I am a lecturer in the Cal State system… I have experienced the same thing you have. I am a woman who teaches some “woke” subjects, and most of my colleagues assume I am one of them because of my perceived identity (they think I am a “woman of color” because I speak Spanish 😂 and they don’t know that when I teach post colonial theory I also teach critiques of it). I also keep my mouth shut and try to fly under the radar because I cannot afford to lose my job (I am not on the tenure line; I am a contract worker). While my university is woke (we also paid Kendi, the holy pope of wokeness, 5 figures to come speak), it’s nothing compared to my faculty union. I worked for the union for 4 years and I left disgusted after I saw the transformation from a labor organization to a useless postmo think-tank obsessed with the most ridiculous causes; e.g., stopping “caste” discrimination, defunding CAMPUS police, and advocating for free university tuition for the ** right ** people of color. Teaching is my calling, but I am not sure I can make it another 10 years in this environment…BTW, a colleague terminated our friendship partly over our disagreement over ontological violence and ontological racism 😝
The line "The upper-middle-class, highly-educated, conspicuously credentialed, managerial-suite female--the modal woke evangelist--uses the language and posture of wokeness to both gatekeep and to justify new and ever-expansive needs for her otherwise trivial skillset" is simultaneously astute, hilarious, and deeply, deeply saddening.
Hilarious response to a guy expressing anger at the same thing she is angry at. LOL wow. Even in the midst of their hysterical, performative "grief" these people still love to practice their circular firing squads.
I've experienced similar situations via zoom over the past two years. Favorite moment was a program director stopping discussion so that she could read everyone an angry poem she had just written, decrying an executive decision that she felt was racist. The decision? To continue providing a pilot support group for overworked physicians who were experiencing mental health crises and suicide ideation. Her main reason against continuing the group? It didn't "center black & brown bodies." The actual support group? Full of black & brown people. The executive who made this stunningly racist decision to continue the support group and who was later subject to an unsuccessful letter-writing campaign to get him fired? A POC and the person who had single-handedly saved our agency from closure many years back and the person who had hired & repeatedly promoted the angry poet.
LOLOL. I laugh so that I do not cry! Also, it's just so damn funny.
Like the writer, a couple years ago I also diagnosed this as a fever that will eventually break. Still waiting...
What are the odds that the person who asked "Can we drink wine on camera?" got a little talking to by one of those teary dopes afterward. Once people start to laugh the solemn, pseudo-moral schtick is threatened. Keeping the tension high at the eggshell factory is the whole point.
About that ICE comment: one of the things that was genuinely unsettling and horrible in the time frame you're describing were the threats to deport undergraduate and grad students attending colleges which turned remote in the pandemic, on the basis that attending college remotely isn't a valid reason to have an education visa. The administration earnestly attempted to do this. It's a moral travesty to invite people to your country, then deport them because there's a pandemic. In the sea of stupid hysterias, the ICE raids on students were an uncommonly legitimate concern.
So on the one hand, I can't stop chuckling at the "you're doing it again" exchange - the most crystalline example of gas lighting I've ever seen - but I think the thing that makes this stuff so addictive/difficult to argue down is that there were sporadic, half hearted attempts to do actually bad stuff, and then people just passively and uncomprehendingly accept any subsequent absurd claim. Trump is race baiting demagogue with no scruples; the thing is he also isn't Russian Manchurian Candidate Hitler.
I also do believe the wokums sincerely mean it: they make themselves so miserable that it's really the only thing that makes sense. I don't think that invalidates the fact that it's _also_ a social power play, as seen in the "you're doing it again" exchange. It's that people are really extremely good at self deception, and wholeheartedly and earnestly believing narratives that are socially advantageous.
I appreciate this description, I have seem glimpses of this behavior though blessedly I am away from organizational life mostly.
One quibble is the author's final point, that these people have started to really believe what they previously just did/said performatively. I hear people say things on NPR, for instance, that their family's past racial oppression has literally entered their DNA, their genetics, in only one or two generations. I don't believe any of these people and I don't believe they believe.
Similarly, when I hear people insist that DJTrump won the election, not only do I not believe them, I am convinced that they don't believe as much either. This week there were clips of a British journalist who did an interview with DJT about the end of 2020. He was convinced that Trump actually believed his own line. I think Trump is a skilled sociopath and such people can convince other that they are sincere. Same with Ibahim Kendi, he is really a sociopath, I've listened to him carefully. Hannah Nikole-Jones? A woman who has constructed an alternate reality, an invented history really, and is peddling it. Why such people are not recognized as clever frauds is beyond me, but I don't wholly buy that they are "duping" people. People instead get behind their bandwagon because of, well, mass hysteria and the need to follow a bandwagon.
