How to be woke
Or how to deal with angry white men like me.
I get it. You are tired of white men doing shit stuff and then wanting to dominate the discussion about it. Why the heck would you read about a white man’s ideas about race and social justice? When in fact we should all rather listen to POC, women and queer people?
Perhaps because I think we don’t talk enough about meaning. How do meaning and its creation interfere with the whole debate about social justice and identity politics?
By the way, how useful is the term white man? Or angry white man? I define it here as whatever comes to your mind when you imagine a Trump voter. Actually, its up to you to decide whether the term is precise enough to use in a political debate. I just do so because what matters here is not what you understand by angry, or old, or fragile white man, but your rapport to them.
I am proud of being called a social justice warrior. To me, social justice warrior is like an ironic label, that I have appropriated from the online trolls. It helps me keeping a critical distance towards my desire to change the world. I largely prefer it over woke. Woke would mean that I know better than the rest.
The opposite is true.
It is an essential human trait to seek and create meaning. What distinguishes us most from other animals is the ability to create meaning. When we act and speak, it usually means something. Meaning helps us to organise the chaos around us since we exist.
Prehistoric humans faced a pretty hostile environment. Nature was nourishing, but also destructive, unpredictable and chaotic. But language allowed humans to attach meanings to the weather, the plants and the animals and their world became more understandable and less menacing.
By understanding the world, humans slowly started to take control. They counteracted bad luck in hunting with rites and dances, each with their specific meaning. Higher powers were invoked, susceptible to prayers. Mysterious sickness would now be treated with plants, or more prayer, or both.
If you are sceptical about chants and rites as a cure you have missed the point. The question is not whether all of this actually works. The point is that humans are able to believe in the meaning they create.
Every time when hunters and gatherers designated their chiefs, empires crowned their queens and kings or trade connected tribes and nations, it was because humans created meaning and believed in it. Sometimes meaning was negotiated or disputed, which could lead to war.
Meaning gave humans more power to create and destroy than physical force could. Because meaning also gave humans the power to believe.
The modern human is no different. We may have managed to control many of nature’s forces (or live in conditions where we don’t have to deal with them too much). And yet, how chaotic and uncontrollable is our world becoming?
Where once the world’s nature once dominated our lives, we are now surpassed by the very world we, ourselves, have created. If you think about it, our daily lives are totally out of hand: We have little to no influence on our global supply chains, the internet or the international trade system. In fact, we don’t even know how the cars that we drive work, or what wood our furniture is made of. Even socially speaking, we are often dyslexic. We can only assume what others are really thinking or what their motives are.
Paradoxically, we also consume a constant flux of images and text, coming from all sides, that are supposed to explain to us how things work. But this flux does the opposite. There are so many channels and sources of meaning that we don’t know where to begin with digesting all this information.
What we drink, eat or wear is mostly the result of a complex economic machinery that no individual alone can fully comprehend. The little margin left to us is called consumer choice (which in turn is shaped by social norms and marketing).
Confronted with the overwhelming complexity of our world and the little control we have over it, we feel as lost and scared as the prehistoric hunter did facing a sawing tooth tiger or a blizzard.
The truth is that meaning never gives us full security. Nature changes constantly and so does society. Concepts and stories that have explained the world 100 years ago seem now outdated and ridiculous. Some have never been true at all.
Plus, there are so many contradictions. Isn’t it absurd that we have created the Nobel prize for peace, the atomic bomb and the cure for malaria in less than one generation? War, the destruction of our nature and racial discrimination are promoted worldwide. So are the ideals of justice, peace and sustainability.
It is this contradiction that repels us and drives our desire to change the world. The ethical and moral standards we hold contrast with what we observe. And as we have so little margin we often see no issue. The world is so absurd that we feel everything is meaningless.
We become irritable, fearful, angry. Especially towards those who we want to hold accountable for the evil. Trump voters, racists, misogynists, ruthless capitalist corporations — they are all quickly identified and blamed. Yes, it is ethically wrong to preach hate, exploit nature and preach racism.
What social justice warriors like you and me need to understand is that our opponents are as lost as we are.
