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In the mid-2010s in the English-speaking world there arose a left-wing social and political movement that has become enormously influential, one you are likely familiar with in one form or another. The movement has gone by many names: woke(ness), social-justice warriors (SJW), Progressive Activist, The Elect, Successor Ideology, Tumblr liberalism. What is notable about these names is that all of them have been applied to the movement primarily by people outside it. The only one coined from within the movement is “woke”, and recently many members of the movement have become suspicious even of that.
The movement, in other words, has shown a remarkable reluctance to name itself. What is clear to me is that the movement is a movement, with its own new and radically revisionary paradigm of inquiry, and therefore needs a name to identify it, even though its members seem reluctant to give it one. Perhaps this could be because they believe it is not a movement, it is just common sense. If so, I think a simple reflection on what was considered common sense ten years ago, within the same societies, is sufficient to show that belief false.
But this post is not about the name or lack thereof. Rather, the purpose of this post is to talk and think about the movement’s ideas, whatever it might be called. There are significant aspects of this movement that I agree with, and at least one that I have greatly benefitted from. I sympathize with its aims considered at the broadest level. Moreover I believe that there is truth in everything; I looked for the truth in the rise of Trump, and it is at least as important to do that here.
As a start to that end, in the remainder of this post I will articulate those aspects of the new movement that I disagree with, but do so in terms as sympathetic as I can manage. My aim is to describe these tenets of the movement in terms that its members would recognize and agree with. As the movement often has a new and specialized vocabulary, I am aiming to put the content of their ideas in my words: the aim is not to parrot their ideas in their vocabulary, but to express the content and meaning, in good faith, in a relatively widely recognized form of English.
I do this in part because I’m broadly in sympathy with the view recently expressed by Regina Rini that we need nuance rather than being simply pro- or anti-: “I can learn from thoughtful, point-by-point rebuttals of these views without the rhetorical intrusion of epochal ill winds. I learn nothing from bombast.” I’d like to start such a project with a point-by-point list of where my disagreements are. This is not a rebuttal; I’m not going to explain why I disagree, not here. That rebuttal would be the work of several different posts, some of which I have already made, others of which I will make in the future. Here, again, the project is sympathetic understanding.
So here goes. The new movement believes, and I do not believe, that…
- The most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity).
- On questions of race, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity, the most important overarching distinction to make is the distinction between privileged groups on one hand, and marginalized groups on the other.
- The fact of being marginalized is always central to the life experience of people in marginalized groups.
- Therefore marginalized groups’ experience of marginalization makes them all natural allies with each other.
- Therefore with respect to race, the most important division is between white people, who are all privileged by virtue of their whiteness, and people of colour, who are all correspondingly marginalized.
- Because marginalized people have the lived experience of being marginalized, they naturally understand the nature of that marginalization better than privileged people ever can.
- Therefore, those within a privileged group should not speak on any issue that they are privileged about, except to amplify the voices of the marginalized.
- It is hurtful to marginalized people to question them or ask them to justify their positions on issues related to their marginalization; rather, their own accounts of anything related to their lived experience should simply be accepted.
- To fight racism it is helpful to emphasize and strengthen people’s racial identities, for example by setting online icons to match one’s skin colour and teaching young children to identify themselves and each other by race.
- One of the more important ways to respond to the colonization of indigenous peoples in the Americas is by prefacing public events with an acknowledgement that the land the events are on once belonged to them.
- The cultures created by people of colour are their property, and for people of other cultures to make cultural or artistic works using that property is to take that property away from the people of colour illegitimately.
- Social and political activism in general, and activism on racial and gender inequality in particular, is a moral duty for everyone.
- Anyone not actively working to change the status quo is complicit in all of its inequities and problems, and therefore those who are not proactively antiracist should be considered racist.
- Anger on behalf of marginalized people is helpful and should be encouraged; in a protest demonstration, damage to property is often a helpful and productive means of expressing this anger.
- Gender should be viewed entirely as a matter of self-identification, and so one should refrain from using the offensive phrase “biologically male/female”, replacing it with “assigned male/female at birth”.
- In human interactions and institutional policies, the highest priority should be assigned to safety, including safety from psychological as well as physical harm.
