Michael Bird is the Academic Dean of Ridley College in Melbourne. He is author or editor of over a dozen books. Recently, Bird wrote a piece at his Substack page titled “How I Changed My Mind on Woke.” I can’t read the entire piece because I am not a paid subscriber, but here is the part of it that caught my attention:
But based on what I’ve read and studied more recently, I think wokeness and social justice are truly different things and wokeness is divisive and destructive.
What has led me to this epiphany is not watching Fox News, or listening to right-wing pundits on you.tube. Rather, it’s been reading largely left-wing secular critiques of wokeness. Books like these:
- Paul Embery, Despised: Why the Modern Left Loathes the Working Class.
- Richard Hanania, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics.
- Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.
- Freddie deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.
And this:
In addition, wokeness applies academic categories of deconstruction, post-colonialism, and intersectionality to every aspect of life, from personal pronouns, to the food you eat, to what you wear, to your friendship circle, to the movies you watch. Every aspect of your life is political so there is no separation of your private and public life. Every aspect of your life is up for investigation and judgment. That is why wokeness is not good for a pluralistic and civil society.
So “woke” is not just a misguided or juvenile version of social justice, it is a different species of thought, it is a hierarchy of identities with an illiberal ethos. It pursues a kind of perpetual war of identities with no prospect of a redemptive moment for healing or progress.
If wokeness was merely activism about injustice, it would be fine. If wokeness was just about ending racism, misogyny, and homophobia, that’d be great too. But wokeness, for all its purported concern for inequalities, results in illiberal perspectives on freedom of association and speech, it does nothing to bring people together despite their differences, and it gives political capital to white upper-middle class progressives who are the chief beneficiaries of the revolution they want to set loose.
Read the rest of this excerpt here.
I can’t read the whole piece either but it feels like he has abandoned the earlier meaning and adopted the alternative meaning.
Evangelical is a similar term. But I also think this is similar to what is going on with Ragney/Wilson crowd and empathy.
Changing a terms standard meaning and then identifying the new meaning as justification for why it is bad has become a common strategy.
My local school board is banning books and doing so by redefining the words grooming and pornography.
I think Michael Bird is identifying excesses that are real, but also shifting to used the redefined word instead of using another word as a more traditional term to describe the problem.
Er, Richard Hanania’s *Origins of Woke* is a “left-wing secular critique of wokeness”? I get the left-wing critique of identity politics (and see much to recommend it), but “wokeness” can be much broader than that. Certainly the political (and theological) attacks on “wokeness” lumps together just about every stance that’s even mildly left of center.