So-called Anti-Woke, Anti-DEI policy catch-all

[Paine]

I think the criticism of some aspects of modern leftist activism being too race-focused is fair. But the attempt to retroactively cast historical leftism as inherently superior to this current strain of leftist thought - as having always "uplifted marginalized people through a universalist message" - seems historically questionable to me.

Okay - take out the always. Should’ve said something like: left movements win in the United States via universalist messaging.

Universalist left-wing messaging is superior to identity focused left-wing messaging. The latter has never won an election.

 

[superrific]

Okay - take out the always. Should’ve said something like: left movements win in the United States via universalist messaging.

Universalist left-wing messaging is superior to identity focused left-wing messaging. The latter has never won an election.

Neither has the former, at least not in a very long time.

Liberals win presidential elections when the electorate is reminded that competence in governing is important, usually because Republicans break everything. Then for some reason people forget the lesson, start voting for chaos monkeys, and only after so much damage is done do they remember, oh yeah, it's good to have adults running the country.

I thought in 2016 that Trump couldn't win because 2008 wasn't that far behind us, and that people would remember the horrific fallout from the mismanagement of the economy by idiots. Apparently not. Just as they seem to have forgotten in 2024 all the idiocy from Trump I.

 

[rodoheel]

Okay - take out the always. Should’ve said something like: left movements win in the United States via universalist messaging.

Universalist left-wing messaging is superior to identity focused left-wing messaging. The latter has never won an election.

What do you see as the distinction between universalist versus identify-focused messaging? Obviously the Civil Rights movement was very focused on equality for a specific minority group. So was the gay rights movement. Can you isolate something that was more universalist about, say, the gay rights movement when compared to the more modern trans rights movement?

 

[superrific]

What do you see as the distinction between universalist versus identify-focused messaging? Obviously the Civil Rights movement was very focused on equality for a specific minority group. So was the gay rights movement. Can you isolate something that was more universalist about, say, the gay rights movement when compared to the more modern trans rights movement?

How many elections did the Civil Rights movement or the gay rights movement win? Arguably anti-gay politics saved Bush's bacon in 2004, and he got off the hook for what had obviously become a debacle even then by running against gay people marrying.

For whatever reason, the left doesn't win elections in this country. In my view, it's because the divide and conquer strategy is so effective because it has such great raw material.

 

[Paine]

What do you see as the distinction between universalist versus identify-focused messaging? Obviously the Civil Rights movement was very focused on equality for a specific minority group. So was the gay rights movement. Can you isolate something that was more universalist about, say, the gay rights movement when compared to the more modern trans rights movement?

Though the civil rights movement was focused on advancing equality for Black people, they did so through an inclusive message that sought to uplift all marginalized groups, including poor white people. The March on Washington was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for a reason.

Civil rights organizers knew the way to tackle systemic racial inequality in this country was through advancing economic justice for everyone. This is how to build a broad enough coalition to pass meaningful change as they did. They understood that economic domination girded racial domination.

The modern “woke” movement, on the other hand, seeks to address racial disparities at the individual level rather than the societal level. They say: If we can just get enough white people to acknowledge their “white fragility”, then that will advance racial equality. This sort of individual moralizing does not work, and civil rights leaders like Bayard Rustin stood in direct opposition to this sort of outlook.

Wokeism has done very little to dismantle racial inequities in this country, and it seems to have meaningfully contributed to putting Trump back in the WH. As a political movement, it has failed to produce its desired outcome.

All of super’s points about solidarity in this country are correct. My historical area of study is antebellum American history, so I’m quite aware of this. Very few serious leftists think that the work of creating cross-race solidarity is easy anywhere, let alone in this country.

But, what do you think is more effective in building a cross-race working class coalition in this country: telling white people that they are innately racist because they’re white or convincing poor and working white people that their economic advancement is innately linked to that of poor and working minorities?

 

[Callatoroy]

Farce’s response is exactly why broaching this topic on the board is useless.

Check your inbox

 

[ZenMode]

Woke = social justice politics with class taken out.

Social justice has been the domain of the left for its entire existence. This has always involved uplifting marginalized people through a universalist message. See: the Civil Rights Movement. However, this message has always also had a core class component.

Wokeness flips this traditional left message on its head by essentializing race. Whereas traditional leftist messaging emphasizes understanding and commonality, wokeness asserts that people of different races can never understand one another’s experiences.

Large corporations and universities were more than willing to accept this new paradigm. After all, putting a few people of color in high positions is a good way to deflect from any accusations that these institutions may face. Moreover, wokeness does not present a challenge to the entrenched class interests of elites.

