The term “ woke is used so polemically by various political actors that it has lost its analytical value. It is too heavily judgmental (usually negative) and its meaning is imprecise. I prefer to avoid it.
In contemporary struggles for social justice in the United States, being woke (“awakened” in American slang) is:
at) be aware of social injustices, especially when they are masked by the dominant discourse and even more when you experience them yourself, and
b) according to this awareness, take a stand against a cultural hegemony of the dominant whose discourse tends to make us blind to social injustices. It is in this sense, for example, that the ” critical race theory » aims to make visible the racial logics which do not say their name and which disguise themselves in universalist postures. I believe that these racial logics are much more marked in the United States than in Canada or Quebec.
In short, the term has designated a posture of awareness of injustices, and the need to lead struggles to denounce their manifestations in language and culture. This is where posture woke is expressed, and it draws its positive meaning (in the eyes of social justice activists) from contesting the power relations that are expressed in the discourse.
But how did it end up taking on negative connotations? And negative for whom?
For various reasons, postures woke ended up giving rise to slippages, that is to say unjustifiable actions, which discredited them and which are responsible for the pejorative use of the term ” woke “. But what constitutes slippage or unjustifiable action?
Two perspectives
The first perspective (which is mine) is in support of struggles for social justice, and it is generally left-wing, but it is critical of the inappropriate use of certain accusations of “racism” or “transphobia”, especially when they are accompanied by actions to “silence”.
The second perspective is that of hegemonic groups, which take a dim view of challenging the established order. They will then seize each skid to accentuate its danger. And their criticism will carry all the more as the skids multiply.
When an anti-racism activist, who encourages her students to participate in Black Lives Matter protests, is called racist by some of her students because she used the famous n-word to analyze the strategies of reversal of the stigma, there is a slippage that does not serve the cause of struggles for social justice. But so far, there is still nothing to report. There is a long tradition of radicalizing struggles for social justice, and particularly student struggles. You can’t blame 19-year-olds for doing what 19-year-olds often do: argue. The problem arises when the university, under the guise of supporting social justice struggles, supports censorship actions, and wrongly validates the accusations of racism against the teacher before having adequately examined whether these accusations hold. the road.
In this logic, it happened that several educational establishments, or even large media institutions looked favorably on these excesses, for various reasons which deserve a separate analysis. I have examined in a recent publication* two aspects of these slippages, in which: a) the moral posture often replaces the analytical posture, and b) the concepts (racism, various “phobias”) are stretched well beyond their validity limits. And this has the consequence that the “holders of inclusive virtue and absolute truth” feel entitled to silence the discourses they do not like, including within the university. This is what makes it possible to consider that the posture woke, initially liberating, has become counterproductive in struggles for social justice.
In this context, the hegemonic groups (carriers of a right-wing perspective) have no trouble delegitimizing these forms of criticism of the dominant social order, because of these excesses. This situation then allows a demagogic discourse which associates with a right-wing posture and a “moral panic” any criticism of the slippages associated with the posture woke.
This is why it is urgent that the protesting forces of the dominant order remain critical and vigilant in the face of the excesses that discredit their struggles.
* Identity, “race”, freedom of expression. Critical perspectives on some debates that are fracturing the left. Under the direction of Rachad Antonius and Normand Baillargeon.