I suspect every reader of this post can relate to being in the position of traveling in privileged circles with people high in both status and sanctimony, and gently agreeing with them out of fear of dramatic and pointless confrontations, or possibly employment consequences.
I’ve always thought wokeness was a really elaborate competitive strategy to gain status/power out of doing nothing, with a belief in nothing; like the climax of nihilism for folks who should never have been admitted to college but now somehow run the show.
I was never in a Zoom meeting like this, but after seeing my Facebook feed filling up with the new terms (and conditions) previously only seen promulgated on campuses such as Evergreen, I do remember reading a YouTube comment that said, "did you ever wake up one morning and realise you're living in a religious sect?". I will never forget that YouTube comment (It was before Andrew Sullivan's "we all live on campus now"). Anyone who followed the campus debacles in the years previous knew it was coming, but it came hard, and as a dizzying shock.
If the author concedes that he/she is both collaborator and coward, and “willing to face down the consequences of that personal failing,” why is he/she unwilling to face down the consequences of ceasing to be a collaborator and coward? At some point, in every institution, someone has to grow up and say “No!” out loud.
I agree. It's not fake, they really do believe this. All the other stuff is true at the macro level, but at the individual level, they've been convinced.
This is hilarious. I wish it didn't veer off into standard "what is woke?" discourse at the end, as I'd much rather hear the psychobabble you are forced to endure as an academic. By the way, Richard Hanania is the best at explaining what all the fuss is about: the feminization of society. It really is that simple.
One thing I don't get is how people who appear to have a brain can tolerate the midwit nonsense that gets passed off as thought these days (Kendi and the rest). For a good example of this off the top of my head, go read a couple pages of Kendi or DiAngelo's antiracist tumblr books compared to a broadly read "public intellectual" type book from a few decades ago, The Closing of the American Mind. You don't even have to agree with the latter's views to see that something horrible has happened to the discourse in this country. I frankly doubt that most people with GRADUATE degrees could finish the latter book.
Great piece. Somehow they chose that particular circle of hell. It certainly casts doubt on the widely held belief that "education is underfunded in this country."
Outside academia (I'm not an academic) encounters with "woke" always carries a veiled threat of physical violence. There is always the sense that one is in direct contact with mental illness and emotional instability. Those trapped in D.E.I. passive/aggressive "you're doing it again" need to accept that the individual is just a half-step short of "...how many fingers am I holding up..?" Inquisitor O'Brien. They are surveillance state criminals and should be seen as such. SUBSTACK articles appear weekly telling of destroyed lives and institutions. Justified criminality (Stalin was a bank robber), that is, conflation of criminality with revolution has burned entire sections of major cities and granted pathological permission for car jackings, theft and unprovoked random citizen assault. Civil life is in the balance. The horror of academic subversion is the students lost chance at connection with their own individuality and the great mystery and the miraculous that surrounds us. I don't know how academia will overcome this but if it doesn't we're lost.
"Woke" is the lipstick on a pig named Totalitarian Finance. The Clinton/Gates/Schwab/Biden Globalist CCP influenced manipulation and funding of politicized ideological utopian "woke" runs cover for installation of a new world feudalism. Globalism destroyed capitalism in the name of capitalism. Now, "...you'll own nothing and be happy" demands the destruction of free speech, thought, enterprise and American individuality. I'm not being religious when I say it is a war on the Soul itself. The role of the well funded sick in the head minions of "woke", is to install a commissariat, capture legitimate social concern and prevent dialogue that would produce actual solutions, while installing fear in those who would protest. If need be destroy lives. No actual evidence required.
Free or substance labor worldwide and access to the exploitation of natural resources without consequence now is no different than it was at Ludlow or Lawrence then.
One of my major political awakenings was realising that the classes of people who gave gained almost everything their advocated ever demanded were making GREATER complaints than ever before, notwithstanding... I sought explanations and came up with several candidates.
One - habit, people who have aligned their ideological mindset around fighting oppression may simply be claiming oppression from sheer habit. Two - paranoia, despite improvement in all areas they may have such a doom mentality that they authentically thing the sky is falling in. Three - the most uncharitable of all, that they are cynically and deliberately claiming they are oppressed as a powerful mechanism of advancing their self interest.
The author's suggestion of mass hysteria/psychogenic illness feels valid.