The very real issues with this wokeness have been weaponized by the right as an all-out attack on the idea of diversity itself. They will label anything that disagrees with their political program “woke.” But that doesn’t mean that leftists and liberals should ignore the problem.

A very succinct description.

IMO, wokeness extends beyond race into gender, sex, nationality, sexual preference, religion etc and if you do the math one way, one group is the bigger victim and another group if you do that math a different way. So, a trans, black Muslim would be a bigger victim than a trans white man.

 

[rodoheel]

Though the civil rights movement was focused on advancing equality for Black people, they did so through an inclusive message that sought to uplift all marginalized groups, including poor white people. The March on Washington was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for a reason.

Civil rights organizers knew the way to tackle systemic racial inequality in this country was through advancing economic justice for everyone. This is how to build a broad enough coalition to pass meaningful change as they did. They understood that economic domination girded racial domination.

The modern “woke” movement, on the other hand, seeks to address racial disparities at the individual level rather than the societal level. They say: If we can just get enough white people to acknowledge their “white fragility”, then that will advance racial equality. This sort of individual moralizing does not work, and civil rights leaders like Bayard Rustin stood in direct opposition to this sort of outlook.

Wokeism has done very little to dismantle racial inequities in this country, and it seems to have meaningfully contributed to putting Trump back in the WH. As a political movement, it has failed to produce its desired outcome.

All of super’s points about solidarity in this country are correct. My historical area of study is antebellum American history, so I’m quite aware of this. Very few serious leftists think that the work of creating cross-race solidarity is easy anywhere, let alone in this country.

But, what do you think is more effective in building a cross-race working class coalition in this country: telling white people that they are innately racist because they’re white or convincing poor and working white people that their economic advancement is innately linked to that of poor and working minorities?

I understand the distinction you're making, but it seems like an imperfect fit when applied historically. Was the Civil Rights movement actually largely successful in convincing poor whites that they would be uplifted by civil rights for blacks? Poor whites in the South were certainly harsh opponents of equality for blacks, and even after the Civil Rights Act was passed that simmering racial resentment was weaponized by Republican strategists as part of the Southern Strategy. Racial resentment among lower-class whites has remained a key part of Republican strategy for decades; it hasn't just occurred naturally and recently as a backlash to "woke" moralizing. And I think you'd be hard pressed to find many lower-class whites who agree that the Civil Rights Act "advanced economic justice for everyone." It was really as much about social advancement as economic advancement, and it was pretty clear that it was advancement for people who had been socially and economically marginalized based on the color of their skin.

 

[Callatoroy]

"The very real issues with this wokeness have been weaponized by the right as an all-out attack on the idea of diversity itself. They will label anything that disagrees with their political program “woke.” But that doesn’t mean that leftists and liberals should ignore the problem."

Why do you think that is? Wokeness has an element of "cancel" to it. So isn't the right's characterization just a defensive reaction?

 

[rodoheel]

A very succinct description.

IMO, wokeness extends beyond race into gender, sex, nationality, sexual preference, religion etc and if you undo the math one way, one group is the bigger victim and another group if you do that math a different way. So, a trans, black Muslim would be a bigger victim than a trans white man.

This is a very limited understanding of modern DEI practices that has little basis in reality. I personally agree that trying to frame DEI as "who has the most victim points based on their background" can be unproductive, but that is a small proportion of the things that conservatives lump in with "DEI." it's the epitome of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. At a fundamental level, most DEI programming is simply about trying to understand and empathize with people who come from different backgrounds, and to understand how and why things that seem innocuous to many people can be hurtful and marginalizing to others. I find it hard to believe that most people would really disagree that trying to understand each other better and treat everyone fairly are worthy goals. The disagreement is just about methods and message, but many of the people who criticize DEI and ?woke" have a very warped understanding of how varied those methods and messages really are.

 

[finesse]

Everybody knows that the real victims are white evangelical Christian males.

 

[superrific]

Though the civil rights movement was focused on advancing equality for Black people, they did so through an inclusive message that sought to uplift all marginalized groups, including poor white people. The March on Washington was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom for a reason.

Civil rights organizers knew the way to tackle systemic racial inequality in this country was through advancing economic justice for everyone. This is how to build a broad enough coalition to pass meaningful change as they did. They understood that economic domination girded racial domination.

The modern “woke” movement, on the other hand, seeks to address racial disparities at the individual level rather than the societal level. They say: If we can just get enough white people to acknowledge their “white fragility”, then that will advance racial equality. This sort of individual moralizing does not work, and civil rights leaders like Bayard Rustin stood in direct opposition to this sort of outlook.

