Are you up to speed on current discussions of race and racism? If not, read Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, and John McWhorter’s Woke Racism. Since McWhorter frequently refers to DiAngelo and Kendi, we need to start with the word “Woke” and its cognates, some my neologisms.
“Woke” has become a pretentiously honorific term. Although its lexical definition is simply an awareness of injustice, especially racial injustice, “Wokers” suggest that their opinions reflect righteous perceptions of or positions on racial injustice, or that their proposals offer righteous prescriptions for it. They imply that the “unWoke,” more than unaware of racial injustice, are insensitive or indifferent to, and thereby complicit in it. They imply that those who are aware of racial injustice but do not agree with their perceptions, positions, or prescriptions enable racism.
All three books are disappointing. Their authors write for concurring readers, not for readers curious, uncertain, questing, or concerned about race. Accordingly, all three, variably anti-intellectual, exhort and deprecate more than reason. DiAngelo’s book is a self-serving polemic, with undertows of personal racism awash in rip tides of aggression against other whites. Kendi’s book, though burdened with biographical stories, addresses most domains in which racism operates but reveals his ignorance of education. McWhorter’s book, polemical, poorly focused, and hastily written, is right to criticize their “Wokism” but wrong not to expose their basic strategy—to exploit most whites’ ignorance of race and racism, and their fear of being called racist.
No one has taught whites what they need to know about race. Since the mid-20th-century Civil Rights Movement, schools have addressed racism by teaching multi-culturalism, a jumble of superficial, stereotypical tidbits. Recent events have prompted schools to enlarge students’ understanding of the black experience through history and literature. Having omitted much about race, schools are now having trouble achieving balance because of resistance by those who prefer their understanding of America to be sanitized, bland, and homogenized as white and Christian. Educational reform to achieve a pluralistic balance is necessary, but Wokers' proposals are the wrong ones.
Before Wokism had a name, it evolved in and trickled down from college English departments to public schools. Its forerunner was not Critical Race Theory (CRT), but New Historicism, which interprets literature, not as expressions of experience, but as transcripts of power transactions involving race, gender, class, and colonization. Wokism focuses on race and the relative power of whites and blacks. Too often New Historians and Wokers strain to make their case, often by taking a single fact as indicative or determinative of an entire historical period or literary work.
Ever the teacher/scholar, I would love to support this claim from my academic experience, but few readers would relish a detailed account of racial politics in scholarly seminars and publications. Let me just say that, from the one fact that Othello is black, New Historical and Woke interpretations of Othello insist that Venice is a racist society and that race explains Othello’s jealousy and his murder of his wife. Ironically, they adduce racial stereotypes for support. They vilify those with contrary interpretations. Because mine offers a race-free explanation of Othello’s behavior, they treat me and my ideas as racist; their thinking is that to deny racism in any case is to “whitewash” it.
Bad as Woke influence on academic publications and in academe is, its influence on school boards is worse. Wokers claim that disparities in academic performance—better by whites than by blacks—result from racism, white privilege, or white advantage. They claim that the disparities result from instruction in white-only, not black-also-, oriented curriculums in traditional subjects. They claim that, to avoid perpetuating these evils, schools must treat, teach, test, and judge blacks differently from whites. They must teach Black (not Standard) English, history, math, and science; cease insisting on one right answer; and abandon the same standardized, subject-matter tests for all students.
This Wokers’ position assumes that academic subjects—language, mathematics, history, science—are internally divided by race and that the different divisions must be taught and tested differently. Based on this assumption, a proposal for race-based curriculums and instruction, if adopted, would re-establish separate but not equal education for blacks. If—really, since—this assumption is wrong, Wokers propose changes implying that black students are innately incapable of mastering traditional subjects as traditionally defined and taught. How racist is that!
Wokers also claim that disparities in course enrollments—more whites than blacks—result from racism, white privilege, or white advantage. They propose to eliminate these disparities by eliminating gifted and talented programs, and advanced placement and enriched or accelerated courses. Example: a school board of Woke blacks and liberal whites is ending the gap in racial enrollment in advanced academic courses in my “elite” high school by eliminating them. Consider this: a Woke school board is depriving white students who have demonstrated high academic achievement, of courses suited to their academic abilities. It is enough to drive Tucker Carlson back to Hungary. Then consider this: a Woke school board is depriving black students who have demonstrated high academic achievement, of courses suited to their academic abilities. Yet it is not enough to prompt Al Sharpton to hold a press conference. For the gap is gone.
Not gone are the disparities in academic abilities between these high achieving black and white students, and all other black and white students. In the name of equality, this Woke school board is hurting black as well as white students. It is harming the chances of talented black as well as white students to succeed in a world in which both races will live together in schools, careers, neighborhoods, and relationships. By shifting emphasis from education to an ersatz equality, its policy discourages all students from striving for academic achievement. It promotes curriculums emphasizing politically approved causes, not the content of traditional academic subjects. Wokism degrades education.
To be consistent, Wokers should seek to eliminate disparities in enrollments in special education courses—more blacks than whites—, especially since racists might think that these disparities reflect black academic inferiority. Wokers do not. Their inconsistency and anti-intellectualism show an unsavory racial—is it (also) a middle-class?—bias in removing strengths in education while not reforming weaknesses—thereby offering nothing constructive to improve education for students, black and white, by matching it to their abilities to meet their needs.
McWhorter offers a useful insight into Woke thinking, feeling, and acting which cause personal harm and social damage. Wokism is a religion of the self-righteous, dogmatic, close-minded, intolerant, and coercive—in education, harmful to students black as well as white. They are zealots garbed with seemingly good intentions; skilled in exploiting ignorance, guilt, and fear; determined to defeat rational opposition—i.e., heretics—to their holy cause; and indifferent to the consequences of their crusade to achieve racial equality in education—i.e., educational uniformity regardless of student ability.
The challenge for the conscientious is to find and use ways to deal with Wokism and Wokers. One way: avoid any concession to anti-intellectualism; cling to fact, logic, and reason. Another: criticize the inadequacies or dangers of their proposals yet continue to seek social justice. Yet another: condemn any racism in their antiracist proposals and encourage equity. Finally, do not think that they offer the path to redemption from racist sin. We may be sinners, but our sin is not original, and it can be absolved by intelligent, informed, and persistent effort.
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