How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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Woke has adopted this ambiguity about truth which allows words — such as ‘racism’ and ‘hate speech’ — to take on whatever meaning the user intends without regard to the possibility of countervailing evidence. As Williams remarks:

Elite universities have traditionally been bastions of privilege with a student body that was predominantly white, male and wealthy. Countless talented individuals were denied admission and, as a result, access to the well paid professional roles that a degree from a top institution opens up. But attempts to compensate for disadvantage at a community level through lower entry requirements for individuals are not without problems. In September 2020, the University of Edinburgh renamed David Hume Tower ‘40 George Square’ after the philosopher was accused of racism. The university said: Hume’s comments on race, ‘though not uncommon at the time, rightly cause distress today.’ Clearly, staff do not see it as their role to explain to students, calmly and rationally, that if they cannot cope with mere mention of a globally and historically renowned philosopher then perhaps university is not for them. Far from it. Instead, the author of the statement accepts that students are ‘rightly’ distressed. This suggests that – in the face of Hume’s alleged sins – distress is the ‘correct’ emotional response. This begs the question: are the many people not distressed by the existence of David Hume Tower racist? Emotions seem to be as important as words in the woke university. Students assumed to be vulnerable need the campus to be a safe space free from offensive speech, emotional distress and intellectual confrontation. Never mind that confronting unfamiliar and seemingly offensive ideas can be educational; what students rapidly learn is that cries of psychological harm often lead to political wins. A prime example of this tactic in operation is the now widespread movement to decolonise higher education. The curriculum is of particular interest to the decolonisers because, in the woke university, education is not primarily to inform, still less to challenge, but to affirm. Students expect to have their identity validated through their course material.As Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, director of the campaign group Don’t Divide Us, told the Telegraph : ‘This initiative is normalising politically radical and partisan beliefs. It will do nothing to help teachers teach pupils how to read, and has little to do with education more generally.’ She went on to advise schools to put Read Woke’s guidance ‘in the bin’.

In the fevered imagination of university administrators, higher education is fundamentally, structurally, systemically and irredeemably racist. At least, there can be no other explanation for so much time and money being committed to anti-racism initiatives. Worse yet, staff and students are not just racist but sexist, homophobic, transphobic and classist. Anarchy would ensue were it not for an endless cycle of workshops, awareness raising campaigns, anonymous reporting systems and institutional policies setting out exactly how staff and students should relate to each other – right down to which words they should use.

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A subsequent independent review of the cancellation led to a public apology from the University’s Vice Chancellor and the wider revelation that staff and students at Essex feel: ‘constrained to self-censor their speech and activity because of concerns about how we manage the balance between freedom of speech and our commitment to diversity, equality and inclusion.’ The book’s latter chapters reveal how deceptively pessimistic a title How Woke Won is, with wokeness described as so perilous a position that it feels like one is reading the final days of the Romanovs. The elite may be charging forward with this new doctrine, but the public are not behind them. Williams concludes her book on an uplifting note by assuring us that the fight against woke is winnable, and by supplying us with the tools with which to engage. With its moral righteousness and veneer of egalitarianism, woke ideology lends authority to the demands made by activists and those in positions of power. From schools that teach children to question their gender identity, to universities that provide students with ‘content warnings’ for classic works of literature; from local councils that remove statues of historical figures, to multinational corporations that sell virtue alongside their products; woke thinking has seeped into every aspect of our lives. Racial divisions are rehabilitated in the name of anti-racism. Women’s rights are destroyed in the name of trans rights. Ordinary people are demonised as bigots, while virtue-signalling (but exploitative) corporations pose as radical.

Most entitled of all are the interviewees who demand to know why there even has to be a discussion about gender identity. ‘Why can’t we just be accepted for who we say we are?’, is their plea. They may smile sweetly while raising this question, but a group of Scottish women’s rights campaigners reminds us that they are really asking women to allow men into all the places where they are most vulnerable. And while they’re at it, they’re asking women to give up their claim to the word ‘woman’. Critics of woke capitalism claim businesses that ‘get woke, go broke’ because attempts at virtue signalling often end up insulting customers who, unsurprisingly, shop elsewhere. However, woke can make good business sense. It not only serves as a preemptive strike to deflect criticism, it also allows unprecedented management reach into the lives of employees. Through unconscious bias training, anti-racism and diversity training, enculturating staff into woke values permits bosses unprecedented access to and control over not just their employees’ time, but their personal, political and emotional lives too. More generally, woke ideology overides social class, divides workers according to identity, and allows employers to act as a neutral arbitrer in workplace conflicts. Woke capitalism, perhaps more than anything else, reveals the elite beneficiaries of woke politics. Woke politics aims at social justice through the foregrounding of identity politics: at its core is an insistence on categorising people according to immutable characteristics such as race or sex, before dividing and ranking according to assumed hierarchies of oppression. Historically privileged groups, primarily white men, are expected to accede to those who have been historically oppressed. The sense of virtue that comes from acting on behalf of the disadvantaged and oppressed legitimises a refusal to countenance dissent and a ruthlessness at dealing with those seemingly in opposition to the woke mission. Those deemed ‘enemies’ are readily written off as racists, TERFs or even fascists. At the same time, woke overlaps with a therapeutic ethos that sees oppressed people as more in need of emotional safety than material change. In this way, woke censorship, cancelling and even violence are justified if they prevent vulnerable groups suffering psychological trauma. So powerful is the woke sense of virtue that seemingly nothing, up to and including physical violence, is off limits if it prevents those considered offensive from inflicting psychic harm on those deemed vulnerable. Joanna’s writing has been published widely in the UK and the US including The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The Guardian, The New York Post and American Conservative.

