Woke: ‘White, Wrong’

By James Lileks

Thursday, September 16, 2021

 

I was driving home to Fargo for a funeral. I take the old highway, because it goes through small towns. You see what’s closed, what they’ve built since last you visited. How the main street has flower baskets hanging from the streetlights. The town sign still has a notice that says the Elks meet on Tuesday. 

 

Stopped in Verndale, Minn., to stretch my legs in the city park. There’s a World War I memorial, a decommissioned train caboose. A playground for the tots. The flagpole is dedicated to a local man who served in World War II. The flag was at half mast for the servicemen who’d just died in the Afghan retreat. Sometimes there’s an Amish buggy parked in the tool-store lot; every few hours, a freight train barrels through, dragging a mile of Chinese goods on their last leg. On a sunny fall day you can sit in the park all alone and still get a sense of the place, the people, the history, the culture that courses along these capillary roads. 

 

If you go there, that is. If you’re looking down from 30,000 feet, or from the safe remove of a city, you tweet about how empty and depraved it is. On Twitter the other day, Bloomberg.com columnist Noah Smith, for example, turned his seasoned intellect to rural America. Spot the moment when you eye-rolled so hard your retinas picked up the brief interstitial flashes of the neurons in the recesses of your skull:

 

As a country, we needed to give rural White Americans some sort of identity they could be proud of other than Confederacy-style white supremacy. We failed to give them one. 

 

Leave aside for a moment the idea that rural white American culture is Dixie-lovin’ pale-boy-über-alles and consider the magisterial regret: We failed to give them the proper identity. Who, exactly, might have extended a kingly arm and granted with noblesse oblige an identity for rural white America? The next tweet explains:

 

Of course the blame for this lies with Republicans who stirred up racial resentment for votes, etc. etc. We all know that story. But what did we liberal elites do to push back on this? Nothing. We ditched the rednecks and fled to hippie college towns and cities on the coast. 

 

“We liberal elites” ran away and let them stew in their rancid juices, instead of staying home and starting an “ideals on wheels” program that would bring Howard Zinn books to elderly shut-ins. 

 

Why did they run? Bullies!

 

Getting picked on by rednecks as a kid sucked. So what did liberal Gen Xers and Millennials do? We moved out.

 

You can imagine how that went. The smart kid is leaving the small-town library and runs into some toughs in overalls, chewing on stalks of wheat. The leader steps forward, grinning, and addresses his confederates: 

 

“Lookit him with his glasses and shoes and all. Whatcha readin’, nerd? A Theory of Justice. Well, boys, looks like we got ourselves a dee-voh-tee of Mr. John Rawls here. You like it when a just society maximizes its effort t’ extend its liberties to all, doncha? Betchoo subscribe to his notion of the original position, too.” (Spits.) “We got an original position for you, dork, and I ain’t sure you gonna like it.”

 

(Banjo music plays from tree limb above.)

 

“So mebbe you’d best toddle off to some big town where they take kindly to that newfangled thinking and leave us Burke-fearin’ folk in peace. Gowan, now, git.”

 

We continue with the tweets:

 

We didn’t stay and work to build a real nation out of the people who gave us a hard time. We got college degrees that allowed us to escape to better places. 

 

At least it’s nice to hear someone admit that running off to college to get a degree is not, in itself, the accomplishment some think. 

 

What’s changed things? Why, the apps on which he spends all his time:

 

Now social media has changed the game. We can’t spread out any longer. We’re all in one room together. Mobility, in the substantive sense, has vanished. Meaning we have to become a real, unified nation once again. 

 

He mistakes a lot of people yelling at one another on Twitter for the entire nation crammed into a slaughterhouse pen, bellowing in anger and fear. The good news? A new narrative will emerge. And it’s racial essentialism!

 

Like it or not, the ideology that’s going to re-unify America will be based on the thing we call “wokeness”. A pushback now underway will limit it, but overall it will become the basis of the new consensus for how we define our sense of nationhood. 

 

Wokeness will provide a new national narrative. The means of salvation will be the products of a technocratic enclave, built by the savvy members of the rural diaspora. Children in rural white America will read the holy texts of Kendi (PBUH) on the Internet and set Dad straight at the dinner table. The scales will drop from their elders’ eyes, clanging like manhole covers, and they’ll roll up their sleeves and craft a new identity. The Noah Smiths will gaze upon it and say that it is good, and they will on the seventh day rest.

 

“Rest” meaning “maybe stay off Twitter until after lunch.” Self-care is very important.