The following was posted by Anand Giridhadaras on his blog The Ink. He is the author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.
In 2017, a political eternity ago, I gave a talk at the Obama Summit in Chicago. One section of it dealt with the question of so-called wokeness, which has in the years since between a national tinderbox, with more heat than light. I wanted to share that part of the speech today. The bottom line: Wokeness is good, actually. But we need a plan for the still-waking……
As our society fractures, some change-makers are drawn to visions of progress that don’t bother with suasion. I’m thinking especially of those of us who live in what we regard as the America of the future and who think of ourselves as “woke” — aware of injustice, committed to pluralism, willing to fight for it.
As wokeness has percolated from Black resistance into the cultural mainstream, it seems at times to have become a test you must pass to engage with the enlightened, not a gospel the enlightened aspire to spread. Either you buy our whole program, use all the right terms, and expertly check your privilege, or you’re irredeemable.
Is there space among the woke for the still-waking?
Today, there are millions who are ambivalent between the politics of inclusion and the politics of exclusion — not quite woke, not quite hateful.
Men unprepared by their upbringing to know their place in an equal world. White people unready for a new day in which Americanness no longer means whiteness. People anxious about change’s pace, about the death of certainties.
The woke have a choice about how to deal with the ambivalent. Do you focus on building a fortress to protect yourselves from them? Or a road to help them cross the mountain?
A common answer to this question is that the people angry at losing status don’t deserve any help. They’ve been helped.
I understand this response. It is hardly the fault of the rest of us that those wielding unearned privilege bristle at surrendering it. But it is our problem. The burden of citizenship is committing to your fellow citizens and accepting that what is not your fault may be your problem. And that, amid great change, it is in all of our interest to help people see who they will be on the other side of the mountaintop.
When we accept these duties, we may begin to notice the ways in which our very different pains rhyme. The African-American retiree in Brooklyn who fears gentrification is whitening her borough beyond recognition probably votes differently from the white foreman in Arizona who fears immigration is browning his state. Yet their worries echo.
When we learn to detect such resonances, we gain the understanding of other people that is required to win them over, and not simply to resist them.
It isn’t enough to be right about the world you want to live in. You gotta sell it, even to those you fear.
I find this rhetoric very appealing. Of course, we should try to persuade those who don’t agree with us, as they try to persuade us we are wrong.
But I think the appeal to reason is doomed. It would be like trying to persuade a devout follower of Trump that he is a con man. I have tried but never succeeded, just as they have tried to persuade me that Biden is demented, with no success.
The leaders of the anti-WOKE frenzy, like DeSantis and Rufo, are riding this crusade for power and money. They are not open to suasion.
Their followers tend not to be able to define what WOKE is. They just know they are against it. They assume that WOKE means grievance politics, and they want nothing to do with it.
I’ll see if Anand has some useful ideas about how to remove the stigma that rightwing rabble rousers have attached to the word WOKE. I certainly see nothing attractive in their antonyms: “I’m sleeping.” “I’m not awake.” “I have no interest in making the world a better place.” “I don’t care about social justice.” Who would espouse such views?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This speech is essentially a synopsis of his more recent book, “The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy” in which he profiles several progressive activists who have thought deeply and strategically about how to reach a broader cross-section of Americans who are not dug-in on many issues but are perhaps skeptical. I highly recommend the book. https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-persuaders-at-the-front-lines-of-the-fight-for-hearts-minds-and-democracy-anand-giridharadas/18133815
Giradhadaras is making a case for tolerance. He is asking people to be more understanding of others and their political leanings. Sometimes people tend to see others in terms of stereotypes, but people are more complicated and nuanced than that. A willingness to listen to others is the first step in creating a meaningful dialogue.
At times we need to take people at their word. Such is the case with Ron DeSantis, When he says that Florida is where woke goes to die, we should believe him. Woke has its origins in Black culture. When DeSantis evokes the term, he fully intends to stamp out Black culture, history and social justice along with anyone that stands up for these concepts or gets in his way.
Thanks but no thanks, I’ll continue to go it alone.
That’s the point. You’ve never gone it alone in your entire life. No human being ever has. Any who would claim so is deluded. People both benefit and are held back by a myriad of influences of which they are unaware. That’s the American Myth, the one where all successful people do it on our own, it was fair and square, and all hard work with no other factors involved. These scared white Americans and the people who are more than willing to join the club under conditions set by others cling to it fear the proverbial level playing field in life most of all. They have the advantages or believe it as a birthright of “the hollow collegiality of shared skin.”
The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is a great example of the lie. Founded in 1936, the first Black player inducted was in 1962. Do you mean to tell me that all those white players in the Hall who never had to compete with athletes who were “others” except for the occasional Jew were playing on a level playing field? Did they do it alone? Were they really the best? And just because we don’t know the names of the great Black players who never got a fair shot or worse, does that make the ones who did more talented or deserving.