At the University of Manchester , staff have been advised not to use terms like ‘mother’ or ‘father’ but instead to use more inclusive and gender neutral words like ‘parent’ or ‘guardian’. Likewise, ‘men’ and ‘women’ should be replaced by ‘individuals’ while ‘manpower’, ‘mankind’ and ‘chairman’, and should be replaced with ‘workforce’, ‘humankind’ and ‘chair’. The University of Edinburgh provides a list of transphobic phrases that academics and students must not say. It includes ‘all women hate their periods’ and ‘you’re either a man or a woman’. In the US, Northwestern University advises that rather than greeting friends with ‘Hey, guys’, people instead say ‘Hey, everyone’. It also issues guidance for ‘socio economic language’ recommending ‘under-resourced’ rather than ‘inner city’ and ‘working hard to make ends meet’ rather than ‘working poor’. It seems unlikely that the same will be said for This Book Is Anti-Racist , a polemic by American author Tiffany Jewell. Yet, as the Telegraph has uncovered, this book is being promoted in Scottish schools through ‘ Read Woke ’, a scheme designed to ‘enlighten’ pupils about racial issues. Read Woke provides books for school libraries as well as reading lists and resources for teachers. As the name makes clear, the focus is neither beautiful writing nor diverse viewpoints but political messaging. One important difference between today’s elite and an older establishment is the readiness of today’s cultural gatekeepers to deny their status. Many figureheads of the new woke elite […] enjoyed middle-class, privately educated upbringings, yet they use their identities to distract from their social-class privileges and claim victimhood.”

Language plays an important role in demarcating the woke from the non-woke. Knowing to say ‘people of colour’ rather than ‘coloured people’, ‘transgender’ rather than ‘transsexual’, ‘Latinx’ rather than ‘Hispanic’, and ‘sex assigned at birth’ rather than simply ‘male’ or ‘female’, serves to differentiate people who are woke from those who are not. This acts much the same way that saying lavatory or toilet, napkin or serviette, sofa or settee, signified social class in decades past. A key role of schools and universities today is inducting students into this woke language and its associated ideas, either through immersion or through formal training, in the form of mandatory anti-racism workshops or consent classes. In turn, young graduates carry this outlook with them into the workplace. The more woke language and principles are adopted by a social and cultural elite, the more they are assumed to be mainstream, and the more those who use outdated terminology stand out.Nonetheless, the Census data released in June 2022 shows the highest proportion ever — 50 per cent — of Australians are born, or descended from those born, overseas. So it’s also hardly surprising that claims of persistent racism by anti-racism activists do not fit with our experience of living in what is now, by far, one of the world’s most integrated multicultural and multi-ethnic societies. The premise of all these books is that people are defined, first and foremost, by their skin colour. Needless to say, this is not an appropriate lesson for children. Far from teaching kids to treat others with kindness, tolerance and respect, pushing this worldview on them will only lead to a build-up of guilt and resentment among pupils of all races and ethnicities. These lists unwittingly reveal what passes as offensive on today’s campuses. Universities are not having to outlaw swear words, racial epithets or gross insults. Staff and students are far too polite and well-intentioned to utter such phrases in public. No; universities are proscribing common words that are part of most people’s everyday vocabulary. Staff employed to write linguistic guides dictate the limits of acceptability according to their own political perspectives. The upshot is that spontaneous interactions are replaced by a stilted deference to the rules. Where this book stands out is when it focuses on how wokeness is an elitist movement. When the author discusses it from this angle, I’m like, “YES!”. She dives into how elites have altered language and other aspects of life to signal their status and then compares it to what’s going on now. I also really enjoyed when she wrote about how major companies are capitalizing on the woke movement while also mistreating and exploiting workers around the world. I’d say that this is maybe 30% of the book. Other than that, if you’re familiar with the topic, you’ll hear a lot of arguments that have been presented before and stories of why they’re issues. It was interesting learning a little bit more about how this is unfolding in the UK as well.