The Woke Scare

I have been trying to find words, or a combination of words, to account for where we are in this country.  I have turned to writers that I love and to history that haunts all with an eye for some fragment or prior event(s) that can help make sense of the nonsense of these current days.  And the archive is full.  Trumpism is America, U.S.A.  That we can be sure of.

Take, for example, the moral panic around wokeism.  As Democrats and Republicans engage in their autopsy of the election, many have decried what they call “identity politics,” the concern for pronouns, or transgender athletes, or DEI, or “open” borders.  They suggest, among other things, that the reason Vice President Harris lost rests with the overreach of Democrats to accommodate the “far left” of the party.  In addition, many of those on the “far left” denounce “identity politics.”  They demand that the party turn its attention to the needs of the working-class.  A generalized category, I suppose, that includes working black and brown people, but I suspect, and, in fact, I am sure, they mean white working people and their anxieties.

I will not deny the excesses of our recent days.  Much of the overreach captured by the derisive term “wokeism” has involved performative gestures around anti-racism and the like.  Leaving, as it is plain to see, much of the racist bramble in place.  Just take a stroll around Black Lives Matter Plaza in the shadow of a White House soon to be occupied by Donald Trump to feel what I am saying.  The idea that Vice President Harris lost because of wokeism is mere hokum.  To my ear, it is a shrill dog whistle: she lost, they say without saying it, because the Party chose a woman of color.  Democrats succumbed to the symbolism of representation and inclusion that they are now so eager to rail against.   

None of this admits that Trumpism and the resignification of “wokeism” as a bad thing (for Ralph Waldo Emerson“to be awake” is the aim not a curse) are rooted in “white identity politics” based in what the historian Carol Anderson called “white fear.”  Of course not: Americans, no matter their political affiliation, love their illusions straight, no chaser. 

But that aside I keep returning to what the Trump forces plan to do about it all.  With the threats and beating of the chest, I am bracing myself for what I am calling “the woke scare.”  Wokeism will be used to justify a broad surveillance apparatus with police enforcement to deport immigrants, punish organized labor, educational institutions, certain non-profit organizations, and activists – to purge governmental agencies of any concern for diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

I am reminded of one of those historical parallels.  The Red Scares between 1917-1920 and 1947-1952 enabled government to mobilize the machinery of the state to terrorize immigrants, organized labor, educators and their institutions, and Black people.  The Palmer Raids disregarded due process. Over 3000 people arrested across 33 cities. And then, of course, the McCarthy era with its House of Un-American Activities Committee and its allegations, along with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and its surveillance and prosecutions, left so many lives in tatters.  Many Americans cowered in the face of it all. Capitulated to the manufactured moral panic that made the country and its people even more monstrous. 

“The woke scare” will do similar work as “the darkness drops again” and “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”  Ironic, though. That wokeness or remaining awake would be the reason for the return of America’s Mr. Hyde. 

I have always thought that the sleeper – that person who refused to be awake – committed the sin of conformity.  They reconciled themselves to the world as it is.  Whether it was to the institution of slavery or the domination of life by big business and billionaires or to the subordination of women or to Trumpism, these are the sleepwalkers who live their lives as if all is right and good in the world. 

But to be a sleepwalker is not the desired state: to conform to the world as it is and to refuse to take responsibility for the life that is yours in such a world amounts to a sin against the Holy Ghost.  Henry David Thoreau’s Walden comes to mind:

Each one is a man…. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you.  And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.  And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception.  I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.

To be “woke” is to see the world for what it is and to fall out of a condition of conformity. 

When a sleeper finds herself in the wrong position and awakens to the ugliness of the doings of men and cries out, Thoreau tells us, it will take “a gang of men…to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is.”    

There is a reason why the Trumpists want us to remain sleepers. There is a reason why so many of them have poisoned the word woke and made it part of the potion that makes us the monsters.  They don’t want us to awaken to our world.  They prefer sleepwalkers.  

No wonder. They are scared that we “may sometime get up again.”

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