Wokeism has done very little to dismantle racial inequities in this country, and it seems to have meaningfully contributed to putting Trump back in the WH. As a political movement, it has failed to produce its desired outcome.

All of super’s points about solidarity in this country are correct. My historical area of study is antebellum American history, so I’m quite aware of this. Very few serious leftists think that the work of creating cross-race solidarity is easy anywhere, let alone in this country.

1. I have been railing against "white privilege" for a long time, probably before you ever saw this board. It's idiotic messaging. It's not so much that it's wrong, per se, as much as it adds nothing but vituperation. Any claim you want to make on the basis of white privilege, you can make with a framing of black disadvantage. That can be a unifying message. White privilege is anti-solidarity.

2. Your description of the "modern woke movement" is incorrect, badly. Maybe you just didn't phrase it well, but at the heart of wokeness is the idea of systemic racism. It's specifically because the "woke" movement isn't content to address racial disparities at the individual level that it threatens so many people.

I don't know of anyone who thinks "if we just get enough white people to acknowledge their privilege, that will advance racial equality." I would say, rather, that the program of anti-racism has no real strategy. It's not as if they say policy changes aren't required (and hoo boy does Ibram Kendi have a lot of policy changes in mind, most of them quite terrible), which begs the question of why they are talking about white privilege at all. My explanation: it helps get tenure to put a weird framing on a familiar issue.

In any event, I agree that the anti-racist movement specifically eschews universal messaging, and that it suffers for it. And we suffer for it too.

3. On the other hand, I think you're also asking the impossible. How do you address the legacy of racism in a universal message? Affirmative action is quite simply not universalist. If you think it is necessary to right historical wrongs -- as most liberals do, though the formulations vary -- then you're going to be signing onto a non-universalist program. The "win win" fiction is just that. Busing was extremely unpleasant for many white families, many of the affected white families hadn't been white for very long. They had been Irish or Italian. It was very much not a win for them, and ignoring that is folly. What's the alternative? Racial progress isn't zero-sum, but it is redistributive in nature. And that's not something we can avoid.

 

[Paine]

I understand the distinction you're making, but it seems like an imperfect fit when applied historically. Was the Civil Rights movement actually largely successful in convincing poor whites that they would be uplifted by civil rights for blacks? Poor whites in the South were certainly harsh opponents of equality for blacks, and even after the Civil Rights Act was passed that simmering racial resentment was weaponized by Republican strategists as part of the Southern Strategy. Racial resentment among lower-class whites has remained a key part of Republican strategy for decades; it hasn't just occurred naturally and recently as a backlash to "woke" moralizing. And I think you'd be hard pressed to find many lower-class whites who agree that the Civil Rights Act "advanced economic justice for everyone." It was really as much about social advancement as economic advancement, and it was pretty clear that it was advancement for people who had been socially and economically marginalized based on the color of their skin.

Right, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act did not ultimately address the core economic demands of the Civil Rights Movement. There is always going to be some degree of backlash from racists reacting to racial advancement, be it economic or cultural.

The question is: how do we minimize this reaction and create lasting change?

I think the way to minimize reaction is to focus your messaging and platform on the economic bread and butter issues while also creating sympathy in the press via peaceful protests.

It seems to me that Wokeism has not only failed to advance the sociocultural standing of marginalized people, it has actively engendered greater reaction by their lack of a universalist message.

 

[superrific]

It seems to me that Wokeism has not only failed to advance the sociocultural standing of marginalized people, it has actively engendered greater reaction by their lack of a universalist message.

That doesn't seem terribly controversial, especially not now. I'm not sure the lack of a universalist message is the issue as much as stupid messaging. "Let's continue the fight of the Civil Rights movement to help create a better and more thorough form of equality" isn't universalist; it's also not "white people with white privilege, you should analyze all the ways you are privileged and we're not going to tell you what good will come from it."

 

[4thgenheel]

I don't think that has anything to do with being qualified or not. That's a question of fitness. And KBJ is not "one of the most" either. It's not close. Breyer was a law professor at Harvard for 13 years before being appointed to the First Circuit, where he served for another 14 years before being nominated to the Supreme Court. Along the way, he had experience working in Congressional offices and as a special prosecutor for Whitewater. And Breyer's bio was not particularly unusual. Ginsburg was a DC Circuit judge for 13 years, after having been a successful Supreme Court advocate.

