The humiliation of an anti-woke warrior
Woke (chiefly US slang): aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice) - Merriam-Webster
Republicans use “woke” as an insult. However, caring about people and the harm inflicted on them by tradition, culture, and the law is an admirable quality. So conservatives work hard to trash ”woke” as something insidious and dangerous — until it becomes MAGA shorthand for an existential threat to the American way of life — or some such hyperbole.
That works well for the base. They think in sound bites, not paragraphs. To them, “woke” — like “critical race theory” (CRT) — is a bad thing, even if they are not sure what it is. Even prominent anti-woke warriors are clueless.
When Briahna Joy Gray of The Hill’s “Rising” web series interviewed conservative gadfly, Bethany Mandel, she wanted her guest to be clear on her terms. She asked Mandel,
"Would you mind defining woke? It has come up a couple of times and I want to make sure we are all on the same page."
It should have been an easy question for Mandel as “wokeness” obsesses her. It did not go well. Mandel sputtered into a ditch.
“So … I mean … woke is … sort of the idea that … um … I … this is going to be one of those moments that goes viral … I mean, woke is something that is very hard to define and we have spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression … um … (shakes her head) … sorry, it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.”
Given time she was able to tweet out an answer later:
She excused her previous incoherence by saying she had had a “brain fart”, she is only human, and she was off her game because Gray had been “demeaning parenting in general in colorful and nasty terms.”
In most circumstances, I would empathize. Who amongst us has not come up short? However, “woke” was the topic of discussion in a planned interview — it was hardly a ‘gotcha question’ — and I assume that Mandel knew that Gray was Bernie Sanders's 2020 campaign national press secretary. Also, as she said, she had written a chapter-long definition.
In her panic, Mandel said it was something she could not define in a 15-second sound bite. Yet in her tweet (which read aloud takes 18 seconds) she did. And if “woke” is undefinable in 15 seconds, she should have said that upfront. She did not. So her rationale for dithering is just desperate, post hoc justification.
Bearing that in mind, let us have a look at her definition. It is an example of the straw man argument. She has created her own meaning and then knocked it down. It would be the same as saying that liberals eat babies. Eating babies is bad. Therefore liberals are bad. Logically it is valid. But it is a syllogism based on an asserted premise with no evidence that the premise is true.
The idea of “woke” arose among Black Americans in the 1930s. In brief, it was a demand by Black nationalist leaders for Blacks to stop ignoring racial oppression and undergo a spiritual awakening, much as Jesus had physically woken Lazarus from the dead.
Social and sports historian Bijan C. Bayne outlines the philosophy’s history in a Washington Post opinion piece, “How ‘woke’ became the least woke word in U.S. English.” (If you are on the wrong side of a paywall, Aja Romano covers similar ground in a Vox essay, “A history of “wokeness.” )
The word “woke” was used in a verbal coda the Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, added to his 1938 song, “The Scottsboro Boys.” A piece that describes the 1931 saga of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who white residents accused of raping two white women.
“So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
The term has become mainstream in the last decade. Whites have expanded it to refer to all social injustices. Conservatives, on the other hand, have demoted it to a cheap (usually undefined) slur.
Mandel calls woke a “radical belief system.” I do not know what a “belief system” is or how it differs from “belief.” I suspect she deliberately uses the word “system” for the same reason anti-LGBTQ zealots talk about a gay “agenda”. They are emotive words, evoking a fifth column of domestic temple-razers.
“Radical” is another inflammatory word designed to rile the reader without requiring them to think.
When she says that these radicals believe our institutions are built around discrimination, she is misrepresenting what most people, who value fairness, believe. While some may think (and they may be right, for all I know) that “our institutions” were designed to be racist, most believe our institutions are not inherently discriminatory — only that some zealots use them to institutionalize discrimination. Get rid of the bigots and the institutions will be fine.
Exhibit #1 is the criminal justice system. Studies have repeatedly shown the law to be biased against Blacks and the poor — in interactions with cops, the likelihood of prosecution, and sentencing. Add to that the banking industry. The hiring practices of corporate America. And the pay differential by group inherent in the private sector.
When Mandel writes, “and claiming that all disparity is a result of that discrimination,” she admits there is disparity. Her admission raises the question if the difference in outcome is not institutional, where does it come from? Does it even make a difference where it arises?
As bad as Mandel has been so far, she gets worse.
She adds, “It [wokeness] seeks a radical redefinition of society in which equality of group result is the endpoint.” I suspect that most people Mandel excoriates for being “woke” are not radically redefining anything. They only want fairness.
Further, good people are not aiming to ensure that “equality of group result is an endpoint” — a clumsy way of saying “communism” — they merely want equality of opportunity.
To stick the landing, Mandel finishes with “enforced by an angry mob.” The allusion to the stereotype of the angry Black man — also trotted out to diminish the millions who supported BLM peacefully — is yet more incendiary language designed to appeal to the limbic cortex (aka lizard brain) of the Fox News viewer.
It is a tactic used frequently by the rabble-rousers on the right. Why not? It works. MAGAs do not need to know why they are frightened. They just need to be scared (it must release endorphins). Mandel, and many cynics like her, realize this is a good way to make money and get on TV. Even if sometimes those TV appearances do not go as they had hoped. If nothing else, her name awareness has gone up.