All social movements have the primary objective of disseminating their ideas to awaken the conscience of the greatest number to reality as they perceive it. This is true for progressive, revolutionary and reformist movements, such as the labor and trade union movement, feminism, environmentalism, anti-racism, alter-globalism… It is also true for conservative and reactionary movements, including the liberalism, republicanism and nationalism of all tendencies. Present or past reality—or rather the perception that we have of it—then becomes the stake of struggles.
This is what we live today around the question woke. This concept emerged to tear the veil of ignorance that hides the forms of oppression that continue to divide societies. But the concept fuels controversy, because not everyone has an interest in seeing reality in the same way, since it involves questioning certain inequalities in terms of power, status and class advantages, material and symbolic resources. and, possibly, to institute restorative measures.
The question woke has come to mobilize scholars and politicians, activists and moralists, and even to move the lines between progressives and conservatives, but also within the progressive camp itself, so often plagued by internal struggles. Each advances its arguments, opposing true reality to false interpretations, facts to ideology, scientific objectivity to militant subjectivity, morality to politics.
A legacy of anti-slavery struggles and the civil rights movement in the United States, the word woke was updated by the Black Lives Matter movement in the mid-2010s. Stimulating the rapprochement between decolonial thought and intersectional struggles, wokism seems on the way to allowing minorities to unite around a shared experience of discrimination now perceived as systemic. This movement and its methods, however, provoked a virulent conservative reaction denouncing the attack on freedom of expression and the threat that the recognition of diversity would pose to values considered universal.
Thus, by a strange reversal of the situation which can be explained by the media weight of conservative nationalism, it is finally the reactionary voices which have popularized this word the most, but by essentializing it and reversing its use. In this perspective, the term will cease to designate a state of mind (being aware of discrimination), to come to characterize a specific social group (the woke). And these are no longer just anti-racists, but also and above all “anti-white racists” who do not respect freedom of expression, among other problems. Then finally, by extension, the word woke will designate all the progressive forces — including feminists, trans people and ecologists — that the reactionaries want to denounce, first in the United States, then in Quebec, France and many other countries.
But beyond the war of words, the current virulent debate around wokism poses more fundamentally the question of living together. This happens each time that the movements in struggle for emancipation allow the irruption of new political subjects, formerly invisible and subjugated, within the social body (serfs, slaves, workers, women, natives, colonized…). And each time, the supporters of the established order have loudly demonstrated their dismay in the face of the unthinkable: losing their supremacy and having true equality imposed on them, perceived then as a terrible totalitarianism of mere “minorities”. However, opening up to others does not mean forgetting oneself, and making more room does not necessarily lead to losing one’s. All of this depends on how one sees things, on one’s own experience, on one’s specific relationship to reality.
Basically, the question remains eminently political. How can we build societies that recognize the equal dignity of all its components without opposing majority and minorities? How to build a relationship to history that allows us to fight discrimination without freezing identities? How can we think of our relationship to diversity in a logic of complementarity rather than competition, and see in it a collective force rather than a deadly fragmentation? What dialogue between the universal and the particular can we establish in order to move towards a dynamic of unity rather than division?
It is to all these questions that this special issue of the journal Possible proposes to offer elements of answers by mobilizing conceptual and epistemological reflection, critical gaze, discourse analysis, practice narrative, auto-ethnography and the expression of personal experiences in the form of interviews. Like so many perspectives aimed at enlightening us on the long and tortuous path of individual and collective emancipation.
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