KBJ is great. Kagan is great (she hadn't been a judge at all, but had been Dean at Harvard Law). Let's not pretend that they were "qualified" according to traditional criteria, because that's false. Let's use them to point out that traditional "qualifications" are often bullshit that neither predict nor relate to job performance.

semantics. the skeletons should've been disqualifying.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/ketanji-brown-jackson-school-career/

seems pretty highly qualified, moreso than quite a few of her colleagues.

 

[Paine]

1. I have been railing against "white privilege" for a long time, probably before you ever saw this board. It's idiotic messaging. It's not so much that it's wrong, per se, as much as it adds nothing but vituperation. Any claim you want to make on the basis of white privilege, you can make with a framing of black disadvantage. That can be a unifying message. White privilege is anti-solidarity.

2. Your description of the "modern woke movement" is incorrect, badly. Maybe you just didn't phrase it well, but at the heart of wokeness is the idea of systemic racism. It's specifically because the "woke" movement isn't content to address racial disparities at the individual level that it threatens so many people.

I don't know of anyone who thinks "if we just get enough white people to acknowledge their privilege, that will advance racial equality." I would say, rather, that the program of anti-racism has no real strategy. It's not as if they say policy changes aren't required (and hoo boy does Ibram Kendi have a lot of policy changes in mind, most of them quite terrible), which begs the question of why they are talking about white privilege at all. My explanation: it helps get tenure to put a weird framing on a familiar issue.

In any event, I agree that the anti-racist movement specifically eschews universal messaging, and that it suffers for it. And we suffer for it too.

3. On the other hand, I think you're also asking the impossible. How do you address the legacy of racism in a universal message? Affirmative action is quite simply not universalist. If you think it is necessary to right historical wrongs -- as most liberals do, though the formulations vary -- then you're going to be signing onto a non-universalist program. The "win win" fiction is just that. Busing was extremely unpleasant for many white families, many of the affected white families hadn't been white for very long. They had been Irish or Italian. It was very much not a win for them, and ignoring that is folly. What's the alternative? Racial progress isn't zero-sum, but it is redistributive in nature. And that's not something we can avoid.

Your point in number 2 is getting to one of core parts of this discussion. The scholars who birthed what we’re calling Wokeism think about the issues much more deeply than progressives who repost memes about intersectionality and white privilege.

Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kimberlé Crenshaw have all criticized the ways in which their work have metastasized into something that is fundamentally illiberal.

Your point in bullet 3 is something worth thinking about. I think it’s party addressed in my previous response to rodo in terms of political messaging.

 

[superrific]

semantics. the skeletons should've been disqualifying.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2022/ketanji-brown-jackson-school-career/

seems pretty highly qualified, moreso than quite a few of her colleagues.

I never really understand that objection. Semantics refers to the meaning of words. The meaning of words is important! It's how we communicate.

If you were to say to someone, KBJ was much more qualified than Kav, they wouldn't believe you. They shouldn't, because it's not correct under any reasonable definition of the word qualified. And so what you've done with those semantics is make yourself look foolish. You would lose credibility.

If you were to say that Kav was qualified but his baggage made him unsuited for the job, and that it's so frustrating that the GOP sees that type of baggage as a feature, not a bug, and that there were other judges just as qualified without the baggage -- those are all fair points. They have the advantage of having a sound basis in ordinary language. It's indisputable that Kav had baggage.

 

[rodoheel]

Right, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act did not ultimately address the core economic demands of the Civil Rights Movement. There is always going to be some degree of backlash from racists reacting to racial advancement, be it economic or cultural.

The question is: how do we minimize this reaction and create lasting change?

I think the way to minimize reaction is to focus your messaging and platform on the economic bread and butter issues while also creating sympathy in the press via peaceful protests.

It seems to me that Wokeism has not only failed to advance the sociocultural standing of marginalized people, it has actively engendered greater reaction by their lack of a universalist message.

I think this analysis is too simplistic from a historical perspective. I think what this boils down to is "The Civil Rights movement in the 1960s was successful, so they must have done things the right way; the current "woke" movement (which to be clear I detest as a term meant to describe anything broadly and collectively, but will accept for the sake of this framing) is on the decline, so they must have done things the wrong way." When in fact I think there are a lot of factors external to those movements that go a long way to explaining their different results.

For example, the Civil Rights movement benefited greatly from the rulings of the Warren court, which did as much to advance the cause of Civil Rights as any legislation or popular movement did, while the current liberal movement faces headwinds from a much more conservative Supreme Court (at minimum the most conservative court in decades) that is dismantling and obstructing liberal progress that ordinarily could have been achieved legislatively.

