In 2017 the Oxford dictionary officially extended its entry on “woke” to mean “alert to injustice in society, especially racism.” This terminology came to prominence with protests that arose following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.
The Michael Brown Incident
Eighteen year old Brown and another individual, reportedly having stolen a box of Cigarillos, were walking in the middle of the street. An officer intervened asking them to move to the curb. When they disregarded his orders a physical altercation ensued. At one point Brown reached into the vehicle and fought with the officer for possession of the officer’s gun. By the conclusion of the incident, Brown had been shot several times and was dead. The officer had managed to retain his gun, therefore Brown was unarmed when shot. Protests and riots began almost immediately. Activist Brittany Packnett Cunningham wrote,
“[I]n August 2014, we weren’t trying to change the world as much as we were trying to secure our own humanity. We saw in Brown’s slain body the spirit of every black young person, under threat by systems that seem to feed on our downfall.”(1)
The death of Brown is very sad but not surprising. No 18-year old should ever die over a stolen box of Cigarillos. Entering into a physical altercation with a police officer and fighting over his weapon is likely to end badly for a person of any color or ethnicity. But Cunningham’s statement opens up broader issues. She casts the protests in terms of “systems that seem to feed on our downfall.” Why does this 18 year old represent “the spirit of every black young person”? Is there actually a system or machine in operation which doomed its participants all to tragedy? Supposedly, there is: systematic racism. Wokeness theorizes that intricate systems of power and hierarchy function which operate unjustly to confer special advantages to one group at the expense of another.
Wokeness is the weaponization of postmodern theory. An entire ideological edifice has been erected on themes I will describe in this series of presentations. This is only an introduction. We can say this: wokeness is much less about race than about power. There will never be a shortage of persons who attempt to capitalize on heartbreaking incidents to advance their own agendas. Some incidents will represent actual injustices; others, not so much.
Many reflexively believe that if an outcry goes up it is because there is substance in the complaint. We assume that people generally are honest.
But what if there is an entirely different moral paradigm operating, where facts are not facts? Where the modus operandi is creating “facts” to suit the outcome a group wants to achieve? What if the mission of the drivers of wokeness is to engineer a vast change in society which sometimes means acting out views of right and wrong completely different from what most of us expect?
Authors James Lindsey and Helen Pluckrose describe how ideas have sorted themselves out. They outline changes from the initial constellation of postmodern thought to its current form. They call this form “applied postmodernism,” highlighting two basic premises and four key themes:
The postmodern knowledge principle: Radical skepticism about whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism.
The postmodern political principle: A belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how.
1. The blurring of boundaries
2. The power of language
3. Cultural relativism
4. The loss of the individual and the universal (2)
This is the DNA of Woke. Let’s do some unpacking according to this understanding.
In woke, it’s not that there is no objective truth; it’s that it is mostly impossible for us to determine what objective truth is. In the absence of objective truth, society constructs its own “truth,” or what functions as if we could know it to be truth. This is social constructionism. Truth is not what we find ourselves situated in but is something “created” by humans. People (“social”) create a consensus (“construction”) about what the truth is. Often it is actually only a small set of people who frame the ideas and then attempt to imprint them onto society.
The second premise goes with it. Society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies. These are effectively automatic, almost an innate machinery, operating whether we want it to or not. Hierarchies flow from the fact of human interactions. This means that some groups are on top and some on bottom. The group on top decides what is and how it can be known. In other words, everything boils down to power relations between groups. One group exercises its power to oppress others. Its “way of knowing” oppresses other ways of knowing.
The four themes make sense when seen in relation to these two premises. Boundaries make oppression possible, and so blurring boundaries helps the oppressed. Male and female are clear categories, so blurring the categories relieves people of the “oppression” of categorization.
