What Is Wokism?

I was talking to a prominent philosopher at a conference, and he told me that he thought the idea of “wokism” was bullshit, and he didn’t even know what this supposed phenomenon of “wokism” was. A little later in the conversation, he suggested that wokism was no different from support for civil rights, which goes back at least to the 1960’s, and that there is nothing in particular that’s new here.

For that philosopher, and others like him, let’s try to explain wokism.

1. Examples

When you want to explain something, always start with examples. Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, AOC: these are examples of “woke” people. Woke people believe things like this:

1. Many forms of unjust group prejudice are (still) rampant in Western society, including: racism (esp. against blacks and Latinos), sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and Islamophobia. (Woke people are particularly concerned about the forms of prejudice just listed, much less so about other forms, e.g., prejudice in favor of good-looking people, or people who went to prestigious schools.)

2. This one of the most important problems, if not the most important problem in the world.

3. Biology plays essentially no role in explaining group differences in behavior, psychology, or cognition, particularly for the groups referred to in point (1).

4. Group differences in social outcomes (crime rates, socioeconomic status, drug use, educational attainment, etc.) are mainly or entirely due to the prejudice mentioned in (1).

5. Schools and businesses should practice affirmative action, e.g., give racial and gender preferences to ensure greater “diversity”.

6. People should also receive DEI trainings to teach them the truth of this ideology and how they can help combat prejudice.

7. All transwomen are literally women, just as much as cis women; similarly, all transmen are men. Anyone is whatever gender they say they are. Any other view is harmful bigotry.

8. Everybody should announce their pronouns prominently, e.g., in their email signatures, in their online bios.

9. The expression of offensive (to people with this ideology) social or political views is harmful, comparable to violence, and perhaps even itself a kind of violence.

10. Cancel culture: Because of this, offensive social or political views should be silenced, and the people with such views should be harmed in their personal lives, e.g., by losing their jobs.

11. It is important to be wary of committing “microaggressions”, such as asking people with an accent where they are from, or claiming that you don’t see race.

Anyone familiar with contemporary society will have run into those views, will have noticed that they tend to cluster together, and will have noticed how influential they are in the culture. There was a surge in influence of that cluster of views in the last decade or so. If you haven’t noticed these things, then I would invite you to move out of the cave that you’ve apparently been living in for the last 10-15 years, and back into society.

2. Is “Wokism” a Bad Term?

Some people, I guess, think that the word “woke” is some kind of slur, or at least negative evaluative term, against people with progressive political views—and therefore, perhaps, we should avoid using the term so as not to hurt woke people’s feelings.

This is incorrect. “Woke” is a descriptive term for a cluster of political views, just as “liberal”, “conservative”, and “libertarian” are. There is no other word for that cluster (“progressive” is close but broader). Obviously, people with different political views will have different feelings about this cluster. Conservatives and moderates are going to have negative emotional reactions to wokism due to the sheer insanity and malevolence of the cluster of views in question, so whenever they talk about wokism, they will be attacking it. That does not mean that the word is a slur. It doesn’t sound negative because the word is negative. It sounds negative because normal people are against those views. Any word that referred to this destructive ideology would also sound negative in the mouths of people with reasonable political views.

There’s no reason, when talking about a horrible ideology, to try to look for positive-sounding words for it, nor to avoid the negative emotional reactions that normies would have when you accurately identify the ideology. Compare: the word “fascism” is an accurate description of the ideology of people like Mussolini and Hitler. It sounds bad because the thing that it refers to is something that almost everyone is against. There is no reason, if someone is advocating fascism, to try to come up with some other word for what they’re supporting that sounds nicer than “fascism”. (Leftists can appreciate this point.)

3. The Equality Thesis

I talked with anti-woke philosopher Nathan Cofnas about this. He proposed that the core of wokism is “the Equality Thesis”, which holds something like: all interesting social, cognitive, psychological, and behavioral differences between groups (I assume we mean here races, sexes, and a few other kinds of groups that social scientists study, not “groups” like “smart people” or “professors”) are due to environment, not biology. Wokists then look at our current society, see large differences in social outcomes (wealth, incarceration, drug use, crime, etc.) by social group, and conclude that our society has huge injustices because it is systematically disadvantaging certain groups. In particular, they think it must be prejudice that is holding back certain groups, since they can’t think of any other acceptable explanation.

Cofnas goes on to say that, to challenge wokism, we have to reject the Equality Thesis in favor of hereditarianism, the view that biology and genetics make a significant difference to social outcomes.

One problem with Cofnas’ account is that it doesn’t cover trans ideology (e.g., the idea that anyone who says they are a woman is a woman), which seems like a paradigmatic example of wokism. I think he just bites the bullet on that.

