I hate the word “woke” almost as much as “postmodern” because in some sense its purchase on the world has been ruined by conservatives. If you buy what I am saying, then let me redefine it in a way that I think makes sense and identify some problems in its usage along the way. The word isn’t going away anytime soon, so maybe best to explore its meaning and suggest a way to use it to more positive effect.
Being woke n. a state of being aware how moral reasons ought to apply to a particular case wherein the case is a societal problem or systemic or institutional in nature. I want to make clear that awareness is not application, but only that moral reasons ought to apply rather than conserving the status quo. When I see conservatives rejecting wokeness, the usage has no precision. It could be rejecting a fourth-grade book titled “I am Martin Luther King Jr” in a local library or a sex positive adolescent book that tells young people that people are queer, gay, bi, or non-binary. The only consistency in their usage is the avoidance of moral accountability so that business may continue as usual. Woke is now more a bogeyman, a strawman, an ad hominem and a red herring (sometimes all at once) not to hear that which challenges the status quo and would structurally be something conservatives should be held accountable for (the lack of effectiveness of public education in LA, MS, AL and AR as these states always rank in the bottom 4 out of 50). At the core of being woke, however, is thinking there’s some iniquity and raising consciousness about that problem means that some moral reasons ought to apply in making that iniquity better.
On the center left side, the more interesting thing is that the professional capitalist class will often be woke insofar as that means our corporation is not perceived as doing anything immediately wrong according to center leftist identity politics. The structural realities of capitalism are allowed to continue while woke and its structural violence it causes is somehow not a problem. Ever hear a story about the effect of some policy on NPR’s Marketplace and yet the show never questions the structural violence that caused the problem. In some circles, knowing about the immediate effect will be a success of being wokeful. However, when we do not address the structural problems of our society that cause harm, we become guilty of do-nothingism. If being woke is simply being aware, then this might also explain the do-nothingism problem of those who are woke and capitalist. For these people, our political economy is not a problem at all; it’s the smaller problem of not including everyone. It’s the feel-good-Disney-effect of approving of their decision to make Black Panther but to never ask the deep philosophical question about structural racism in the movie. Morality would never apply to any systemic and structural problem because Center Leftists and conservatives from Fox News both have an interest in the violence of capitalism continuing.
Of course, my redefining the term just replaces being woke with being ethical. But, I am not willing to use the adjective of my favorite area of philosophical study (ethics) to be chewed up in cultural politics. If there is something redeemable about being woke, then the redemption must be a type of ethical awareness and desire to solve a problem and address the problem’s systemic and structural causes. In this way, the most redeemable feature is a type of standpoint or orientation one takes toward a problem. Being woke could be the middle ground that sees ethical and moral concepts at a societal or institutional level in the same way that ethics and politics commingle in ethics and public policy.
The term should not be distorted from this positive significance. We already have a ready-made example of what happened to postmodernism. The term “postmodern” basically means a skepticism about absolute fixed standards of moral and political truth that conservatives desire for ultimate justification of what they seek to conserve and do; it never means what Lyotard wrote in the Postmodern Condition about critiques of meta-narratives nor did it address the nuanced differences between Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard. It just smooshed all philosophical differences aside into a corner, a miscellaneous category of what someone didn’t like. Woke is already there in terms of being a label and set of commitments that conservatives refuse to acknowledge. The conservative usage of being woke smooshes all philosophical differences about each particular problem and promotes the disregard about what they refuse to see. Yet, it is revealing that they do not mention the moral reasons that could apply to a problem they are most likely blind to. Avoidance looks like blindness, but avoidance can only resemble blindness if others never press them about it. Why the avoidance of these moral reasons?
We should be cautious. There’s also probably degrees of wokeness, a type of muted wokeness. I can imagine that someone may be race woke but not gender or class woke. Someone could conceivably be aware the school to prison pipeline, mass incarceration and state policies of under-funding Black public schools as a real challenge here in Louisiana. They could spend a lifetime fighting these things, and maybe make some marginal headway on them without ever addressing the damage the state republicans are doing to gender and class politics in the state. In some ways, this also might be the same problem with center left notions of being woke. One could spend a lifetime being marginally woke to the detriment of other areas where iniquity is generated. Taking our cue from Martin Luther King Jr., we should not tease apart the politics of liberation from any whose dignity and worth are threatened as persons. One person’s blindness may contribute to another person’s suffering. You cannot address the school to prison pipeline without asking first why society is structured in this way and why the indifference and acceptance of this structure!
So, it’s unclear to me what being woke means if class, gender, and race are not part of it imbued with an ethical orientation to the problems we face. By returning some understanding of the term to moral reasons, we might shift the debate to mean why some moral reasons are refused being even admitted into our cultural politics and force reflection upon those who seek avoidance of our shared structural problems.
When the conservative shirks away and tightens up, it’s philosophically interesting to see what causes that retreat. In every case, they turn and shy away from the existential insight that we all choose a world with structural problems in it. The French existentialists gave us one thing. They forced us to reconcile the fact that our values behind the institutional habits that they conserve are malleable to the very ontological truth of human freedom. We choose to live in a world that ignores the dignity of the poor, the vulnerable, and the different. In choosing this world by our silence, our very freedom impacts and harms others. Every conservative runs away from this existential freedom because it reveals that their justification for both racial supremacy and heterosexism is based on the fallacy of appealing to tradition. The fact that it’s always been this way is, in fact, not justification for anything. Social reality is amenable to the purposes and efforts we assign to it. We should start reminding them of this fact and just what being woke means; it means they continue to be asleep while others suffer from the indifference of others.
The Horizon and The Fringe 