On “Wokeness”
When conservatives talk about Barack Obama, they tend to depict him as a radical socialist who wants to take away your guns and melt them down to build a mosque or something. When liberals talk about Obama, they glorify him as this post-racial figure whose inspirational example stands as a testament to America’s highest ideals. Of course, they’re both wrong because the truth lies somewhere in between — neither savior nor tyrant, Obama is the very definition of a centrist, middlebrow politician.
Liberals and progressives once pinned their hopes on Obama bridging the racial and social divides in this country, but with each passing year it became obvious that he was temperamentally disinclined to rock the boat the way his fiercest critics accused him of doing. Therefore, his critiques of “woke culture” are perfectly in line with a man who makes abstract appeals to “civility” and “compromise” in the face of conflict without ever fully coming to grips with the fact that neither the low whites nor the Quality (to borrow terms from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest work) in this country would never allow him to achieve even this status-quo preserving goal.
So sure, in the abstract Obama is right about “woke culture” — even I, as a proud progressive, think it can be annoying and reductive and over the top at times — but so often complaints about wokeness seem to be a cover for bad actors who want to maintain their privilege to act badly. It’s like when stand-up comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle complain about PC culture because they believe doing so makes them free speech warriors defending the right to do racially/sexually insensitive bits or to misgender people or whatever lazy tropes and ruts worked for them back in the halcyon days of yore when People Knew How to Take a Joke.
People who complain that they “can’t say” certain words or express certain views don’t want to evolve along with the culture at large, but instead want to keep their precious views trapped in amber, untouched by time or criticism. There are just certain people out there who prefer to operate in bad faith and want the excuse to be deliberately hurtful whenever possible because it helps them defend their ideological turf, or because it’s in their social or financial interest, or simply because it pleases them to do so.
Obama is getting praise from both sides of the political aisle for this speech because it appeals to a broad sense we have of ourselves as an equanimous nation. After all, it’s this exact message that helped launch Obama into the national spotlight lo those many years ago. But at the same time, it’s never a good sign when you get people like Ann Coulter and Tomi Lahren agreeing with you. Not because it’s a bad thing to find common cause with conservatives, but because these are the sort of conservatives who profit directly from outrage culture by appealing to the worst instincts of their audience and by — and forgive me for using a term I loathe — triggering those outside their audience. These are exactly the sort of people who hate “call out culture” because they want to exist in a consequence-free space where they can slander and defame the individuals and groups they and their base despise.
Despite what Obama may think, “calling someone out” on social media is a necessary means of holding powerful people to account , and oftentimes it’s the only available means to powerless people who are otherwise unable to access the Quality. It may not be the most efficacious means of enacting lasting, meaningful change, but — to paraphrase a now-disgraced and decidedly “unwoke” former Secretary of Defense — you go to social media war with the tweets you have, not the social change you might want or wish to have at a later time.
