Woke and Anti-Woke

Wokeism is ending. But I remember when it first started. I was living in a flat in Wellington and remember seeing some posts on Reddit about some controversy regarding Halloween at Yale University. Everyone on Reddit, and I, thought it was silly. That is my earliest memory of wokeism. But I quickly moved on to the next post to comfort me in my cold, damp living room. I did not expect the seismic shift that would shape and change the cultural and political landscape into what it is today.

Upon reflection, it was quite amazing to see wokeism develop. It started as a few sporadic movements at American universities. Soon, it was a worldwide movement. One day I was viewing a Reddit post about over-zealous students arguing over nothing. Now we have members of Parliament in New Zealand who owe their seats to the fight against woke. They want to introduce New Zealand’s first bathroom bill. New Zealand never needed legislation like this.

Woke is the past simple tense of wake and used to mean someone who was aware of racial prejudice and discrimination. You wouldn’t usually use woke as an adjective, but it comes from African American Vernacular English. It was a good word – catchy, succinct, and meaningful. Looking at Google Trends for the search term “woke”, we see interest grow steadily since 2016, and more rapidly since 2019. At the same time, the word became distorted and semantically loaded. It is not the first word from the Black American lexicon to be co-opted by wider society. Everyone knows what woke means, but not what it used to mean.

Wokeism was a bull-market affair. On 4 January 2016, the S&P 500 index closed at 2012.66. On 31 December 2021, it closed at 4766.18. That would be a 136.8% return over about six years. Not bad! At the same time, if you invested in wokeism during that period, you would have seen a similar return. Early investors were those people on social media who raised issues of gay rights, trans rights, racial rights, and the like. It was a bull market, and people were excited. Now, markets are more precarious. So are our social markets.

Companies became “woke”. Infamously, Anheuser-Busch launched a campaign with Dylan Mulvaney to promote Bud Light. It was innocent enough, but the backlash was huge – and ugly. Capitalism has an infinite ability to monetise social trends. A company transforms into whatever form appeals to its target market. The logical axioms of a company are profit, power, and growth. Any and all public messages serve those axioms for the company. In this case, the messaging took a progressive form to lure in young drinkers. The lure failed.

I remember working at a large New Zealand bank when wokeism arrived at our door. The bank had always been a relatively progressive place to work. Halfway through my tenure, emails started arriving in my inbox signed off with he/him and she/her. I knew the pronoun thing from queer circles, so I never thought much of it. One day, during a large Teams meeting, an executive (or some nobody bigwig) introduced himself with his pronouns: he, him. This is odd, I remember thinking. As the call progressed, each subsequent very-important-executive introduced himself, stating his pronouns. But not one of them needed to, I thought. The gender of each middle-aged, white man was clear – if what they actually did at the bank was not.

The annoying thing about wokeism is that it forces your hand. The tweet and comment section do not have a lot of space for nuance. They have character limits, after all. Human brains have a character limit as well. People skimming through strangers’ opinions online don’t have the time or energy to analyse the nuance of an individual’s point of view. So they turn to mental shortcuts. The human brain – famously flawed and brilliant – loves shortcuts. The most common shortcuts place someone in a group: you’re woke, you’re a fascist, you’re one of them. And if you don’t have an opinion, the algorithm won’t see you. And neither will we.

Wokeism is polarising. Social media and public discourse amplify the polarity. In a raincloud, when positive charges accumulate, they attract negative charges from the ground. Opposite charges attract, after all. The more one charge accumulates, the more it attracts the other. Then lightning strikes. It would be strange if any progressive social movement didn’t attract a conservative backlash. If the movement is substantive, so is the backlash. The loudest voices and most brazen actions on each side attract corresponding commentary and response from the other side. The loud voices attract and attack each other. Yet through it all, neither can exist without the other.

Wokeism isn’t really ending. It is too nebulous a concept to have a clear beginning and end. The same goes for anti-wokeism. Also a nebulous concept. The bull market is followed by a correction. When times change, and get tough, we hope people reflect and learn. Unlike electrical charges in physics, people in a society aren’t predictable. We don’t know what will happen next, but I think we are seeing change. I’m no longer in that flat in Wellington. But I’m still online, still watching. The next movement will come. Maybe it’ll surprise me less. Maybe not. Either way, let’s hope we meet it with more reflection – and less noise.