Woke's Not Dead

An example of the genre

 

Lately, it seems as if every left-wing media outlet big enough to worry about maintaining its visibility on social media, and every nominally left-wing figure with a book deal, has been opining about the so-called 'death of woke'. The Young Turks have pivoted to full transphobia, and over at Novara Michael Walker has just about fully come out of the closet as a tervert, and Aaron Bastani is hot on his heels as he tries, with pitiably obvious desperation, to impress the big skinhead lads at his gym. It's probably a little unfair of me to use Ash Sarkar in the above screenshot, to be honest, as her new book, Minority Rule, is more about how anti-woke talking points are used as a distraction by the real minority that controls everything (the rich, obviously), but the video's title was too good to resist. 

The inconvenient fact in all this is that the only actual sense in which 'woke is dead' is that all the right-wing paedophiles who complained about it have started saying 'DEI' instead, because their grift requires them to cycle their buzzwords every five years or so. 'Woke' in the sense that the likes of GB News or the Daily Mail decry it never really existed - like a lot of terms that suddenly gain widespread popular usage it was ripped off from black culture and repurposed by white people to mean something else, to the point where it became a free-floating signifier which could be made to stand in for anything that the particular white person using it was getting upset about - which was usually the fact that media was acknowledging the existence of people who weren't exactly like them. 

In its original usage, however, 'woke' simply meant exactly what it sounds like - awake. To be woke was to be aware of what was going on, to no longer be lulled into a false sense of security by the lies of a racist, ableist, queerphobic system of control. And that system hasn't gone away just because the people who profit from it have found a new buzzword to use to complain about the fact that people keep trying to resist those systems. Right and wrong don't switch places just because a slightly different flavour of senile white man sits pissing himself in the Oval Office. La lutta continua - the struggle today is the same one it was yesterday and the same one it probably will be tomorrow, and anyone with even the slightest amount of genuine intellectual seriousness knows that. 

Of course, our midcult media are entirely lacking in intellectual seriousness, which is why we see spectacles like that soi-disant 'serious' journal, The Atlantic using the 'death of woke' as an excuse to hire a nonentity called Thomas Chatterton Williams because he is a black man who has made a tidy career out of being willing to say 'anti-woke' things, and can thus be relied on to launder their racism. I came across some of Mr Williams' self-important sermonising on Bluesky yesterday evening and was entirely unsurprised to learn where he had found employment - unsurprised because he seems, in his Chomskyan understanding of why he has been hired and what he is permitted to say, to be a quintessential example of the 'omniscient gentlemen' whose number Maureen Tkacic had back in 2012 in her piece for The Baffler which remains the only thing you will ever need to read about Mr Williams' new employers. 

I understand that Mr Williams divides his time between the US and France, and that prior to his recent putting about of himself on social media he was most well-known for having someone ejected from his chateau for being beastly about Bari Weiss. This provoked in me a strong desire to watch, once again, the documentary Meeting The Man: James Baldwin in Paris, a great example of an engaged intellectual refusing to play along with a documentary director who wants to draw a neat and tidy dividing line between his writing and his activism; refusing, indeed, to do what Mr Williams and those I talked about at the beginning of this piece have chosen to do, which is to allow themselves to be turned into products which are to the liking of the ruling powers. What makes Meeting the Man such an instructive film, especially in times like our own, is the way Baldwin resists. The film itself is currently only available on MUBI, but you can get a feeling of what he has to say in this clip: 

The great thing about seeing someone else resist is that it reminds you that you can, too. You don't have to pander to bigots because you're afraid of losing views or book deals. You can be better than that. Indeed, as Baldwin observes, you have to be.