The War on “Woke” is a War on Empathy, and It’s Working.
Empathy alone will not save us, but the lack of empathy will doom us. All great atrocities across millennia have grown in soil devoid of empathy. Empathy can be compared to a roux, the essential base that holds all good cooking together. Without a good roux, dishes fall apart; similarly, without empathy, necessary individual actions and systemic changes cannot occur.
So, why does there appear to be a coordinated attack on empathy? The answer is simple: empathy was making a difference. No one fights this hard against something that isn’t making an impact — the powerful demonstration on the Burnside Bridge in Portland, Oregon, on June 2, 2020, serves as a perfect example. Thousands of people from diverse backgrounds, though predominantly white, lay down for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in remembrance of George Floyd. Did all those who were there that day go back and fundamentally change their lives and eradicate systemic racism? No. But they did sound an alarm bell, heard loud and clear by those who prefer a complacent population over an “awakened” one.
Hysterical accusations of “indoctrination” echoed throughout the conservative media landscape, with pundits blaming educational institutions for teaching empathy to young White people. Forcing them to feel feelings like guilt or shame. So is empathy just another name for White guilt? No. However, let’s not throw the guilt out with the bathwater. Guilt is a necessary human emotion; anyone with no guilt also has no shame and will do anything. We all should have, at some point in our lives, felt guilty, even for things we didn’t intend but that hurt others. It can spur us to be better and do better. But empathy isn’t guilt.
Empathy is the bedrock of human relationships. It allows us to connect with others on a deeper level and respond compassionately to their needs and emotions. Specifically, it is the balance between what psychologists Daniel Goleman and Paul Ekman call Cognitive Empathy, where we take on someone else’s point of view and try to understand their situation or emotions without necessarily feeling those emotions ourselves, and Emotional Empathy, where we not only understand a person’s predicament but also feel with them and are spontaneously moved to help if needed. To be clear, “woke” is not solely a stand-in for empathy; it also represents Black, Hispanic, female, LGBTQIA, and anyone whom those waging this war do not believe should have a voice, influence, or leadership in this country. It’s also a corporate board that has one Black officer being called “woke.” And a historically White institution such as the Virginia Military Institute has those who believe themselves to be the victims of “woke” policies simply because a Black man has assumed leadership. Woke is cover for terrorizing drag brunches, insulting trans people, harassing LGBTQIA youth, and even forbidding young girls from speaking to each other about their periods, Google Florida.
A cardinal sin of “wokeness” is those who, until very recently, have been excluded from participating in the evolution of how language refers to them asserting their right to name themselves, to reexamine language imposed upon them. Writing in a tone similar to “You kids get off my lawn,” George Packer made a big splash in the Atlantic with his article on “The Moral Case Against Equity Language. Mr. Packer confidently states that “although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people. They are handed down in communiqués written by obscure “experts” who purport to speak for vaguely defined “communities,” remaining unanswerable to a public that’s being morally coerced.” This is deeply flawed reasoning, and it ignores several salient facts.
First, the “organic” development of language emerged from those who saw themselves as empowered to name others, places, and things. They renamed native landscapes, mountains, waterways, and ways of being overnight. They also created the very concepts of Black and White out of whole cloth to further a political agenda — the consolidation of White Supremacy — without input from those most impacted. Packer taking offense at this rogue reclaiming and self-naming and framing is as absurd as the play “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” in which the characters break free and seek to tell their own stories, oh the horror.
“All great atrocities across millennia have grown in a soil devoid of empathy.”
And this is what folks like Ron DeSantis in Florida, Greg Abbott in Texas, and Sarah Huckabee in Arkansas are fighting so furiously against. Ron DeSantis has said don’t let the fear of being called names like cruel, unkind, and racist stop you from being cruel, unkind, and racist and putting an end to the spread of empathy. This is curious because surely, he knows that as Captain G.M. Gilbert, an Army psychologist assigned to watch the defendants at the Nuremberg trials, said, “A lack of empathy, it is the one characteristic that connects all defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
But we need not only look to the past to see the danger of the war on empathy. In 2019 Zurich Insurance Group released a report titled “Decline in Human Empathy Creates Global Risks in the ‘Age of Anger.’ The report goes on to say that individual psychological and emotional problems can become collective concerns when loneliness and frustration meet populist and identity politics — an emerging reality in what is becoming known as the “age of anger.” To be sure, this is not our first “age of anger,” but the danger this age of anger presents is that it has the potential to derail our democracy, if not permanently, potentially indefinitely.
