Naptime

I am not a fan of "Woke." Mainly because I have no facility with African-American Vernacular English (also known as "Ebonics") and grew tired of being hassled about that when I was in college. So I will admit to a contrarian streak that will happily claim to be sleeping for no other reason than it annoys people who annoy me.

But I've found the rather heated hostility to "Woke" culture on the part of many American conservatives to be more than a little mystifying. Mainly because I have no Earthly idea of what they actually understand "Woke" to mean, and what they have attributed to it that makes it such a threat. It's like watching a person desperately climb a tree to avoid someone's teacup-breed dog. It's pretty clear that they're deathly afraid of the animal, but one wonders what they could possibly see in it that would justify such a reaction.

As near as I can tell, to be "Woke," is to be little more than constantly aware of prejudice, discrimination and whichever of the myriad forms of social inequality that humans are capable of visiting upon one another. Personally, it's never really appealed to me because there is a sense of looking under each and every stone to find yet more injustice. And if a given stone doesn't have any injustice underneath it, then one hasn't looked hard enough. It plays into a sense that, more than the world simply being an unjust place (and I, for my part, expect nothing different from it), everyone who isn't one's ally is an active agent of injustice. And that sort of "if you're not with me, you're against me" logic has never really been attractive to me: I'm perfectly fine with a world in which being neutral in a conflict of mine is not aiding and abetting the forces of injustice.

But maybe that's why there is such a strong "counter-Woke" culture. After all, "if you're not with me, you're against me" logic is pretty common on the American Right, too, and many people see pernicious evil in nothing more sinister than not seeing them in the way they wish to be seen (or, for that matter, see themselves). Most people, it is said, are the heroes of their own stories. Wokeness, with its propensity for finding villains, can be understood to be a challenge to that ideal. But I think that there's another piece to the puzzle, namely the way Americans tend to deal with history. Generally speaking, Americans have short memories, historically speaking. The difference between 50 years ago and literal ancient history is often perceived as purely academic. But in its focus on how current patterns of injustice have their roots in history, Wokeness can often look like holding a very long grudge. And in a culture that sees intentional wrongdoing in not allowing bygones to be bygones, one can see how mutual hostility would come out of that. As an aside, I also think that American Christianity plays a role in this, in presenting forgiveness as something that one does for the benefit of the people who have wrong one, rather than for the self. And to the degree that Americans expect to be forgiven for past transgressions, and those transgressions forgotten, constant vigilance feels like a violation of a social contract.

In any event, it all strikes me as yet another symptom of a society that has lost (or discarded) the ability to empathize and trust. It's a function of neediness, I think, and Americans of all stripes are very good at seeing themselves as needy.