By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, February 15, 2021
Emily Hauser suggests that:
"Woke," like
"PC" before it, means "being decent to people who are not
you" and it is genuinely remarkable how many people are willing to go on
record as being firmly opposed to such an endeavor.
Perhaps it would help Hauser to understand why so “many
people are willing to go on record as being firmly opposed to such an endeavor”
if it were noted that her description here is inaccurate — and to the point at
which it is hard to believe that she can really mean it. To look at what is
happening in the United States at present and say, “Woke just means being
decent to people who are not like you” is the equivalent of saying, “but Antifa
just means anti-fascist” or, “Communism just means making sure people have
enough to eat.” They don’t mean that, and only a useful idiot would propose
otherwise.
In practice, “wokeness” involves a lot of extremely
destructive habits that deserve widespread resistance. It involves the hunting
down of anyone who disagrees with axioms that a handful of self-appointed
arbiters decided were inviolable just yesterday; it involves the on-the-fly
invention of malleable standards that are, by design, unequally applied; it
involves the rank infantilization of everyone who is not both white and male;
it involves the picking and choosing of who counts as “real” representatives of
the very groups its adherents believe they are helping — based, of course, on
their ideological leanings; and, eventually, it demands the wholesale destruction
of classical liberal ideas within our institutions. If “wokeness” really did
mean “being decent to people who are not like you,” the vast majority of the
people who have recently been victimized by it would have been left alone in
the first instance, and there would be no meaningful opposition to the creed
that put the target on their backs.
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