New York Times Op-Ed: Wokeness Will Always Be With Us, by John McWhorter (Columbia; Google Scholar; Author, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America):
Pundits these days often declare that wokeness has had its moment, that 2020 and 2021 were its peak and it’s now an increasingly distant memory. This is shortsighted. Wokeness is still with us, as livid as ever, and I suspect it always will be. The only question is where it will strike next?
By wokeness, I refer not to its original meaning of being informed about larger societal structures that preserve power for a certain (white) elite. Awareness of what is often called structural racism is one thing. Something else is the strain of wokeness so many would like to eulogize — call it High Woke — with its three distinguishing traits. One is the idea that dismantling structures that favor whiteness and its power must be society’s primary focus, a North Star, rather than one of many. The second is the commitment to punishing those insufficiently devoted to the program. The third is resistance to fact and logic when they are inconvenient.
High Woke was around before 2020. I encountered it in academia occasionally in the 1990s, when it troubled enough people to inspire claims that universities were being taken over by “tenured radicals.” But it hadn’t achieved anything like the purchase it would in the late 2010s. …
George Floyd was murdered in May 2020. By that summer, High Woke had gone mainstream. What was typically referred to as a racial reckoning reshaped disciplines, colored language, determined hirings and ruined careers. Professors across the country wrote me in terror about their fear of losing their jobs. I lost count of how many people told me of suddenly intransigent co-workers condemning peers and even superiors as moral quislings. …
If there had been no lockdown, there would have been no racial reckoning — or at least not of the kind we had. By 2022, with the lockdown over, this unusually potent manifestation of High Woke lost some of its main enablers — Zoom and also loneliness. …
High Woke is not crazy. It is one way for people to gain something it’s natural to want: a sense of moral superiority and group membership. It is a kind of substitute religion, with white privilege as original sin, cancellation threatening the heretic, and the idea of America at last coming to terms with racism as the End of Days.
There is no reason that something this captivating will disappear, having once been allowed such sway for two years, and with social media ever ready to spread its gospel. It pleases its adherents too much, and scares too many with its glowering threats of condemnation, ostracizing and unemployment. …
We will regularly grapple with a vocal minority trying to drown out discussion with their prosecutorial conviction that when power is the issue, differing opinions are immoral. And what’s even sadder is that in response, we will also always have eruptions of the right-wing version of High Woke, infused with the same obsession with white power except in defense of it, lustily punitive, and opportunistically unreasoning. Much of our national conversation will be fueled by these two strains driving each other.
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