I am a lecturer in the Cal State system… I have experienced the same thing you have. I am a woman who teaches some “woke” subjects, and most of my colleagues assume I am one of them because of my perceived identity (they think I am a “woman of color” because I speak Spanish 😂 and they don’t know that when I teach post colonial theory I also teach critiques of it). I also keep my mouth shut and try to fly under the radar because I cannot afford to lose my job (I am not on the tenure line; I am a contract worker). While my university is woke (we also paid Kendi, the holy pope of wokeness, 5 figures to come speak), it’s nothing compared to my faculty union. I worked for the union for 4 years and I left disgusted after I saw the transformation from a labor organization to a useless postmo think-tank obsessed with the most ridiculous causes; e.g., stopping “caste” discrimination, defunding CAMPUS police, and advocating for free university tuition for the ** right ** people of color. Teaching is my calling, but I am not sure I can make it another 10 years in this environment…BTW, a colleague terminated our friendship partly over our disagreement over ontological violence and ontological racism 😝
The line "The upper-middle-class, highly-educated, conspicuously credentialed, managerial-suite female--the modal woke evangelist--uses the language and posture of wokeness to both gatekeep and to justify new and ever-expansive needs for her otherwise trivial skillset" is simultaneously astute, hilarious, and deeply, deeply saddening.
.
“Please be mindful of masculine centering.”
Hilarious response to a guy expressing anger at the same thing she is angry at. LOL wow. Even in the midst of their hysterical, performative "grief" these people still love to practice their circular firing squads.
I've experienced similar situations via zoom over the past two years. Favorite moment was a program director stopping discussion so that she could read everyone an angry poem she had just written, decrying an executive decision that she felt was racist. The decision? To continue providing a pilot support group for overworked physicians who were experiencing mental health crises and suicide ideation. Her main reason against continuing the group? It didn't "center black & brown bodies." The actual support group? Full of black & brown people. The executive who made this stunningly racist decision to continue the support group and who was later subject to an unsuccessful letter-writing campaign to get him fired? A POC and the person who had single-handedly saved our agency from closure many years back and the person who had hired & repeatedly promoted the angry poet.
LOLOL. I laugh so that I do not cry! Also, it's just so damn funny.
Like the writer, a couple years ago I also diagnosed this as a fever that will eventually break. Still waiting...
What are the odds that the person who asked "Can we drink wine on camera?" got a little talking to by one of those teary dopes afterward. Once people start to laugh the solemn, pseudo-moral schtick is threatened. Keeping the tension high at the eggshell factory is the whole point.
About that ICE comment: one of the things that was genuinely unsettling and horrible in the time frame you're describing were the threats to deport undergraduate and grad students attending colleges which turned remote in the pandemic, on the basis that attending college remotely isn't a valid reason to have an education visa. The administration earnestly attempted to do this. It's a moral travesty to invite people to your country, then deport them because there's a pandemic. In the sea of stupid hysterias, the ICE raids on students were an uncommonly legitimate concern.
So on the one hand, I can't stop chuckling at the "you're doing it again" exchange - the most crystalline example of gas lighting I've ever seen - but I think the thing that makes this stuff so addictive/difficult to argue down is that there were sporadic, half hearted attempts to do actually bad stuff, and then people just passively and uncomprehendingly accept any subsequent absurd claim. Trump is race baiting demagogue with no scruples; the thing is he also isn't Russian Manchurian Candidate Hitler.
I also do believe the wokums sincerely mean it: they make themselves so miserable that it's really the only thing that makes sense. I don't think that invalidates the fact that it's _also_ a social power play, as seen in the "you're doing it again" exchange. It's that people are really extremely good at self deception, and wholeheartedly and earnestly believing narratives that are socially advantageous.
I appreciate this description, I have seem glimpses of this behavior though blessedly I am away from organizational life mostly.
One quibble is the author's final point, that these people have started to really believe what they previously just did/said performatively. I hear people say things on NPR, for instance, that their family's past racial oppression has literally entered their DNA, their genetics, in only one or two generations. I don't believe any of these people and I don't believe they believe.
Similarly, when I hear people insist that DJTrump won the election, not only do I not believe them, I am convinced that they don't believe as much either. This week there were clips of a British journalist who did an interview with DJT about the end of 2020. He was convinced that Trump actually believed his own line. I think Trump is a skilled sociopath and such people can convince other that they are sincere. Same with Ibahim Kendi, he is really a sociopath, I've listened to him carefully. Hannah Nikole-Jones? A woman who has constructed an alternate reality, an invented history really, and is peddling it. Why such people are not recognized as clever frauds is beyond me, but I don't wholly buy that they are "duping" people. People instead get behind their bandwagon because of, well, mass hysteria and the need to follow a bandwagon.
