White versus black in a woke world

In our ridiculous world with its changing fashion and hypes, “Woke” has become the word for a new adverse attitude.

Everything seems to have become woke. We speak about a woke class, a woke capitalism, there is even spoken about a church of woke. You can’t imagine how crazier it gets.

In Dutch for example we may not speak any more of a “blank” person (a Caucasian) but has to say a “white person”, though it is not done anymore to speak about a “black person” when talking of a brown-coloured person.

It has taken me some time before I came to understand what people really meant with Woke, because that adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination“, deemed to be used for so what everything.  Inappropriately, that word woke was used by many people in their conversations, even when they talked about cows and calves. It seemed “cool” to use that word.

A Black Lives Matter die-in over rail tracks, protesting alleged police brutality in Saint Paul, Minnesota (September 20, 2015)

Though the phrase stay woke had already emerged in AAVE by the 1930s, in some contexts referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans it only recently after the international social movement, formed in the United States in 2013, Black Lives Matter movement, following the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Pamela Turner and Rekia Boyd, among others. Very quickly the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter founds its way internationally on social media.

Up to 2020 the support for the Black Lives Matter movement had grown so much it had also created a social awareness, something had to change. Black Lives Matter also voiced support for various movements and causes beyond police brutality, including LGBTQ activism, feminism, immigration reform, and economic justice and by doing so a new movement arose, being a “Woke generation”.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines woke as ‘originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’.

Surely being alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice isn’t a bad thing? {‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’}

Suddenly it no longer seemed appropriate to talk about men, women, homosexuals, bisexuals, sexless, and transgender people in a certain way. Asexuality being distinct from abstention from sexual activity and from celibacy, after all the pedo sex scandals there had come an “anti-paedophile activism” encompassing opposition to paedophiles, paedophile advocacy groups, child pornography, and child sexual abuse. But several people presenting too openly their sexual acts, like on Pride parades, all other people to have to accept their actions, otherwise to be labelled not only ‘conservative’ but even “anti-” when it was or is not so.

There have been incidents in which vigilantism intended to be against pedophiles has been mistakenly directed against the wrong person, including:

• A mob confusing a pediatrician with a pedophile, due to the similarities between the words.^[8]
• An incident where a man was misidentified as a pedophile because he was wearing a neck brace similar to the one a sex offender was wearing when pictured in a newspaper.^[9][10] {Wikipedia on Anti-pedophile activism}

In the same vein of misunderstanding and misinterpreting, the whole woke movement has arisen and has grown into something very annoying and discussion limiting something.

In the present time not allowed to say one can see a “community of igloos” or temporary winter homes or hunting-ground dwellings of Canadian and Greenland Inuit (Eskimos) (Illustration from Charles Francis Hall’s Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux, 1865)

In many museums in the world the curator started relabeling the historical objects and artworks, often making it they had to describe the object with several words instead of previously but now not accepted ‘one word’. As such people have become not allowed to use words like “hut” or “cabane” “or “shag” / “Shack”  you even may not say anymore “primitive dwelling” or “shanty” not allowed to say “roughly built, often ramshackle building”, “igloo“, “Eskimo“, etc.. In some museums, the labels by the works have become so full of words most visitors even do not take time any more to read them. (Proof that all that woke thing creates just the opposite and gives people even less insight into the world events and customs of many peoples. )

I do agree we may not speak about “savages” when there are those pictures of Africans who are depicted as “savages” or vicious or merciless, brutal, not domesticated or cultivated, wild people. But I think there is nothing wrong by saying those white people considered the coloured people they found in Africa, to be very wild and uneducated or regarded as primitive.

White people do have to live with the Atlantic slave trade which played an important role in spurring the Industrial Revolution in its early decades and helping to birth a new financial system. We can not ignore the shameful treatment of coloured people from that time regarded as illiterate areas.

Insofar as the trade encouraged the emergence of a new British commercial class that in turn lobbied for modernising reforms through Parliament, it may even have played a paradoxically pivotal role in the birth of modern democracy. We should never deny or downplay the dark side of Western history – nor the strangely double-edged story of Western freedom.

In concealing certain events and in not being allowed to mention them or not being allowed to use certain words, one misses the ball and is more likely not to achieve the intended goal of integration and respect.

Sherelle Jacobs writes

The evil “whiteness” stuff is getting out of hand. Everywhere one looks there are excesses.
Take the decolonised university courses that seek to purge Dead White Men (the intellectual cousin of the Evil White Male) from the curriculum. Or the obsession with toppling statues of figures such as Cecil Rhodes. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

Where she refers to the constituent college of the University of Oxford in Oxford, England, Oriel College that the majority wanted the statue to be removed and that the King Edward Street plaque should be removed. Previously in 2016, Oriel College had decided to keep the statue following a consultation, despite protests from campaigners.  Some of the university’s geography dons published a statement saying it is a “source of shame” for the city that the imperialist Cecil Rhodes was still “honoured” with a statue.

When Sherelle Jacobs attended a colourism workshop at her old university not long ago, mixed race women, including her, were prohibited from speaking on account of their “proximity to whiteness”. There you see but how that whole woke business has twisted the whole system and made many not think and act soberly anymore. Rightly she reamerks

Even worse is the trend towards barring white people from black spaces altogether. Two Canadian theatres have sparked an outcry by limiting performances to an “all black-identifying audience”. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

We should know that taking away historic statues, plaques, memorials or monuments is also going to take away the remembrances to those people and events, making the next generations not even thinking any more about what happened in the past.

Wiping out the past will not correct the things that have gone wrong. By hiding what really happened, one is also clearly not taking any blame but prefers to deliberately conceal what really happened. Which I think is a much more shameful attitude.