Also, the current liberal movement is facing headwinds from the global advance of nativism, nationalism, and authoritarianism, which is surely something that can't be chalked up as a backlash to "wokeism" in the United States. Compare that to the Civil Rights era, when the western world had recently risen up to defeat the menace of fascism, and the far right had been further discredited politically in the US by the excesses and ugliness of McCarthyism. Big difference in the opposition.

And finally, there's the difference in modern media compared to the Civil Rights era, which has made it much more difficult for modern progressives. right-wing media seizes on isolated overreaches and use them to paint the whole progressive movement as extreme. Social media and self-elected bubbles make these narratives really difficult to counter once they take hold. Just look at what some of the right-wingers on this board say about "woke" and "DEI" if you need an example of that.

In sum I think you are simply taking an outcome-determinative approach that focuses too much on results as proof of what strategy works best when in reality these movements are not happening in isolation and there are external factors that are as much or more responsible compared to the difference in tactics and messaging you've harped on. I'm not necessarily disagreeing that the current progressive tactics and messaging are often counterproductive, I just think you're missing the forest for the trees when it comes to analyzing while progressives are currently experiencing setbacks. The Civil Rights era does not, in my view, show a clear example of progressivism that was focused on economic justice (much less that such focus was the chief reason it succeeded).

 

[4thgenheel]

I never really understand that objection. Semantics refers to the meaning of words. The meaning of words is important! It's how we communicate.

If you were to say to someone, KBJ was much more qualified than Kav, they wouldn't believe you. They shouldn't, because it's not correct under any reasonable definition of the word qualified. And so what you've done with those semantics is make yourself look foolish. You would lose credibility.

If you were to say that Kav was qualified but his baggage made him unsuited for the job, and that it's so frustrating that the GOP sees that type of baggage as a feature, not a bug, and that there were other judges just as qualified without the baggage -- those are all fair points. They have the advantage of having a sound basis in ordinary language. It's indisputable that Kav had baggage.

point taken.

but i'll pivot and say that his lack of fitness makes him unqualified.

 

[Paine]

I think this analysis is too simplistic from a historical perspective. I think what this boils down to is "The Civil Rights movement in the 1960s was successful, so they must have done things the right way; the current "woke" movement (which to be clear I detest as a term meant to describe anything broadly and collectively, but will accept for the sake of this framing) is on the decline, so they must have done things the wrong way." When in fact I think there are a lot of factors external to those movements that go a long way to explaining their different results.

For example, the Civil Rights movement benefited greatly from the rulings of the Warren court, which did as much to advance the cause of Civil Rights as any legislation or popular movement did, while the current liberal movement faces headwinds from a much more conservative Supreme Court (at minimum the most conservative court in decades) that is dismantling and obstructing liberal progress that ordinarily could have been achieved legislatively.

Also, the current liberal movement is facing headwinds from the global advance of nativism, nationalism, and authoritarianism, which is surely something that can't be chalked up as a backlash to "wokeism" in the United States. Compare that to the Civil Rights era, when the western world had recently risen up to defeat the menace of fascism, and the far right had been further discredited politically in the US by the excesses and ugliness of McCarthyism. Big difference in the opposition.

And finally, there's the difference in modern media compared to the Civil Rights era, which has made it much more difficult for modern progressives. right-wing media seizes on isolated overreaches and use them to paint the whole progressive movement as extreme. Social media and self-elected bubbles make these narratives really difficult to counter once they take hold. Just look at what some of the right-wingers on this board say about "woke" and "DEI" if you need an example of that.

In sum I think you are simply taking an outcome-determinative approach that focuses too much on results as proof of what strategy works best when in reality these movements are not happening in isolation and there are external factors that are as much or more responsible compared to the difference in tactics and messaging you've harped on. I'm not necessarily disagreeing that the current progressive tactics and messaging are often counterproductive, I just think you're missing the forest for the trees when it comes to analyzing while progressives are currently experiencing setbacks. The Civil Rights era does not, in my view, show a clear example of progressivism that was focused on economic justice (much less that such focus was the chief reason it succeeded).

Most of what you say here is fair. I’m making a distinction between the liberal movement and Wokeism though.

We can’t say that the modern liberal movement is failing because of Wokeism as you point out the litany of factors it has going against it outside of that umbrella. I’m not asserting that none of those things are hindering liberals or leftists. I’m certainly not saying that Wokeism is solely responsible for the left’s failures.

I’m simply saying: the messaging of woke progressive activists and professors is working against liberalism and socialism, so liberals and socialists don’t need to feel bad about ditching this sort of stuff in favor of messaging and platform that has a wider appeal.

The way to fight back against these challenges is with an inclusive message of universal rights.