensibly habituated to it. Their racism is instinctive. They can only be expected to be receptive to the call-outs directed at them. They can step around the land mine, even though they can’t see it. That’s the point of Diangelo’s work. A revolution is possible, but ”we aren’t likely to get there if we are operating from the dominant worldview that only intentionally mean people can participate in racism.”
Performers and audiences
When I, or one of my Black friends, write something about race on our walls that gets their panties in a wad, some White women complain, chastise, unfriend, or block us. These acts become another way to assert White power and the privileges emanating from White supremacy. We recognize this as “Whitesplaining”—a microaggression that shows up as an attempt to override our lived experiences with their logic steeped in privilege and entitlement.
—Stacey Patton, White Women, Please Don’t Expect Me to Wipe Away Your Tears
As, oftentimes, the majority, privileged groups control the mainstream culture simply by occupying most of the seats in the room. If our society is to become inclusive, privileged people need to become allies. They need to tune in to diverse voices and listen with open hearts and open minds. Often, what they hear might be hard to sit with. But, according to a popular guide to allyship, this is a time to “decenter” themselves, acknowledge that “the conversation is not about [them]”, and “amplify voices of the oppressed before [their] own.” When leaders, like Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber, declare that “racism” and “racist assumptions . . . remain embedded in structures” of their institutions, they’re doing their part to amplify such voices in their communities.
The New York Times recently identified a case of privileged people failing to serve as an audience of allies on Linkedin. In the months since the death of George Floyd, many Black Linkedin users have turned to the digital platform as a place to “expose long-ignored injustices and pump their experience into the mainstream.” But rather than embrace that expression, Linkedin has used its power to enforce white corporate norms.
Diversity consultant Aaisha Joseph called companies on the platform out for their inappropriate responses to Black expression:
Ima need #companies to stop sending their dedicated House Negros to ‘deal with the Blacks’ they deem out of control. It’s really not a good look—it’s actually a very #whitesupremacist and #racist one.
Not long after she did, Linkedin took her post down, saying the post violated their “Professional Community Policies, which instruct users to ‘be civil and respectful in every single interaction.’” The article goes on to explain that:
For Black people in the corporate realm, however, words like “professional” and “respectful” are red flags. Like the natural Black hairstyles that were once widely considered unprofessional, certain behaviors—being too Black, speaking too Black or talking too much about Black topics—have long limited advancement in companies with white cultures.
That’s what has changed on LinkedIn in the last few months. Black people are being, to use a technical term, Blackity-Black Black on LinkedIn.
Here, these Blacks are upholding their end of the woke partnership by using Linkedin to broadcast Blackness into a mainstream space. But Linkedin and users of privilege on the platform are failing to play their part by embracing that Blackness and sitting with the parts that might make them feel uncomfortable. Instead of acting as allies, they’re reinforcing the dominant cultural narrative.
I think the problematicity of cultural appropriation can be explained in terms of the performer-audience dynamic as well. Privileged people transgress the woke partnership when they seize the performer role in contexts where sensitive power dynamics are in play. When white people adopt elements of Black culture, those elements are effectively absorbed into the dominant culture. Inclusion is what happens when privileged people show their acceptance of the expression of marginalized voices. But when Black attitudes, opinions, or behaviors are appropriated by white people, they come to be accepted by the mainstream, not because they’ve learned to embrace Black ways of being, but because those ways of being have ceased to be Black.
Before they were appropriated, these cultural elements were authentic signals of Blackness. Exhibiting them was a way for Black people to give the world an opportunity to affirm their unique right to exist. But now that the expression is no longer authentically and exclusively Black, white people’s acceptance of that expression becomes meaningless. They’re just accepting a Black body as a mouthpiece for white culture, which, of course, they’re always happy to do.
In order to test the conditions of inclusive acceptance, marginalized people must conspicuously be themselves, and privileged people must conspicuously demonstrate their acceptance of them as such. The expressive act serves to express the marginalized experience. When someone who doesn’t actually partake of that experience performs that expressive act, they change the meaning of the expression. When a white woman wears a Black hairstyle, it ceases to be an expression of Blackness and becomes just a hairstyle.
Electness and excommunication
Nuance has largely been dismissed from the debates about speech raging on college campuses. Absolutist postures and the binary reign supreme. You are pro- or anti-, radical or fascist, angel or demon. Even small differences of opinion are seized on and characterized as moral and intellectual failures, unacceptable thought crimes that cancel out anything else you might say.
—Lucia Marinez Valdivia, Professors like me can’t stay silent about this extremist moment on campuses
Wokeness is a revelation: certain of its premises—disadvantaged people lack the power to improve their own situation; oppressed insights are uniquely valid, while privileged ones are not; cultural domination trumps other explanations for disparities—are articles of faith. Either these truths resonate with you or they don’t. If you doubt the primacy of uniquely personal lived experience over observations everyone can access, and arguments everyone can comprehend, then there’s little wokeness can do to change your mind.
For that reason, the woke are an elect group. The initiate needs to be touched by the spirit of wokeness in a way that awakens their soul to the omnipresence of cultural oppression. There isn’t a reliable way to bring someone into the fold. The required awakening is akin to a divine spark.
So woke people have reason to believe that some people will never see things their way. And because of the woke doctrine of cultural domination—justice will only be achieved when every voice reflects the diversity of the whole—a pluralist social structure that makes space for some people to personally disapprove of the lifestyles of some others is intolerable, even if those people, for the most part, keep to themselves. Everyone has an active role to play in the audience of allies. “The culture” is composed of our individual voices. And the inclusivity of that culture is an essential social good. So our duty to play our part in producing that good outweighs our claim to individual liberty. Participation is not optional.
It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that woke people frequently direct contempt, sarcasm, and harshly personal takedowns at unwoke people. The existence of voices that won’t participate in inclusion makes true social justice impossible. Such voices must be silenced if the woke vision of equality is to be achieved. When privileged people fail to play their proper role, call-outs turn into cancellations. It’s the only way forward.
Many people criticize this censoriousness of the woke, claiming that it impinges on their freedom of thought and expression. But, in the woke world view, unconstrained voices of privilege can’t help but advance the narrative of privilege. That’s how cultural domination works. They may not be able to see that that’s what they’re doing, but marginalized people, with the insight of lived experience, can see. Wokeness only impinges on your speech when that speech is stepping on the toes of the oppressed. The woke know that the oppressed can see things that the privileged cannot. It’s the social duty of the privileged to listen to them. If you can’t recognize that duty, then your existence is an obstacle to justice. Your claim to free speech is really just a yearning for “the freedom to be wrong, to be offensive, to be exempt from any obligation to anyone else.”
What is wokeness?
Henry, This is a truly excellent description of wokeness. But being literal-minded, I find it confusing, because I can't tell what part of wokeness you agree with. For example, do you agree with "... the woke are an elect group. ... The required awakening is akin to a divine spark." I'm almost positive that you don't, but could you clear that up? Thanks, Steve