Another problem is that it mis-classifies a Sowell-style conservative view. Some conservatives, such as Thomas Sowell, blame environmental factors for differences in group success, but they don’t blame prejudice. E.g., some people argue that American blacks have developed an oppositional culture in which success in school is devalued and the norms of the wider society are flouted. Some also argue that progressive government policies (esp. the welfare state) have made blacks worse off.

Cofnas thinks these views are untenable, but that’s not the point here. The point is that these views are compatible with the Equality Thesis, yet they are definitely not woke views and not really even compatible with wokism. So wokism isn’t just about the Equality Thesis.

4. Reverse Bigotry

I have been known to describe the essence of wokism as “reverse bigotry”. In the past, various forms of bigotry were common: prejudice against blacks, against women, against gays, against transgender people, and more. Wokism proposes, rather than to eliminate bigotry, to reverse the direction of traditional bigotry: replace anti-black racism with anti-white (or pro-black) racism; replace anti-female sexism with anti-male sexism; etc.

Now you might think this an unfair description of the views listed in section 1. For instance, just because someone thinks that America is systemically racist against blacks, doesn’t mean that they support racism against whites, does it?

Two things to note:

One, the people who say that are basically blaming white people for the problems suffered by blacks as a group. They are saying that racism (which is, on their view, one of the greatest evils of the world) on the part of white people is responsible for black disadvantage. Sometimes they say the racism is “systemic”, which means that there need not be any actual racists, but many of them say that the racism is ongoing in the hearts of white people today. Anyway, even the systemic racism was caused by evil white people in the past.

For a thought experiment, ask yourself what you would think about a person who explained most of the evils of the modern world as the product of wrongful behavior or evil character on the part of the Jews, either now or in the past. There are actually people like this. We call them “anti-Semites”, and they are obviously racists. If you replace “Jews” with “whites”, then you just have a different form of racism.

Two, these same people almost always support racial preferences in hiring and college admissions, as a response to the alleged racism. These racial preferences, in my view, constitute reverse discrimination. (Woke people would dispute that characterization, but you can probably understand why I would think that, and there’s no point debating it now.)

Objection 1

Cofnas doesn’t like my account. He says that we should try to describe wokeness in terms that wokists would accept. I.e., when they hear the description of wokism, they would say, “Yes, I believe in that.” Clearly, they wouldn’t accept the “reverse bigotry” characterization of their views.

In my defense, it depends on what your purpose is. If you’re trying to have a debate with wokists about whether wokism is correct, then Cofnas is right: you need to come up with a thesis, or set of theses, that the wokesters would accept as their view.

On the other hand, if you’re just trying, as a theorist, to understand what is happening to our society, and you’re analyzing the social trend of wokism, then I think it’s fine to have a characterization of the phenomenon that the wokists wouldn’t accept. I think the core of what is happening is in fact this kind of pendulum swing, where, e.g., a person who can’t conceive of giving up collectivism embraces anti-white racism as a reaction to anti-black racism. The fact that the people who are doing this would not admit that that is what they are doing doesn’t mean that they aren’t doing that.

(Compare: Suppose I’m trying to understand why serial killers commit their crimes. I don’t have to come up with an explanation that the serial killers themselves would agree with. Likely they would come up with some bullshit, or simply not know why they do what they do. Of course, wokists are less bad than serial killers, but that is irrelevant; wokists are also people who may seek to portray themselves in a more positive light than what is accurate.)

Objection 2

You might object, however, that my “reverse bigotry” account fails to capture some of the examples of wokism listed earlier, such as the support for cancel culture or pronoun announcements. Indeed, that is true; “reverse bigotry” identifies a major thread in wokism, but not the whole of it.

5. Cluster Concepts

Most of our concepts are undefinable, or nearly undefinable. (This is a recurring theme with me; see

.)

The way that we form a concept is not normally that we come up with a definition of something, or just decide to combine together some other concepts in a particular way. The way that we form a concept is that we run into recurring patterns in the world. Certain characteristics tend to go together, while others don’t. We group together things that have common clusters of characteristics, without defining exactly how many of the characteristics a thing must have to belong in the group, or even exactly what all the characteristics are—we just group the things that seem similar into a category.

So it is with wokism: you notice a lot of people advocating things like items (1)-(11) in section 1. People who advocate some of those views are a lot more likely to advocate others of those views. (The views are positively correlated.) A surprising number of people hold all or nearly all of the views. A lot of people also reject all or nearly all of them. That’s why it makes sense to have a word for people who subscribe to something like that cluster of views. That word is “woke”.