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

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Such virtue signalling could be written off as just a new form of advertising but its growing use also speaks to a more fundamental troubling of the profit motive. However, Muldrow’s track was picked up by another singer, Erykah Badu, who released an updated version in 2008 on her album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War). This acts much the same way as saying lavatory or toilet, napkin or serviette, sofa or settee signified social class in decades past.

Craig’s 007 is ‘tender, cries and gets into the shower in his tuxedo to comfort a woman’, gushes Higson. Decades later, ‘woke’ would not only come to be taken on board by white hipsters but, at the very same time, exposing and condemning appropriation – be it cultural or linguistic – would itself become a woke action. But feminist campaigns – to have adverts banned, workplace menopause policies introduced and misogyny made a hate crime – imply not just something beyond a belief in sexual equality but actually contradictory to this basic principle. Williams taught at the University of Kent for over 10 years and has extensive experience in think-tanks. 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are adopted by a social and cultural elite, the more they are assumed to be mainstream and the more those who use outdated terminology stand out.

The Old English roots of ‘awake’ lie in both ‘arise’ and ‘revive’, and this has long prompted metaphorical usage. This spoke not just to the existence of racial injustice, but also to a more specific need among black people at that time: to stay alert to threats and dangers from white people in general and from the state in particular. 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.

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. The loudest voices in the Labour movement over the past year in particular have focused more on pulling down Churchill’s statue than they have on helping people pull themselves up in the world. Some, such as ‘diversity’, have always been vacuous concepts, while others, such as inclusion, have been so expanded beyond their original application as to be rendered hollow. Businesses tick over and revenue is generated, some thrive and turn in eye-watering sums, but neither profit nor production seem to offer sufficient justification and money-making is hidden behind woke mission statements and values-laden corporate visions. This attempted normalisation of woke, and the disingenuous slippage between the general and the particular, means that when Boris Johnson was asked by interviewers: ‘Is Joe Biden woke?

She has given many guest lectures, most recently speaking at the Universities of Bonn, Cologne, Leiden and the Freie University in Berline. It is easy to cast this obsession with language as simply performative or harking back to an earlier era of political correctness. With clear thinking and gripping storytelling, Williams explains how how a minority of the elites in Britain and America were able to intimidate the rest of the elites into silence or complicity, imposing a "revolution from above" that is anti-democratic and cruel. This was a protest song describing an incident from 1931 in which nine black teenagers from Scottsboro, Arkansas, were accused of raping two white women.

And we are delighted to announce that spiked is publishing How Woke Won, in partnership with John Wilkes Publishing.

Woke’s youth was among young black people but its illness and decline came after it was kidnapped by old white conservatives’, she explains. From Innocent Smoothies, to Ben and Jerry’s ice cream, to Gillette razors, companies parade woke credentials and sell products based not on anything so crass as quality or value for money but on holding the correct values. This usage speaks not just to the importance of being aware of racial injustice but a more specific need for black people to stay alert to threats and dangers from white people in general and the state in particular. More generally, woke ideology overides social class, divides workers according to identity, and allows employers to act as a neutral arbitrer in workplace conflicts. However, many strenuously disagree with the specific political goals of Black Lives Matter (BLM), the political campaign group.