You don’t have to be a liberal or a POC to feel the pain and anger when the world doesn’t make sense. Most people whose brain is wired correctly despise real graphic brutality — regardless of their political behaviour.
Our craving for meaning is profound and relentless. We want an explanation that is easy and we want it now. Sometimes, when the crime is too cruel and the reasons too complex, we tell the story of the monster or the animal because the lack of sense violates the very essence of our being as humans.
Hence why we are prone to tell the story of the lone wolf when a white guy shoots up a school. Hence why most white people want to believe it because digging deeper would mean to unearth some profound contradictions that they are uncomfortable to live with. It would actually make their world meaningless.
White men are angry because they don’t understand the world anymore. Why are they miserable when not long time ago, they were told they are the kings of the world?
Now the world seems to have enough of them.
Ijeoma Oluo wrote a beautiful, uncompromising piece about her perception of the white man’s anger (please read it):
But white male anger is steeped in a lie. It is fighting for what they were never going to have. For the promises that were never going to be fulfilled. White men are the only people allowed to fully believe in the American dream and perhaps that is the cruellest thing to have ever been done to them and the world that has to suffer their anger as they refuse to let go of a fantasy that we were never allowed to imagine ourselves in.
I could not agree more. The promise of the American dream — as many narratives of economic and social ascension — was a perfect illusion. It once helped poor white immigrants from Europe to believe in capitalism. And as Ijeoma Oluo implies, it also helped them to believe that they were better than the black, brown and red people in America (even though the black, brown and red were here long before them).
The American dream was invented and tailored for white men. As Ijema Oluo points out, only white men were really allowed to believe in it. This makes white men the only dupes of the American Dream.
Many white men are still addicted to the idea that they can achieve any thing. But the golden postwar era of working-class home ownership is over.
White men die in great numbers because of opioids. Live on minimum wage. Suffer of chronic diseases. Swallow pills and get addicted to them. Can’t afford higher education which then correlates with higher suicide rates, inclination to violence and alcoholism.
Yes, the white man’s problems are important — not because he is white, but because the lie he has swallowed is bigger than the others.
The American dream and its derivatives were invented to build nations, conquer the world and assert dominance of an ideology to which today seems to be no alternative. Overt racism, on the other hand, is just not fashionable anymore.
But while racism and old assumptions about gender have been scientifically crushed, the world’s most influential economists and institutions still preach that free and unregulated market will eventually solve societies problems and make everybody happy that works hard enough to deserve it.
Yes, white men were once the only ones allowed to believe in the American dream. Now it’s the only meaningful story they are allowed to believe in and it’s not even true. They feel that — and this is the source of their anger.
Unfortunately, we all will have to deal with the white man’s problems a bit longer before we can all turn to build a new and equal society.
I know this is asking a lot. It is painful, but is the only way to make the angry white men see that they have been conned. This will need a huge portion of patience and indulgence that angry white men, one could argue, don’t deserve because they deny it to others.
Calling out racists and rapists publicly may have started the wave of change. I would probably not be writing this if it wasn’t for the metoo movement or Black Lives Matter.
But the backlash was enormous. The discourse has become extremely divisive. I know that a great portion the work of malicious far-right media. But then again, the ferocious nature of the debate leads us lefties to hit back harder and eventually, as in all wars, the ends start justifying the means.
It can’t be that the far-right and their followers start accusing “woke people” for installing a dictatorship of cultural Marxism. With all righteous wrath for the victims of discrimination and the need to punish perpetrators: It can’t be that we are starting to have an actual cancel culture on social media. As wrecked as the social justice system is, trials should not happen on Twitter.
The social justice warriors and also the victims of discrimination may have more power when relying on empathy and more analytic discourse. This is the hard way to go. It is perhaps even counter-intuitive to care for the perpetrator and the privileged when you are in deep shit yourself.
What humans need to create meaning is not so much their language, but the fact to project themselves on their surroundings and into others. Empathy is a necessary condition for meaning. With empathy, we may be able to help the angry white man to make sense of his world again. It will be painful for him to admit that he has been wrong.
When the angry white men see that they have been conned, the perpetrators among them may start asking for forgiveness. This is where their healing begins.