In Monroeville, a flyspeck of a town in Alabama, Jacobs recently saw an amateur performance of To Kill A Mockingbird in which local white men in the audience were invited on stage to be part of the jury.

It really worked: residents of this Deep South town, where African-Americans can still remember being forced to sit in a separate part of the cinema, pondering their history and how it made them feel without outside judgment or virtue signalling. Sadly, Monroeville is a rare case. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

she writes and adds

Banner at 2017 Climate March in Washington D.C.

It doesn’t help that some conservatives have reacted to all this with downright denialism. It cannot be right that, in some Deep South schools, pupils are being taught that the American Civil War had nothing to do with slavery. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

We have to be very careful by taking away statues and remembrance plates. There are enough people who would love to see the terms Holocaust denial and AIDS denialism to disappear so that the denial of the facts and the reality of the subject matters would not matter anymore. In the States of America we have a beautiful example of the dangers of the denialism that is going on in this “woke world”.

In 2020, cultural scientists Akane Kanai and Rosalind Gill described “woke capitalism” as the “dramatically intensifying” trend to include historically marginalized groups (currently primarily in terms of race, gender and religion) as mascots in advertisement with a message of empowerment to signal progressive values.

On the one hand, this creates an individualized and depoliticized idea of social justice, reducing it to an increase in self-confidence.

On the other hand, the omnipresent visibility in advertising can also amplify a backlash against the equality of precisely these minorities. These would become mascots not only of the companies using them, but of the unchallenged neoliberal economic system with its socially unjust order itself. For the economically weak, the equality of these minorities would thus become indispensable to the maintenance of this economic system; the minorities would be seen responsible for the losses of this system. {Kanai, A.; Gill, R. (October 28, 2020). “Woke? Affect, neoliberalism, marginalised identities and consumer culture”. New Formations: A Journal of Culture, Theory & Politics. 102 (102): 10–27. doi:10.3898/NewF:102.01.2020. ISSN 0950-2378. S2CID 234623282.}

We must always make sure that everything is kept in perspective and that the institutions will make sure that everything is neatly laid out and will not conceal anything even if it ‘discriminates’ against a certain group. We will always have to strive to expose an open honesty.

In his new book Colonialism, Nigel Biggar points out that the British Empire did some good, establishing peace in warring societies, alleviating rural poverty and building infrastructure. Some routinely use facts such as these flippantly to claim that the Empire definitively did more good than bad. But, as Biggar himself observes, the positives and negatives are incommensurable: “How much racism is worth immunisation against disease?” {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

According to Jacobs it would be far more constructive if conservatives focused on challenging the toxic Evil White Male reading of history. She writes

For one thing, it distracts us from the truth of our past: namely, that it was driven not so much by a cabal of racist megalomaniacs but by inescapable ideas in which we are all still, to this day, complicit. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

Forever, certain groups of people will have to face their past. It does no good, on the contrary, to cover up the past by bringing up all kinds of newer concepts and naming things differently. By honestly stating what those ancestors were doing, future generations will be able to get a fair picture of what was done, which cannot be reversed anyway.

Every generation has flaws and in every demographic one can find people who do not want to face the truth of the times at the time when bad things are happening before their eyes. A great example of this are the young people today who all want the hottest phone but don’t want to think about how several children have been exploited for it.

How different are the hypocrisies of our ancestors from our own? {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

asks Jacobs, who does not see people smashing their smartphones in protest at the Congolese children who have died mining the rare cobalt that is crucial to powering their gadgets.

Fixating on a few Evil White Males is a convenient excuse not to face up to such things. {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

she writes.

And the Evil White Male view of history is feeding Western declinism. Some activists have taken to linking certain values or trends with empire and slavery in order to discredit them. People are, in turn, reluctant to challenge these spurious views for fear of being labelled a sympathiser with the Evil White Male of history – or even worse, compared to them.  {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

Jacobs asks us to

Consider also the post-modernist academics who denounce “objective, rational linear thinking” as Western-centric (as if the idea that words and language are fundamental expressions of an external reality can be simply waved away as a “white cultural trope”).

If societies attitudes’ to their past shape their future, then we should be concerned indeed. Unless the West can shake off some of this racialised self-loathing, its decline seems guaranteed.   {The West is doomed if it blames all its problems on Evil White Males}

It is much too easy to blame racism. With the killing of Tyre Nichols, lots of people shouted “racism”, not seeing that it where five “black” cops that went mad at one of their own folks. Those coloured police officers showed the world how American police is not trained enough and have a superior feeling, wanting to show their power over others, be they white or black persons. Too often we can hear the language of such officers, shouting words which should not be allowed to be said by people of the law. We also should recognise in what happened, how education but also social, institutional, and cultural systems play a significant role in shaping people their behaviour and how their formation and culture may contribute to negative outcomes.

Let us be aware

There are also many people who use ‘woke’ as a pejorative in an attempt to silence those who protest against bigotry. It’s often a word that racists, misogynists and others attempt to hide behind. Ed, Portsmouth {‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’}

So using ‘woke’ as name-calling has become the default for the oafish who hate people daring to challenge their rather one-sided mindset. Unfortunately, ‘woke’ has become a blanket term that is used by those who don’t want to have their views challenged. Matthew, Birmingham {‘Why’s it so wrong to be called woke?’}

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Interesting to read:

1. The actual behaviour of big business continues to confound its stated wishes
2. The Telegraph Frontpage for 2022 November 08
3. The Telegraph for Monday 21 November 2022
4. The Telegraph Frontpage for Friday 2022 November 25
5. Green lending tops fossil fuel for first time
6. Anglo-Saxon era church bringing the church into disrepute
7. New term names at London School of Economics
8. Not to tell people that God loves them
9. Evil “whiteness” stuff is getting out of hand

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