The irony here is that all of the aforementioned, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbot, Sarah Huckabee, and presidential candidate Nikki Haley, owe their current positions and opportunities to the very “woke” policies they decry as “dangerous.” Nikki Haley’s parents immigrated to the United States in 1969, four years after the passage of the “woke” Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. One of the main components of that act was to abolish the national origins quota and remove de facto discrimination against Asians, as well as other non-Western and Northern European ethnic groups, from American immigration policy. And the first job her father secured in the United States was at Voorhees College in South Carolina, a Historically Black College that only existed because America refused to allow Black people access to education based on race.
In 1984 when Greg Abbott was 26 years old, he became paralyzed from the waist down in a tragic accident. This meant he would use a wheelchair for the rest of his life. At that time, he lived in a world where “woke” advocates had been fighting for disability rights and the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for at least 20 years, trying to build upon the 1964 Civil Rights Act. These efforts picked up steam in 1973 with the passage of Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act, which for the first time, called the exclusion and segregation of people with disabilities discrimination.
When Greg Abbot was born in 1957, we used derogatory language to refer to those living with disabilities, and we didn’t have much hope for them or make room for them in the workplace or public life in general. But when he began his first professional job in 1984 and ran for his first office in 1996, the road he currently uses his wheelchair to navigate had been significantly smoothed over for him and others by those “woke” ideas he now fights to stop from spreading.
Sarah Huckabee was born in Hope, Arkansas, in 1984. Just 11 years prior, the situation faced by women in Arkansas was dire, according to a 1973 report on the “State of Women in Arkansas.” The study noted that there were “only two economic categories in which Arkansas women led men: unemployment and poverty.” Of course, 1973 was also a turning point; it was the year that the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade granted women the right to choose whether to bear a child. Moreover, it was only a year earlier, in 1972, that the Supreme Court in Eisenstadt v. Baird legalized birth control for unmarried individuals. Immediately after women gained the ability to decide when to have children, their fortunes improved in both Arkansas and the United States.
And as a White woman, Sarah Huckabee grew up in a world where one of the most impactful “woke” policies, Affirmative Action, has provided a disproportionate opportunity to women like her. Yes, that’s right, while they were originally not included in the first executive order on Affirmative Action, President Johnson amended the order to include sexual discrimination. Subsequently, White women have outstripped people of color in every employment category. According to Sally Kuhn, writing for Time Magazine, “While people of color, individually and as groups, have been helped by affirmative action in the subsequent years, data and studies suggest women — white women in particular — have benefited disproportionately. According to one study, in 1995, 6 million women, the majority of whom were white, had jobs they wouldn’t have otherwise held but for affirmative action.” She goes on to say that “The successes of white women make a case not for abandoning affirmative action but for continuing it.”
And Ron DeSantis. While truly deconstructing Mr. DeSantis would take a book, let’s try to summarize. Ron DeSantis is the great and great-great-grandchild of Italian Immigrants from Southern Italy. And when those folks arrived in the United States, there was rampant ethnic discrimination systemically built into the policies, practices, and ideology of the United States. In “How the Italians Became White,” New York Times writer and Editorial Board member Brent Staples writes, “Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As the historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, the newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines, and newspapers that “bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect.” They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses, and labor unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for Black people. They were described in the press as “swarthy,” “kinky-haired” members of a criminal race.” And further, Staples tells the harrowing and illuminating story about the real reason we celebrate Columbus Day, the horrific and brutal lynching of 11 Italian Americans in New Orleans Louisianan. This is an important part of our history that most have never heard of, and if Mr. DeSantis has his way, they never will.
So what changed the fate of Italian Americans? The extension of the concept of Whiteness to them was not initially guaranteed. The vestiges of “Little Italy” around the United States aren’t just tourist attractions but the remnants of the ghettoization of Italian Americans that one could argue only really changed after the upheaval of the Civil Rights movement and the passage of anti-discrimination laws in housing and the workplace that included religion and ethnicity. Law firms, realtors, and others overtly and covertly discriminated against Italian Americans but “woke” law and policies provided the assistance they needed to complete the transformation to “regular White people.” So if the Italians did it, why can’t Black and other brown people? Well, Whiteness, as the oldest political identity group, was never designed to include Black people, so no amount of hard work and industriousness would get us access to the full scale and breadth of those opportunities.
However, the undercurrents are still there, as evidenced by former President Donald Trump wondering aloud if he should refer to Mr. DeSantis as “meatball” Ron. But Mr. DeSantis was likely not too offended because as he starts his march toward authoritarianism, he too is using the classic maneuver of “punching down” at small, marginalized groups, trans people, drag queens, and the LGBTQ community as a ramp to eradicate the history of Black people specifically and whitewash the story of all others, including his own.
What the above stories demonstrate is that “woke” policies have had, and continue to have, a transformative impact on those for whom the system was not originally designed to accommodate. By extension, it also shows that the continued push forward, moving with empathy, has the potential to, if not remove, perhaps minimize the barriers that race continues to present. And that’s the very thing this so-called war is fighting against — stay woke!