- There is a category of words that are inherently offensive to marginalized people, irrespective of whether they happen to offend any particular marginalized person or even the majority of the relevant marginalized group; these words are helpfully referred to as slurs.
- The typical effect of slurs is to make marginalized people emotionally unsafe, vulnerable to trauma.
- Therefore, the usage of slurs in classrooms should be entirely prohibited, even for pedagogical purposes.
- In general, it is important to revise the use of the English language significantly to avoid all words that could be offensive to marginalized people.
- Any innocent intentions behind hurtful words do not matter; all that matters is their hurtful impact on their target.
- The proper and primary role of art and humour is to challenge the privilege of privileged groups, and any art or humour that does not do this should be viewed with suspicion.
- Freedom of speech, to the extent that it matters, is far less important than the harm that speech can cause to marginalized groups. Therefore those who speak ideas contrary to the interests of marginalized groups should lose their platforms for speaking, so that their harmful words can no longer be promoted.
- Especially, when some feminists express the claim that female-only spaces (such as women’s sports, women’s colleges or women’s bathrooms) should be reserved for non-transgender women, this idea is so dangerous that it should be met with social censure, shunning anyone who expresses it and perhaps anyone associated with them.
- Attempts to oppose these tenets or their application are derived primarily from a desire, conscious or unconscious, to preserve the relevant privileged groups’ privilege over marginalized groups.
None of these bulleted tenets are obvious or common sense. I will state once more that I disagree with all of them. (I am probably stating that disagreement more times than is necessary, but this is the sort of post from which misunderstanding is easy, and these are the sort of issues on which misunderstanding is dangerous.) In 2012, even within left-wing circles, every one of these tenets would likely have been met with spirited disagreement if not derision. But I would also say that none of them is self-contradictory or otherwise absurd. Some seem obviously wrong to me, but many people nevertheless hold them or beliefs very much like them, and I hope I have portrayed them all sympathetically enough that they do not look ridiculous. People can and do defend them all, even though that defence can be (and I think often is) weak.
In some contrast to Rini’s view, I think these tenets typically tend to come as a package: I expect that if you were to take surveys, you would find high levels of correlation between believing one of them and believing the others. I would certainly like for them to come as less of a package – for more people to take individual ideas from this list separately rather than accepting them as a group – but so far that does not seem to be what has happened. And many of the tenets do support, or are derived from, other tenets. So, taken together, I think these and other controversial tenets constitute a paradigm or tradition in political theory and ethics. (It is a further step to discuss which such tenets are the paradigm’s hard core and which are mere auxiliary hypotheses, to use Lakatos‘s terminology. There’s no room for that here; that would require a different but similar post aiming to explain the movement’s theoretical structure.)
This paradigm is one that I reject. But I also believe that dialectic begins with sympathetic understanding. While I have never been a right-winger, I have tried in various ways over the years to understand and learn from right-wing thinkers. I think it is important to extend the same courtesy to this recent left-wing paradigm with which I have significant agreements but many disagreements. I hope that this attempt at a neutral presentation of its controversial claims can be a start to that.
I think you are correct to disagree with and / or reject this system. Have seen the term (woke), but did not know it’s meaning or origins. When first reading the term, I was reminded of a book read in the last several years. It was titled Waking Up, and you likely know of the author. Upon seeing this post and reading the summary bullets provided, it seems clear the movement did not begin with that book,unless loosely influenced thereby. Some of the points may have been applicable at one time. I don’t believe the fourth one in the list is now. Marginalized groups are, in my estimation, more focused on themselves now, rather than alliances with others: they have the distinction of enduring marginalization, but the circumstances for such are disparate.
As you at least imply, the bullets overlap or repeat, in an effort,I suppose, to cover all bases and contingencies. Such dilutions seem unhelpful.
Thank you for the summary.
Thanks for your response, Paul. I do hear a lot of people around me acting as if marginalized people are each others’ natural allies, and I think that’s repeated in the media: consider how blown away so many editorialists seemed to be when significant numbers of Latinos voted for Trump in 2020.
I doubt that there is such a movement as defined by the “tenets” in this blog post. I can think of one or two writers who probably would endorse a few of the “tenets”, but without real survey data of the kind that Amod baselessly speculates about in the article, I see no reason to believe that these are the tenets of a new movement and that the “tenets” really do “come as a package” as Amod claimed.
