In my view the most important thing to acknowledge about the 2010s movement around racial and gender issues is that it exists – something a surprising number of people try to deny. Support it or oppose it or be somewhere in the middle, we need to be able to acknowledge it and discuss it. What we call it is of secondary importance.

That said, in order to talk about it we do need to call it something, so it’s worth spending a little time thinking about what terminology to use. (While I have so far just called it by the neutral term “the new movement”, that term’s accuracy rapidly decreases for a movement more than a decade old, whose influence is beginning to fade.) Here, of course, the problem is that the movement is notoriously averse to being named. But that aversion is one of the movement’s dumbest and most obnoxious traits – as Freddie deBoer rightly notes, it is part of a demand to be exempted from the regular practices of politics – and even those of us who sympathize with the movement in general should find that aversion a little cringeworthy. There is no reason at all for us to follow it.

Two terms in common currency are not ideal because they describe only a portion of the movement: DEI and cancel culture. (Likewise “critical race theory”, which refers to one specific theoretical position, on one issue, and shouldn’t stand in for the movement as a whole.)

The term “DEI” (short for diversity, equity and inclusion) has the significant advantage that people in the movement do use it, because that name is what appears on the institutional offices that they created to advance the movement’s goals. But the term gained currency only late in the movement as those offices were being created – and referring specifically to the movement’s incorporation in specific institutions (like universities and corporations). Protests and online activism were not DEI per se; they preceded DEI offices by several years. My radical antifa transgender friend whose T-shirt says “I’m a divisive issue” is very much in the movement in general, but she is not DEI; her violence-adjacent punk-rock anarchism is worlds away from the official institutional codes of conduct created under the name DEI.

“Cancel culture”, meanwhile, refers to one specific and unfortunate strategy taken by the movement, of punishing those who speak out against its tenets – declaring formerly appreciated figures like J.K. Rowling or Natalie Wynn to have gone beyond the pale. But not only does the movement have plenty of strategies that go beyond cancel culture, cancel culture as such is itself a phenomenon that predates the movement, including among the right wing (just ask the Dixie Chicks). The street protests over George Floyd’s death were a core part of the movement, but were neither cancel culture nor DEI.

“Political correctness” comes closer to naming the general movement than any of these, but is generally understood to name an older, similar movement (also focused around linguistic changes on race and gender) that reached its peak in the mid-’90s and then became the butt of jokes in the 2000s. The 2010s movement was the heir of political correctness but was not the same thing: it was more fully institutionalized and widespread, more focused on transgender issues, more animated by a binary between privileged and marginalized groups, as well as being the work of a new generation with its own new vocabulary. (“Intersectionality” was a core term to the 2010s movement but not to political correctness.) In the mid-2010s the newer movement was frequently described as “political correctness” but that usage soon fell away on both sides. I think it’s helpful instead to take up a term that highlights how in the 2010s something new was going on.

So if not any of these terms (“the new movement”, “cancel culture”, “DEI”, “critical race theory”, “political correctness”), then what? The most common and obvious name for the movement, of course, is woke – a term so ubiquitous that in French it is now common to refer to le wokisme. I have no strong objections to this term. The term “woke” was coined within the movement; for several years it was used as a term of pride It’s doing the movement a service to call it by a name that it itself coined; most movements in history (such as Christians) wind up getting a name that someone else gave them.

“Woke” now generally has a negative sense, for a simple and unfortunate reason. People who opposed the movement, quite reasonably and fairly, started calling the movement by the term it used for itself… and then the people in the movement decided to run away from their own term. “Woke” easily could have remained a neutral term used by supporters and opponents alike – if the people who’d coined the term for themselves had been willing to stick with it. But because, like Afua Hirsch, they cannot seem to bear the idea of their opponents even referring to their existence, they stopped using the term themselves the moment their opponents used it, allowing themselves to be defined by the opponents.

That sure seems to me like a dumb strategic move. They would have done a lot better to own their own term “woke” to define their movement, and do the work of actually defending the movement under that term they had coined themselves, once it was subjected to scrutiny. Running away from the term easily gives an outsider the impression that the movement is so intellectually bankrupt that it cannot defend itself. (Much like the 1619 Project’s related attempt to erase its own history.) I don’t think that impression is accurate – the movement has its legitimate, thoughtful, serious defenders – but those defenders would have a more powerful voice if the movement they were defending had been willing to let itself keep its name.

But for whatever reason, they have chosen to refuse that name and any others, which leaves the field open for the movement to be defined by their opponents. “Woke” therefore remains by far the most common term in use for the movement despite having acquired a negative connotation. So I personally have no problem with using the term “woke” and don’t object when anyone uses it; if the movement really thought that this term they coined was beyond repair, they could have coined something else to replace it. The problem with that is that it would have required doing what Afua Hirsch refused to do and have the guts to admit that the movement, and the radical changes it demanded, actually existed.

Having said all that, it is not my intention to engage in one-sided anti-woke polemic. There are significant things I agree with the movement on, and one thing in particular from which I have enormously benefitted and am grateful for. We are now at the point where using the term “woke” is likely to lead one to be ignored (or worse) by those whom one is describing, and that goes against my intention to engage in dialogue. And yes, there are conservatives who muddy those waters by using “woke” as an all-purpose pejorative for anything they don’t like, including ideas like climate action that have nothing to do with the movement’s commonalities of a privileged/marginalized binary or linguistic change.

So, I’d like to be generous and use a more flattering term that is used in some form by the movement itself. (Other than “DEI”, which the movement does use, but as noted above is too narrow.) The movement typically uses the term social justice to define its goal, so I think deBoer is also right to say “the social-justice movement” or “the Social Justice movement” is a good name for it. I think it’s helpful to capitalize the name, in order to identify it as a historically specific movement (like the capitalized Black Lives Matter movement which is a part of it). But capitals or no, my hope is that by selecting a name that the movement has not (yet?) run away from, we will at least and be able to pursue the urgent and all-too-difficult task of honestly and thoughtfully talking about it. So “the Social Justice movement” is what I will be going with as of now. (Unless it should happen – as I hope it does – that the movement reclaims its own term “woke” and actually starts to own it. In that case, I’d happily go back to “woke”.)