John McWhorter's polemic against "woke" thinking

Conservative African-American scholar John McWhorter is ppearing on major media these days promoting his latest book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021). This is an interview with him from Amanpour and Company, Anti-Racism Has Gone Too Far, says “Woke Racism” Author John McWhorter 11/12/2021.

As Andrew Key points out, McWhorter is singing from a familiar hymnbook, though with new arrangements (In a New Manifesto Framing 'Wodeness' as Religion John McWhorter Sounds Like Moses Condemning Israel for Worshipping Golden Calf of Black Power Religion Dispatches 11/05/2021)

In one breath, McWhorter hails the Black masses for not holding the same corrosive ideas as a Black leftist elite while assailing them for destructive cultural behaviors from which they must be saved, as his books describe in Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America and Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America. Simply put, the Black masses and their folksy wisdom are a useful counter to the left-wing Black elite; until, that is, they’re needed as evidence of persistent cultural pathology. Keeping with the religious imagery that McWhorter directs at his opponents: he’s the voice crying in the wilderness for the good ol’ days of uplift ideology and respectability politics.

As questionable as McWhorter’s arguments against anti-racist thought are as an ideology, however, it’s his frame of analysis that I find more troubling. McWhorter deems wokeness to be a new religion. Had he simply declared wokeness a new ideology or simply stayed with his third-wave antiracism construct we could have simply debated the merits of his argument. Yet his declaration of wokeness as religion serves not as honest assessment of religious thinking in the form of social justice activism. Instead, religion is invoked as a ready-made punching bag for whenever he needs to reiterate the point that he finds the tenets of wokeness objectionable.

Chris Lehmann gives his take on McWhorter's brand of "anti-wokeness" in John McWhorter's Dumb B******t Gawker 11.15.2021:

In a discursive world that’s now primed to trace the alleged excesses of critical-race theorizing to the likes of Immanuel Kant, McWhorter is firmly in what now passes for mainstream right-wing punditizing in the CRT culture war: a posture that’s respectably paranoid and conspiratorial, just not inquisitorially so. McWhorter’s recently published book-length jeremiad [Woke Racism] on the alleged racism of the woke revives a comforting refrain on the right stretching back to the errant PC wars of the ‘90s so as to paint the other side as persecutors drunk on their own righteousness. He argues that the language scolds and etiquette enforcers who have seized our lead institutions of culture and governance are maniacal Puritans, transmuting the arch-secular dogmas of radical political dissent into the stuff of an intolerant religious orthodoxy.

The great irony is that McWhorter, like the whole intellectual cohort of tough-minded woke-baiters on the right, fondly imagines himself to be propounding a more nuanced and real-world approach to the fraught politics of race, representation, and cultural confrontation, elevating hard truths over formulaic pieties and incantations of social-justice catechisms. The whole superstructure of this school of argument is designed to ensure that its devotees never pause and wonder just what’s so measured and mature about compulsively envisioning your loyal opposition as wayward bit players in a dinner-theater production of The Crucible.

There are some critiques of "wokeness" as a political style that are more substantial. On the left, there is concern about the superficiality of the establishment liberal version of ethnic and gender
"identity" politics. (Ana Kasparian, Wokeness Is Hurting Democrats Jacobin YouTube Channel 05/03/2021.)

Back in May, Bobo tried his hand at condemning "wokeness" to the outer darkness, i.e., outside the boundaries of savvy Beltway Village pundits (David Brooks, This Is How Wokeness Ends New York Times 05/14/2021):

The thing we call wokeness contains many elements. At its core is an honest and good-faith effort to grapple with the legacies of racism. In 2021, this element of wokeness has produced more understanding, inclusion and racial progress than we've seen in over 50 years. This part of wokeness is great.

But wokeness gets weirder when it's entangled in the perversities of our meritocracy, when it involves demonstrating one's enlightenment by using language -- "problematize," "heteronormativity," "cisgender," "intersectionality" -- inculcated in elite schools or with difficult texts.

It's part of the burden of being a conservative to worry that These Kids Today are learning all kinds of new manners in college.

Tom Edsall - surprise! suprise! - was also trolling on this issue in May. (Is Wokeness ‘Kryptonite for Democrats’? New York Times 05/26/2021) Edsall has spent the last three decades arguing that any kind of concern for minority civil rights is politically dangerous for the Democrats. It kind of his pundit signature issue.

As Ed Kilgore observes, whining about Wokeness also "allows [Republicans] and their supporters to pose as innocent victims of persecution rather than as aggressive culture warriors seeking to defend their privileges and reverse social change." (Is ‘Anti-Wokeness’ the New Ideology of the Republican Party? New York 03/19/2021)

Perry Bacon Jr. suggests that the Republicans most important reasons for "focusing on cancel culture and woke people [is that it] is a fairly easy strategy for the GOP to execute, because in many ways it’s just a repackaging of the party’s long-standing backlash approach." (Perry Bacon Jr., Why Attacking ‘Cancel Culture’ And ‘Woke’ People Is Becoming The GOP’s New Political Strategy FiveThirtyEight 03/17/2021; emphasis in original)