As a list of “stuff that pisses off Amod”, it’s fine. I too will admit to being pissed off occasionally by such bad ideas. It works great as a dialectical stimulus. But I don’t buy the “new movement” claim, especially since it so perfectly matches negative caricatures of social justice.
I can understand why Amod would use the strategy of inventing a new movement and then rebutting it instead of engaging with individual thinkers who have espoused some of the “tenets”, since the latter strategy could invite unwanted attention from the thinkers and their followers. The front of a “new movement” as one’s object of criticism may serve as a kind of self-protection against the real adversaries.
Wow. I am a little blown away by this comment. I am really not sure what to make of it.
“instead of engaging with individual thinkers who have espoused some of the ‘tenets'”
So when I explicitly say in the post that the rebuttal is the work of different posts, it’s not enough for you to imply that my promise to make such posts in the future is one made in bad faith, you are also denying that I engaged with individual thinkers in the previous posts that I linked to? What do you think I was doing in those previous posts, that this post constitutes an “instead of” and not an “in addition to”?
“I can think of one or two writers who probably would endorse a few of the ‘tenets'”.
That’s it? Really? One or two would endorse a few? You haven’t seen these ideas repeated in newspaper columns, on blogs, in diversity trainings at work, by friends and neighbours, on Twitter? Not beyond “one or two writers” who would endorse a mere few of them? I am genuinely curious about what world you have been living in since the 2016 election. Where is it? Can I move there? It sounds great!
“especially since it so perfectly matches negative caricatures of social justice.”
When you say “of social justice” here, what, exactly, are you referring to? Since you “doubt that there is such a movement” and you claim I “use the strategy of inventing a new movement” , what precisely is this “social justice” which I am perfectly matching a negative caricature of, given that it is apparently not a new movement?
Regarding survey data, I agree that that is something that is sorely lacking. I suspect that this is in part because the people who should be doing the surveys have convinced themselves, without evidence, that there is nothing there to study.
But those few who have attempted to study it have found that there is indeed a there there, a significant minority who agree with the kind of ideology I describe, though they have not asked about the specific set of tenets I have identified in this post. That’s not surprising, since this post explicitly aimed to identify tenets I disagreed with. I knew when writing it, and I hope I made clear, that there are some tenets I do agree with, some of which (“the country needs to keep making changes to give blacks equal rights as whites”) are included at the first link.
Regarding “baseless speculation”, are you saying that one should never say anything about a topic on which reliable surveys have not been conducted? So, for example, should one not attempt to speculate about whether the citizens of Russia or China support their governments, given that reliable surveys cannot be taken in those environments? Or, are you willing to say you think I am wrong that these beliefs tend to correlate with each other? If so, why? Do you believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence?
And finally, if we’re talking about negative caricatures: it is a caricature of the apparent non-movement which you call “social justice” that “it” assumes the worst on the part of its opponents and presumes they must always be acting in bad faith. Would I be misrepresenting your comment to say that it fits that caricature precisely?
Perhaps you’re planning to provide more evidence in future posts that these are the “tenets” of a “new movement”, but there’s no evidence in this post. Of course, I don’t think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but I’m pointing out that more evidence is needed, and in its absence the titular concept seems fictional to me. To slightly restate what I said before, I suspect you are wrong (because I have no reason to think you are right) that these are the tenets of a new movement and that the “tenets” really do “come as a package”.
In your first paragraph, you said that “woke(ness)” and “social-justice warriors” are two of the movement’s names, but the dictionary definition that you linked to correctly says that SJW is “an often mocking term for one who is seen as overly progressive” and provides an example from 1991, and “woke” has also more recently become a similar mocking term. I have seen plenty of memes and statements mocking woke(ness) and SJWs (though I’m not on Twitter). Those are negative caricatures. They don’t correspond to, or acknowledge, deep thinking on social justice, one widely used definition of which is “the way in which human rights are manifested in the everyday lives of people at every level of society”. That definition of social justice doesn’t claim that “the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender” as your first tenet states, and I consider that tenet to be closer to the negative caricatures than to the reality of social justice activism, which targets particular inequalities in particular areas.