It is astounding how the one thing that riles them up like clockwork is any discussion of race or human identity, that it’s an historical problem with real consequences, and doing anything to try to address it. They dismiss it out of hand and never explain why, thinking the answer is so obvious to all. Because they know what an honest explanation would sound like when spoken out loud.
K thx
Hello Diane (I peeked back into your comments section for a moment.)
On wokeness, I think the sleaze-right’s inability to define it may be rooted in the fact that they don’t want their followers to wake up . . . to what the “anti-woke” people are trying to do to their own followers. In a word: manipulate. People like Tucker Carlson want to keep the Fox audience in their somnambulist state . . . UN-woke, ala: asleep. The more people actually wake up to what’s going on, the less power the sleazies have.
Anti-woke is anti-intellectual at its core; it’s what the fox says to the chickens in the chicken house; or when, in the time of slavery of black people here in the U.S., it’s what white people in power were up to when they actually wrote laws against teaching slaves to read, or the British during their worst times of colonialism. They set the conditions to keep people poor and ignorant, and then say: Look, they’re poor and ignorant. And presently, their “conditioning machine” is Murdoch and his Fox News.
AND it’s WHY teaching uncomfortable history in K-12 is so important especially in a democracy. The power mongers know how important truly wakeful knowledge is . . . and so there go the libraries.
What we need is a huge and long-term advertising campaign that calls out the sleaze and that cannot help but break through the Fox News misinformation/propaganda communications wall. (I’m leaving the site again, so I’m back to reading only your main posts . . . no comments.) CBK
Diane Addendum to my above note: the anti-woke brigade (like DeSantis) are the post-Civil War equivalent to the carpetbaggers that infiltrated the south with their appeal to newly freed but poverty-stricken black people. The equivalent come-on to 40 acres and a mule is anti-abortion, open carry laws, and anti-gay/trans legislation. Nothing new . . . just different content. CBK
So true. It’s the same racist package in different wrapping paper that DeSantis is peddling.
CBK,
I don’t get the analogy. I learned Southern history, which taught that carpetbaggers were very bad people. Now, we know that many were Northerners who came South to teach the freed children who had been enslaved.
Hello Diane Certainly, history shows many who wanted to help in those post-war times. What I meant, however, were the carpetbaggers who were about trading for votes that would ultimately go to those who were about setting policy against those who came out of slavery. CBK
This is a great example of how the language of oppression and obfuscation seeps into ours without us ever noticing. The term “carpetbagger” was invented by reactionary southerners to paint everyone with the same brush and thus make the all the “other,” the enemy. As you point out, there were without question people from the North who came down to exploit people in the South and likely very many of them. Privatizers today are their intellectual descendants.
But there were without question many who came with the right motives trying to do the right thing. By painting them with the same brush as the charlatans and having the broader population accept their term, they accomplished their goal. The word carpetbagger belongs in a museum of the so-called confederacy with all the monuments that have been and still need to be taken down.
The term carpetbagger was one more xenophobic reaction to outsiders. The one common denominator after the civil war, perhaps every war that ever was, is population movement. This was a time of freed African descendants roaming around in search of a living. Northern businessmen, prodded by an economy stimulated by wartime expenditures, found vast natural resources in a southern landscape that had been chiefly agricultural. Forests in the Appalachian south fell under the crosscut. The massive Warrior Coal Beds fueled steel in Birmingham. In 1886, southern railroad gauge was changed to standard in a massive expenditure of labor. All this sent people to new places.
I have always suggested that the Mason-Dixon Line is actually a small circle surrounding each individual. The term carpetbagger resonated with anyone with a distrust of the outsiders. The white supremacy movement exploited this term in a way that would make Chris Rufo embarrassed.
If you have Prime Video, sit down and watch the first episode of All in the Family. More than 50 years old and pretty much the same arguments with the woke/anti-woke moniker. Another demonstration of how little we’ve changed.
Ohio’s anti-woke bill for universities is SB 83. It gets a hearing on Thursday.
I recently read where someone described “woke” as the new “n” word. The motivation for the “anti-woke” needs no further justification.
Speaking of the “n” word, whether it be new or old, it’s with us everywhere, all the time, mostly from people who would never say it but always think it, may I present today’s Exhibit A:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ralph-yarl-shot-homeowner_n_643d0ebce4b05765f3830683
“Law enforcement released the suspect pending further investigation after consulting with the Clay County Prosecutor’s Office.” Just like if the races of perpetrator and victim were reversed under the same circumstances, dontcha know!
“Police initially said Yarl was in stable condition but had a life-threatening injury. His current condition has not been released, other than he is stable.” All of which was his own responsibility and fault, amiright?
Better luck on your next attempt to foment racial animus. aMiRite?
FLERP, who were you addressing?
Not you, Diane.
Thank you
Greg, lucky for you Diane removed my comment responding to you and your asinine accusation (as usual, with zero evidence) that I’m a bigot. So you should thank her for that.
Sorry, I see the second comment did appear. That’s good enough for GregB. Apologies for the superfluous comments by me.
I’m deleting the trading of insults