Language is all powerful, so it is imperative to control it and use to shape perceptions of what is real and what matters most. This is what stands behind the new wave of censorship and the canceling of those whose views are not preferred. As Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility notes, “the ability to determine which narratives are authorized and which are suppressed is the foundation of cultural domination.” (3)
Cultural relativism automatically accompanies this set of views. Everything is repackaged in terms of groups. In the absence of universal truth there is only truth isolated, local truth, truth in silos, for each cultural group. Each group has its own knowledge, and people from other groups cannot criticize, dispute, or disagree with the knowledge of another group. Individuals no longer matter, but the color or sexual practice of your group, do.
We’ll look more closely at this in future articles. For now, let’s return to the Protests in Ferguson. The protests there insisted that persons of color were being killed on an outrageous scale by oppressive white police.
According to Heather Mac Donald, the statistics tell a different story. There is no epidemic of white officers shooting black Americans. The June 22, 2020 update of police shootings for 2019 showed 14 unarmed black victims and 25 unarmed white victims. In America Police make around 10 million arrests each year. There are an average of 27 deadly weapons attacks on police every day (from a 2014 analysis). Meanwhile, African-Americans between the ages of 10 and 34 die from homicide at 13 times the rate of white Americans. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, the number of black Americans who wanted more police in their communities was twice as high as the percentage of white Americans who wanted it. (4)
In spite of numbers like these, Cunningham said
“We saw in Brown’s slain body the spirit of every black young person, under threat by systems that seem to feed on our downfall.”
It did not matter that he was in possession of stolen property, had THC in his bloodstream, wrestled with the police officer, or that he was not really shot with his hands up as protesters insisted.
What mattered was that a police officer from an “oppressor” group had killed an individual in an “oppressed” group. This framed the event as a manifestation of oppressive structure. It wasn’t about Michael Brown; it was about white supremacy. It was about the new paradigm, about group A allegedly dominating group B. In other words, it was about creating a narrative. Creating the narrative is about changing the culture. Changing the culture is about hierarchies and power relations. It is not about social justice; it is a constellation of ideas enacted to speed the dissolution of the already frayed fabric of society.
In case you wondered if they really mean it when they talk about defunding the police, the answer is yes, they really do. (5)
Black lives do matter, but whereas woke makes intersected (6) or minority lives matter more than the lives of the dominant group, Christianity says we are all in need of salvation through Jesus. Jesus died to emancipate every slave of sin. We are saddened by incidents of unjust violence and unfairness, but the reality is more nuanced than asserted in most claims of systemic racism. We should become aware of the deeply laid agendas which undergird the architecture of wokeness.
Our next presentation traces the shift in thought from the Enlightenment to the present. Applied postmodernism comes from somewhere. Exploring the woke danger, we’ll see this is not about the individual, free choice, an objective right and wrong, or justice; more broadly it is about what has been called a new secular religion intended to overthrow the Enlightenment values upon which present society is based.
Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
Notes
1. https://time.com/5647329/ferguson-police-brutality-activism-america/, accessed 2020-12-27).
2. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity (Pitchstone Publishing, Durham, North Carolina 2020), 30-42, 59-61.
3. Robin DeAngelo, White Fragility, 110-111.
5. See Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, Critical Race Theory, third ed., New York University Press, 2017, pp. 120-124. Also, Angela Y. Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, Haymarket Books, Chicago 2016, “Michael Brown is just the tip of an iceberg. These kinds of confrontations and assaults and killings happen all the time, all over the country in large as well as small cities. . . . The major challenge of this period is to infuse a consciousness of the structural character of state violence into the movements that spontaneously arise.” (15-16). “Abolishing the prison is about abolishing racism.” (23). “At this point, at this moment in the history of the US I don’t think that there can be policing without racism. I don’t think that the criminal justice system can operate without racism. Which is to say that if we want to imagine the possibility of a society without racism, it has to be a society without prisons.” 48. “We need to reimagine security, which will involve the abolition of policing and imprisonment as we know them.” 90.
6. I’ll be explaining intersectionality soon.
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