A couple of writers that came to mind who, I guess, probably would endorse a few of the “tenets” are anti-racism consultants Robin DiAngelo and Tim Wise. But I could be wrong about that, as I’m not very familiar with the work.
I don’t understand what you mean when you say I accused you of “bad faith”. I speculated that you didn’t want to name the people who really think all these things, but apparently I was wrong about that, and I’m sorry if that offended you; I didn’t intend to insult. Still, I think that the way you posited a package of tenets of a new movement is not believable. If some people endorse all or most of these tenets, I would guess it’s because of rigid thinking or some similar cognitive trait, not because they are members of a new movement.
Starting with the point about bad faith: I said in several ways in the post that I was attempting to present the movement neutrally, “in terms that its members would recognize and agree with.” Perhaps I failed at that; it is a difficult thing to do. But your response seemed to imply that I wasn’t even *trying*: that I was “inventing” this movement as a “front” just in order to avoid engaging with individual authors, *even though I already had* so engaged, and that it was nothing more than a “list of stuff that pisses off Amod”. That sure sounded like you believed my *intent* was different from what I repeatedly stated it was. At least you didn’t try to presume that my real intent was something racist, which is something I have been accused of in the past, and is a common accusation deployed against critics of the movement.
And sure, SJW has always been used as a pejorative (as “woke” has not!) – and that’s why I *didn’t* use it myself to describe the movement, and don’t intend to. I merely listed it among the names by which the movement has been called. (That list would look a lot less pejorative if the movement had ever been willing to name itself. At one point it appeared to do the world the service of calling itself “woke”, but as soon as other people dared to use that name in criticisms of the phenomena it named, suddenly activists decided that using the name they coined was racist.) Does it constitute a negative caricature merely to *point out that that name is used?* Because you just pointed out that the name is used too. So by that logic you’re making a negative caricature yourself.
It still seems to me that you have tacitly acknowledged that the movement exists even as you explicitly deny it. You now apparently define social justice as “the way in which human rights are manifested in the everyday lives of people at every level of society”. I don’t really know what that’s supposed to mean, but you did say I perfectly matched “negative caricatures of social justice”, which would therefore imply that I was “perfectly matching negative caricatures of the way in which human rights are manifested in the everyday lives of people at every level of society”. The passive-voice “are manifested” is very curious. Are these rights just wishing themselves into existence magically, with no human agency involved? Nobody’s *doing* anything? Such that I am caricaturing this process of manifesting, not any people doing the manifesting? (While I do think there is some deep thinking associated with the movement, I cannot conclude that this definition is part of it.) It sure *seems* like insofar as there is something that is capable of being caricatured, that something is not a magical passive process by which human rights manifest themselves, as this definition would indicate if taken by itself, but rather *a movement*, a collective effort of people trying to change society in particular ways, some but not all of which I object to.
I’m quite open to the possibility that some of the tenets I’ve listed are a mischaracterization of this movement. Regarding the first one, I’m not sure I’ve explicitly heard anyone *say* it, but I have seen many people act according to it – including some people close to me, who insisted that I participate in activist projects around race in a way that they never did around issues like climate change or income inequality which I would take to be more important. Perhaps that was an artifact of the Trump era, but we are still in an era where it’s common to demand disciplinary sanctions for making a sexist joke where no comparable sanctions are demanded for being environmentally irresponsible or being ruthless with poor people. It does seem to me that the paramount importance of race and gender is a belief at least implicitly held by a large number of people (most of whom would believe many other items on the list), but I could be persuaded that’s not the case if I saw evidence.
In response to your 1st paragraph: You said, “I said in several ways in the post that I was attempting to present the movement neutrally”. But since the tenets seem to me to be neither sympathetic nor the beliefs of a movement, you can imagine how difficult it was to explain to myself what was going on in this post. I proposed a hypothesis; you falsified it. So much for that.
2nd paragraph: It is not the mere mentioning of the words that is a negative caricature; it is that the content of the tenets align with the caricature: a list of stuff that’s “overly progressive”, almost a parody.
3rd paragraph: There are well-defined social justice movements. In the 1950s and 60s there was the civil rights movement in the U.S. Today there is the Movement for Black Lives. These movements target particular inequalities in particular areas, as I said. Is there a movement today that believes the tenets in this post? Not that I see.
