Excessive "wokeness" is more than just awareness of injustice

Graduating from the "woke detox center" means being able to admit what our problem was in the first place

See below for an update from me, if you’re so inclined.¹

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After the Democrats were soundly defeated in several key elections in November of 2021 (especially the Virginia Governor’s race), James Carville went off. The Ragin’ Cajun², who’d previously tried to raise this concern in an extended interview with Vox, called in to the PBS Newshour to attempt to shout from the rooftops that Democrats had a serious “wokeness” problem.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What went wrong?

JAMES CARVILLE: What went wrong is this stupid wokeness.

All right? Don't just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis. Even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean, this "defund the police" lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln's name off of schools, that — people see that.

And it's just — really have a suppressive effect all across the country to Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something. They're expressing language that people just don't use. And there's a backlash and frustration at that.

Of course, my immediate reaction at the time was, “Shit, what a great blog name- ‘The Woke Detox Center’!”

All jokes aside, this message landed with progressives about like you’d expect it to.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @AOC

Like the average audience for people seriously using the word “woke” in a 2021 political discussion are James Carville and Fox News pundits so that should tell you all you need to know

The subtext being, of course, that as a cis, straight, older, white, moderate-to-conservative male, he had a diminished (at best) capacity to even understand the moral and philosophical movement he claimed to oppose, and all the motivation in the world to oppose it in order to preserve his own power and privilege.

I will leave it to the reader to recall or Google any of the multitude of pieces out there that seek to explain that “wokeness” is nothing more than awareness of the reality of systemic oppression, or that the term was appropriated from the black community and can never apply to a white person, or that it has become an anti-black slur. (To be perfectly honest, I resent the suggestion that I couldn’t possibly understand what the word really means if I am white and/or critiquing it, but I’ll set aside my personal irritation for now.) These arguments, while (usually) logically coherent, ignore the fact that words can mean different things in different contexts, and that no one gets to unilaterally decide what a word means for everyone else (not even Merriam and Webster). Angry people use words imprecisely, and I’m not defending that, but it doesn’t mean they have nothing to be genuinely frustrated about. Someone can critique excessive, Puritanical aspects of the way some people practice their Christian faith by referring to problems with “Christianity,” and not necessarily mean that there is automatically a problem with every aspect of following the teachings of Jesus Christ.

However, the critics of “wokeness” in the political sphere do themselves no favors when they’re unable to explain what, precisely, is the root of their frustration. Everyone agrees “racism is bad,” so why oppose people who oppose it? Social justice advocates see clear problems in society; they take some degree of pride in their ability to perceive (i.e., their state of being “awake to”) complex systemic issues that affect some members of society more than others, and they’re distrustful of those who seem to disagree or downplay what’s obviously true to them. The clarity of their own convictions leads them to assume that anyone who opposes their message or methods must be wholly opposed to their clearly righteous cause, and therefore must themselves be immoral. The conversation is then at a standstill.

Earlier this week, Greg Sargent wrote a column in the Washington Post seeking to revive the discussion. He pointed to a speech by Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic State Senator in Michigan, which has supposedly gone viral (a claim I can neither confirm nor deny, as I’m mostly off social media but I wasn’t aware of the speech until reading Sargent’s column).

Sargent wanted to know, and wanted to know from Carville himself: Is this “wokeness”? If so, why did it seem to have such broad appeal? If not, is this a viable alternative to whatever you have an issue with? And oh, by the way, what did you have an issue with in the first place?

Carville is apparently delighted by the speech.

“Enormously effective piece of communication,” Carville told me. “There’s really no comeback to it.”

…

“She spoke English,” Carville told me. “She wasn’t defensive at all.” He noted that McMorrow personalized the issue, drew a sharp and legible contrast with Republicans, and even added in an argument about “roads and schools.”

“I’d show this clip as an instructional video,” Carville said. Asked if he’d advise other Democrats to talk this way, he said: “I would. I’m going to start talking that way.”

Sargent feels there’s something here, but can’t quite pin it down. So he directs the question instead to people like us:

Those demanding that Democrats achieve vast separation from wokeness should say where McMorrow’s handling of this fits into their schema. She didn’t distance herself from race or gender identity or avoid raising their salience.

So does this constitute something they’d advise against, for fear of aligning too closely with politically dangerous topics or positions? If not, what exactly are they saying?

To answer this question, it’s worth a visit to the Woke Detox Center.

My feeble attempt at Jeff Maurer-style humor. Please forgive my uncharacteristic irreverence.

Let’s start by admitting why this conversation is so difficult.

There is nothing wrong with following the teachings of Jesus Christ. There is nothing wrong with enjoying alcoholic beverages in limited amounts. There is nothing wrong with caring about the injustices of the world around you. Because these things are all true, it can be hard to admit that it is possible for these things spiral out of control; to lead to an obsession on your part that begins to cause pain to yourself, to others, and to the issues you care about.

A 12-step program for excessive wokeness might look something like this…

1. We admitted we were powerless over our addiction to social justice activism—that our lives, and the set of beliefs that had come to define our lives, had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that an embrace of our own relative powerlessness could restore us to sanity.

3. Recognized the inherent, irrevocable human dignity that we all possess sets us all as equals, regardless of our group identifiers, our beliefs, or our mastery of obscure concepts.

4. Were entirely ready to abandon all prior beliefs and convictions in order to start again.

5. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

6. Humbly admitted the limits of our own power over the thoughts or actions of others. We humbly admitted that the limited power we do have is only over our own choices: how we choose to act, and how we choose to interpret the actions of others.

