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Who has the Best Takedown of Toxic “Wokeness”?
A dialogue on the best grounds for criticizing some social justice advocates’ tribal distortion of liberalism
Here’s a dialogue I had with Matthew, on whether Christianity or secular humanism provides a better basis for criticizing so-called “wokeness,” as in what’s largely become of the developed world’s pursuit of social justice, namely a toxic form of left-wing identity politics.
Benjamin
What’s Wokeness (in the pejorative sense), and what’s the best basis for criticizing it?
Wokeness began a century ago in the US as a righteous call for African Americans to be vigilant as they attempted to live in a nation that was still hostile to their interests, even after the Civil War had ended the institution of slavery. African Americans would encourage each other to “stay woke,” meaning they should recognize how subtler degradations and oppressions remained. The civil rights revolution in the 1960s showed that, indeed, systemic modes of discrimination had persisted at the state level since President Johnson’s reforms took legislative aim at them.
In the twenty-first century, other groups that saw themselves as victims of discrimination, such as women and homosexuals joined African Americans…