4th paragraph: Here you mention “people close to me”, and in a previous comment you mentioned “friends and neighbours”. It’s not easy to change your neighbors, but it may be time to look for some new friends and ignore Twitter? More seriously, it seems that our different points of view are based on personal evidence from our different milieux: you in a coastal urban university milieu, and me out in the U.S. Midwest with no university affiliation. It seems to me that out here (and off campus and off Twitter) not many people talk about the paramount importance of race and gender and many other items on the list, but I could be persuaded that’s not the case if I saw evidence.
But by all means, go ahead and rebut the “tenets”, even without a movement. It will be fun to read.
I think your response on the fourth paragraph says it all. Why does this list sound like parody to you? Because you are not surrounded by colleagues, neighbours, friends, family members, acquaintances who believe these things sincerely. You are not a part of university committees on diversity and inclusion that assign articles preaching several of these tenets as required reading. You are not surrounded by the kind of people who made DiAngelo’s book – and Ibram Kendi’s and others like them – bestsellers. I am – and that’s after having largely withdrawn, painfully, from Facebook and Twitter back in 2017 (and lost some friendships and strained others because of conflicts over this). So are the left-leaning friends (both on university campuses) who emailed me to thank me for this post.
I believe you that you don’t often encounter people who believe the ideas I’ve enumerated. I expect you are entirely right that there are few if any such people where you are. Please don’t take that as evidence that they don’t exist.
That list makes this a particularly helpful post – setting such a large number of the characteristic beliefs out like that really helps remind us what we’re confronted with (you forgot to include women’s prisons in the list of women’s spaces, however).
As I am not bound by your desire to give as sympathetic an account as possible, I will note the extremely illiberal nature of a great many of the items on the list – in fact, given the extraordinary influence this movement now has, I think the list gives strong reason to doubt the future of liberal democracy, which cannot possibly exist in a culture given over to this kind of thinking. The List is threat numero uno, as far as I can see.
Amod, I am with Nathan here in that I really don’t come across people where I live or who I interact with who believe all or most of these tenets as stated and as a complete package. I have read some on Twitter though, and I don’t doubt you do meet them often enough in your own (Cambridge, academia) environs.
Its interesting that many of the tenets you list could easily be made true by modifying them slightly—for example, by removing qualifiers like “all,” “every,” and “always” and replacing them with “some,” “many,” and “often” etc. It’s not that there isn’t some valuable kernel of thruth at the heart of many of these tenets, but that they abolutize the part that is true.
I am more sympathetic than you are to “wokeness” conceived as a project of awakening to the experience of people who live and experience the world differently than one does and an increased degree of empathy with and care for them. We probably need a good deal more of it. What we don’t need is more absolutized and dichotomized thinking.
On the other hand, history is replete with elites of one sort or another that think the average person needed ethical improvement and lifting up—be that the clergy during the Protestant Reformation, the Evangelicals during the temperance movement, or the Bolsheviks during the Russian revolution—and the average person resists all their sermonizing, pestering, and cajoling and just wants to be left alone to live life as he or she has (and most people have) since time immemorial. There is always resentment and resistence against efforts to cleanse people of their sins, making them confess, and making them over into “better people.” In this sense, wokeism is just another effort by another elite to cleanse “the people” of their sins — this time the residual (and sometimes not so residual) sins of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia.
The interesting thing is that these moral crusades sometimes actually succeed. The Reformation did make Northern Europeans into more sober, hard-working, and industrious people. The Temperance movement did make Americans drink less. This is the never ending process of “civilization.” I can almost picture the Vikings as they were being Christianized complaining, “What, we’re not allowed to rape anymore?” and then asking, “But we’re still allowed to harass, right?” Civilization is always asking more from us this year than it did last year—one more way in which we can do better. It is often annoying and oppressive, but it is also a part of the process of what we have come to call “progress.” The question is, as Charles Taylor asks in A Secular Age, ““how to define our highest spiritual and moral aspirations for human beings, while showing a path to the transformation involved which doesn’t crush, mutilate, or deny what is essential to our humanity.”