I suspect every reader of this post can relate to being in the position of traveling in privileged circles with people high in both status and sanctimony, and gently agreeing with them out of fear of dramatic and pointless confrontations, or possibly employment consequences.
I’ve always thought wokeness was a really elaborate competitive strategy to gain status/power out of doing nothing, with a belief in nothing; like the climax of nihilism for folks who should never have been admitted to college but now somehow run the show.
I was never in a Zoom meeting like this, but after seeing my Facebook feed filling up with the new terms (and conditions) previously only seen promulgated on campuses such as Evergreen, I do remember reading a YouTube comment that said, "did you ever wake up one morning and realise you're living in a religious sect?". I will never forget that YouTube comment (It was before Andrew Sullivan's "we all live on campus now"). Anyone who followed the campus debacles in the years previous knew it was coming, but it came hard, and as a dizzying shock.
If the author concedes that he/she is both collaborator and coward, and “willing to face down the consequences of that personal failing,” why is he/she unwilling to face down the consequences of ceasing to be a collaborator and coward? At some point, in every institution, someone has to grow up and say “No!” out loud.
I agree. It's not fake, they really do believe this. All the other stuff is true at the macro level, but at the individual level, they've been convinced.
One of the best takes on wokeness I've ever read.
This is hilarious. I wish it didn't veer off into standard "what is woke?" discourse at the end, as I'd much rather hear the psychobabble you are forced to endure as an academic. By the way, Richard Hanania is the best at explaining what all the fuss is about: the feminization of society. It really is that simple.
One thing I don't get is how people who appear to have a brain can tolerate the midwit nonsense that gets passed off as thought these days (Kendi and the rest). For a good example of this off the top of my head, go read a couple pages of Kendi or DiAngelo's antiracist tumblr books compared to a broadly read "public intellectual" type book from a few decades ago, The Closing of the American Mind. You don't even have to agree with the latter's views to see that something horrible has happened to the discourse in this country. I frankly doubt that most people with GRADUATE degrees could finish the latter book.
Great piece. Somehow they chose that particular circle of hell. It certainly casts doubt on the widely held belief that "education is underfunded in this country."
Outside academia (I'm not an academic) encounters with "woke" always carries a veiled threat of physical violence. There is always the sense that one is in direct contact with mental illness and emotional instability. Those trapped in D.E.I. passive/aggressive "you're doing it again" need to accept that the individual is just a half-step short of "...how many fingers am I holding up..?" Inquisitor O'Brien. They are surveillance state criminals and should be seen as such. SUBSTACK articles appear weekly telling of destroyed lives and institutions. Justified criminality (Stalin was a bank robber), that is, conflation of criminality with revolution has burned entire sections of major cities and granted pathological permission for car jackings, theft and unprovoked random citizen assault. Civil life is in the balance. The horror of academic subversion is the students lost chance at connection with their own individuality and the great mystery and the miraculous that surrounds us. I don't know how academia will overcome this but if it doesn't we're lost.
"Woke" is the lipstick on a pig named Totalitarian Finance. The Clinton/Gates/Schwab/Biden Globalist CCP influenced manipulation and funding of politicized ideological utopian "woke" runs cover for installation of a new world feudalism. Globalism destroyed capitalism in the name of capitalism. Now, "...you'll own nothing and be happy" demands the destruction of free speech, thought, enterprise and American individuality. I'm not being religious when I say it is a war on the Soul itself. The role of the well funded sick in the head minions of "woke", is to install a commissariat, capture legitimate social concern and prevent dialogue that would produce actual solutions, while installing fear in those who would protest. If need be destroy lives. No actual evidence required.
Free or substance labor worldwide and access to the exploitation of natural resources without consequence now is no different than it was at Ludlow or Lawrence then.
Got Constitution?
One of my major political awakenings was realising that the classes of people who gave gained almost everything their advocated ever demanded were making GREATER complaints than ever before, notwithstanding... I sought explanations and came up with several candidates.
One - habit, people who have aligned their ideological mindset around fighting oppression may simply be claiming oppression from sheer habit. Two - paranoia, despite improvement in all areas they may have such a doom mentality that they authentically thing the sky is falling in. Three - the most uncharitable of all, that they are cynically and deliberately claiming they are oppressed as a powerful mechanism of advancing their self interest.
The author's suggestion of mass hysteria/psychogenic illness feels valid.