7. Acknowledged that we are each incapable of ever truly knowing the thoughts, intentions, or beliefs of others.

8. Admitted that our past beliefs, statements, advocacy, or actions may have been well-intentioned but may have still caused harm to others.

9. Sought to make direct amends to those in our lives whom we have harmed with our statements or actions.

10. Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.

11. Seek through reflection and respectful conversation to grow in our respect for the complexity of humanity, and strive to accept our ultimate powerlessness to reshape it unilaterally according to our will.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to recovering social justice addicts and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Am I answering Sargent clearly enough yet? Maybe not.

The problem with “wokeness” is not talking, or caring, about racism or LGBT-related issues. The problem is when it becomes all-consuming. Excessive wokeness looks something like:

• Single-minded obsession with matters of identity group-based power imbalances at the expense of all other matters of concern (like roads, healthcare, or democratic norms themselves)

• Fixation on group identifiers as the dominant aspect of personal identity for yourself and others, and fixation on the idea that these groups can be neatly arranged into a hierarchical power structure that can be used to inform rules of engagement for all

• Taking great pride in your capacity to frame situations in terms of systemic injustice or oppression, particularly where most people cannot or will not

• A crippling level of paranoia about others’ ill-will or biases against you, or about your own potential biases against others

• The attribution of moral flaws to others and the lack of awareness of one’s own moral flaws

• A compulsion to proselytize and attempt to reform the actions and beliefs of others, often in an attempt to counteract personal feelings of deep shame or guilt

• A voracious desire to accumulate knowledge of increasingly complex terms and concepts in order to publicly exhibit your heightened state of awareness and differentiate yourself as uniquely enlightened among your peers

• Categorization of people into binary “good” and “bad” categories, and an unwillingness to admit that those you’ve labeled as “bad” might have something to contribute to the conversation, or that those you’ve labeled as “good” might be mistaken

• Considering your own worth as a human being, and the worth of those around you, as being contingent on the moral purity of the beliefs you ascribe to

You get the idea.

Is this the exclusive domain of the “super woke”? Absolutely not. I’d argue the “anti-woke” army is as bad or worse; declaring that parents who want to support their own LGBT children are “groomers” or child abusers is revolting. But, per Step 6 of the 12-step wokeness recovery program, we must remember we are ultimately only responsible for our own choices; the poor choices of others are not under our control, nor do they give us license to mimic them.

McMorrow shows that it’s possible to care deeply about the rights of minority groups, and supporting the marginalized, while not falling into this trap. Her anger is righteous because it is personal: She is speaking up against false accusations that were aimed at her personally, and false ascriptions of her motivations. She acknowledges her position as a straight, white, married, Christian, suburban mom influences her perspective on life without suggesting that her opponent’s race, gender, or religion is relevant to the conversation. Other than a passing reference to systemic racism, she used clear, plain English. She was also willing to publicly renounce the most ridiculous extrapolations of some conceptions of systemic racism; for example, she decisively declares none of us (of any age or race) should feel personal guilt for slavery or the actions of those in the past, as we obviously had no control over them. She makes sure to place this issue in the context of bigger, equally (or more) pressing issues that members of the State House should be focusing on like roads and healthcare—things that affect people of all races, it should be noted. She forcefully anchors her position in her own Christian morality, of which she has clearly “made a fearless moral inventory,” showing that in her view, true Christianity is fully compatible with basic social justice advocacy and humanitarianism. And most importantly, she is not “mind-reading” or attempting to ascribe malicious intent to any nebulous group of people: she is speaking specifically about the behavior of one other member of the state house. Nor is she claiming to have a grand vision for “dismantling” any systems and replacing them whole-cloth with something she deems to be more “equitable.” Her demand is rooted in simple, moral terms: her Christian faith compels her to be of service to others in her community, even in the face of hate and spitefulness.

The truth is, when someone is truly being cruel and dehumanizing others, when someone is not living up to our (thankfully) widely-shared moral expectation to treat each other with decency and respect, it’s easy to see who’s on the side of good. It’s the person who doesn’t need a PowerPoint deck of terms and jargon. It’s the person who isn’t trying to prove themselves to the in-crowd. It’s the person who simply stands up and says, “No.”

1. Hey, all. Long time, no write. (Wait, did I use that line last time?) Anyway. It’s become cliche by now for an absentee Substack writer to explain why they’ve been MIA and how it’s all about to change. Well, I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep. But I do want to share that I haven’t forgotten about this enterprise or all of you. I’m constantly trying to figure out when I can make time to write my next piece, or working on one for days and then abandoning it halfway through. (I have at least 6 that are half-finished and collecting digital dust.) I’m in the middle of the book Atomic Habits, which is simultaneously motivating and stressful as hell, as it turned me into a mad woman around my house for a week or so. But one of the helpful reminders it’s given me is to smart small and not let perfect be the enemy of good. That “motion” (researching, saving links, outlining, re-outlining) is not the same as “action” (just freaking writing something, anything). And that it helps to have a regular time and place set aside for the habits you want to cultivate. So this is possibly the first in a series (we’ll see) but I am going to try what I’m calling “writer’s block Fridays.” Every Friday I will take an extended, 2-hour* lunch break (work commitments allowing) and write a post that will go out that day or the next morning. It might not be perfectly framed or argued, it might not have as many supporting links as I’d like, but it will be a piece of things on my mind and an opportunity to dialogue with you all. So please forgive me if some of them are a bit rougher than my previous efforts; it’s an experiment. Thanks!

*Footnote within a footnote, this one took me 3 because I had too much fun trying to make that sign picture.

2. Fun story— My family is from Louisiana, and family lore has it that my aunt once went on a date with Carville. Didn’t work out, I guess.