As the shock wave unleashed by recent cases of positive discrimination shows, the social advancement of women, Aboriginal people, the disabled or racialized groups is often combined with the persistence of a feeling of persecution of White man. Although the application of quotas to be respected or the establishment of targets to be achieved in terms of hiring policies may pose problems, particularly with regard to the local composition and demographic weight of distinct minorities within the populations of rom one region to another, the introduction of a compensatory principle in matters of employment cannot be compared to the premeditated implementation of a mechanism for the exclusion of members of the majority.
In accordance with the logic of inverted stigma, the progress of diversity would necessarily go hand in hand with the concomitant increase in an anti-White bias, in the same way that the professional rise of women would reflect the fatal rise of sexism in towards men. The adoption of corrective measures inspired by positive discrimination, closely associated with the so-called woke ideology, would thus constitute a zero-sum game where the social promotion of individuals from racialized groups would necessarily amount to a proportional subversion of the status quo, judged a priori fair, which nevertheless disproportionately favors access to the most prestigious positions on the market for white citizens.
The “antiwoke” discourse, which tends to confuse theoretical equality and real equality, favors an analytical model that repudiates, on the one hand, any reference to the global history of inequalities and prohibits, on the other hand, any reference to a variable other than individual potential, so as to confuse the analysis of the inequitable distribution of power and material resources. Taking into account the socio-economic disparities that persist requires, however, beyond excessive recourse to the criterion of personal “merit”, a meticulous reading of the structural obstacles to raising the standard of living, such as the material conditions of existence, family income or ethnicity.
There is no need to resort to a racial prism to engage in an analysis of social injustices: the figures speak for themselves well beyond any epidermal reference. For example, the statistical under-representation of Aboriginal peoples or immigrant communities among senior executives is quite convincing. No offense to the champions of the identity right who reduce social injustices to the rank of ideological constructions in order to better discredit demands for equality, there is indeed a systemic bias which plays against certain segments of the population and, In this respect, the mere observation of facts cannot by itself be treated as ideological.
A fuzzy word
Rather than a wave of collective awareness, “wokism” would correspond in this perspective to a large-scale ideological movement, whereas “anti-wokism” would be, if not only the expression of common sense, at least the mark from a neutral posture. However, the very imprecision of the word “woke” makes it possible above all to excessively denigrate the left as a whole and to maintain the vagueness of both discrimination and social privilege. In this sense, antiwoke discourse is just as ideological as the woke perspective it seeks to castigate, and, strictly speaking, denial is to antiwokism what awakening is to wokism.
To use the words of political scientist Daniel Sabbagh, positive discrimination consists of a process of deinstitutionalization of the boundary between the majority group and the marginalized groups, a process that underlies a tangible desire to de-stigmatize social relations. Woke or not, the conceptual recourse to the systemic dimension of the social reproduction of inequities corroborated by the durability over time of the statistical gap between majority and disadvantaged minorities makes it possible to adequately grasp the merits of a redistributive justice that would not turn out to be not immediately as “reverse discrimination” of white citizens.