Thanks, Seth. There’s a lot I agree with in this. One thing where I might want to clarify most: I am 100% on board with “awakening to the experience of people who live and experience the world differently than one does and an increased degree of empathy with and care for them.” I don’t think that the movement actually does this, because it is only about awakening to the experience of people it deems marginalized in the right ways. I know that people who see immigrants as the US’s greatest problem experience the world very differently than I do – and they frequently are quite poor. But those I know and know of in the movement (personally and online) tend to judge such people very harshly, as bigots. In general even successful moral crusades are not always for the good: there is a lot to be preferred about the more relaxed and easy-going culture of Southern Europe. (That’s not even to get into the Bolsheviks!)
And I am sympathetic to the idea that some of these tenets could be made true by softening them, by changing an “always” to a “sometimes” or the like. I do think there is a kernel of truth in the movement – just as I have thought about the MAGA movement, which arose in parallel to this one (and in many respects the two have fed on each other). I think there is more truth in the woke/social-justice movement than in MAGA, though there is a great deal of falsehood in both.
Overall, while I think the movement’s tenets do frequently come as a package, I also think we would be a lot better off if they didn’t, so that we can pick out what is true and what isn’t. I have already noted some tenets of the movement that I do take to be true – that people should not treat gender as wedded to biological sex, that racial preferences can help to achieve racial equality. I hope that in the coming years the truths in the movement can remain acknowledged while shedding the large amount that I take to be false and harmful.
There are two observations I will make about the “movement” that you describe.
The first is that, while the tenets purport to value the views of marginalized people, the movement is, essentially, a white person’s movement. The very idea of “wokeness” is from the point of view of a white person who has awakened from formerly mainstream Western ideas centered on the supremacy of Western Civilization. It is also an arrogant point of view. Similar to the metaphor of the “red pill” among the MAGA crowd, the notion of “wokeness” carries with it the idea of an in-crowd and a sense of “us” and “them” — with “us” fighting against an other, the idea of white privilege. The MAGA crowd finds its “other” in the idea of wealthy, liberal coastal elites. The Woke crowd finds its “other” in a sense that there are amorphous but ubiquitous institutional and cultural assumptions that need to be confronted and exposed.
The other characteristic of the movement (I suggest) is that it does not define morality based primarily on the intentions of the privileged actor — but rather on the state of mind of the marginalized “victim”. In this way, the movement has commonalities with legal theories that define rape as a crime — with the key element of proof in a rape trial being the state of mind of the victim — did she consent, or not — rather than the intention of the rapist. I say “primarily” because intent of the actor is still a factor — but that intent could be action based on ignorance, rather than ill will or even desire or lust.
Amod,
A thought-provoking post as always. I think I can only add agreement to much of what Nathan and Seth have said above. To me, the “woke” movement is much more tame and uplifting (of the experiences of many marginalized and oppressed groups). But there definitely are some people who use that movement as a bludgeon to attack others. And as Jim says, in my experience this has almost always been white people attacking other white people for perceived faults. As you say, Amod, they will quickly “call out” people harshly as bigots with little care for dialogue or mutual understanding.
In fact, I think there was a time a few years ago when it was popular (in memes, etc) to encourage white people to “call out” fellow white people on any perceived acts of racism or sexism or anti-LGBTIQism, etc. The motivation behind that was that it’s exhausting for people in those groups to constantly have to point out and teach people how to not be so racist/sexist/etc. But the execution, I think, was often terrible.
I found that jarring at first, but I’ve come to see it as a bit of their own ignorance as new and zealous members of the movement. But, as far as I know, those folks are a minority and have never constituted their own movement (which would match what you’ve described above).
I think you’ll appreciate Lama Rod Owens’ essay on this topic. He skillfully differentiates a compassion-based “wokeness” of internal work and inclusion vs the elite “wokeness’ peddlers out there.
https://rubinmuseum.org/spiral/are-you-woke
Similarly, I wrote about the importance of loving-kindness in our practice, drawing in part from Loretta Ross’s NYTimes article, “I’m a Black Feminist. I Think Call-Out Culture Is Toxic.”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/americanbuddhist/2020/08/in-strife-and-uncertainty-let-us-remember-loving-kindness.html
There was another op-ed in the NYTimes recently, but I can’t find the link. As I recall, a Black philosopher was similarly worrying about elite cooptation of race and marginalization conversations in unhelpful ways.
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