“Wokeism,” Healing, and Transformation
How the new woke religion starts to heal, then ultimately harms
We all experience trauma, and we are all affected by it. Be they major events in our lives, minor, occasional or ongoing — suffering is part of life and cannot easily be shrugged off. Unfortunately we become reactive, and our reactions and reactivity have ripple effects.
Pain, untransformed, is transmitted.
Put another way: hurt people hurt people.
This transmission is often most powerful and tragic within families, but also spreads, like ripples in a pond, through our communities and ultimately society itself. We all share and live in a vast wave pool of action, reaction, trauma, anger, love, grace and tolerance. Every action has ripple effects, and Twitter makes them all stronger.
Transmission means that personal healing and growth can be viewed as happening over a period of generations, generally within a family, but also from mentor to mentee, minister to parishioner, and teacher to student. Of course each of us (hopefully) also heals individually as our families heal inter-generationally. Over time and at the largest scale, we have the opportunity to improve our country and the world itself if we choose wisely.
Which do we generate and transmit? How do we change?
To be hurt is unfortunate, if unavoidable. To be ignored, dismissed or blamed for one’s own suffering can lock that hurt in place and make a person even more reactive and harmful to others. Without encountering empathy, a hurt person will transmit her hurt through anger and reactivity at the individual level. Typically, this reactivity only builds as the hurt person, sadly, dismisses others much as the hurt person has themselves been dismissed.
Therapy, confession, blogging, and other practices all help us move past, contextualize and overcome our pain and reduce our destructive tendencies. Empathy in these contexts heals us even as a mother soothes an upset child. We all need to be heard. We all need to be valued and respected.
Wokeism, trauma, healing and being stuck
Therefore, Wokeism is a wonderful thing when it encourages people to acknowledge, hear, empathize with, and see another’s pain. When Wokeism moves a person to acknowledge and empathize they help a hurt person personally transform, and then transmit less suffering.
But unfortunately the benefit ends there when it could go so much farther. Dualistic, Manichean thinking in terms of oppressor/oppressed binaries shift the woke from empathy to judgement very quickly. Wokeism is color-coded, political and competitive where it should be universal and human.
The understandable is not always acceptable
Wokeism acknowledges (or urges us all to acknowledge) others’ suffering, but then, unfortunately, tells hurt people and groups that their reactivity and anger are acceptable.
I highlight acceptable here to distinguish it from understandable or justified. An angry, reactive, oppressed person is most certainly understandable. To understand is the essence of empathy: even a person who does something we disagree with or abhor is a human being, and we can empathize with them. We always have that same shadow within ourselves, and can feel how we too could have gone down that darker path. We know them to the extent we know ourselves, and love them to the extent we forgive ourselves for our own darkest thoughts.
Consider: An abused child who grows up to abuse their own children is understandable but their actions are not acceptable. A victim of sexual trauma who goes on to victimize others actions are also unacceptable. A person subjected to racial prejudice who burns a building or even lashes out with reverse racism’s actions are (I would say) also hard to accept. A person with little hope who breaks into the US Capitol performed (I would say) an unacceptable action.
Or watch this video. A hurt person is lashing out. We all have bad days, but in her other writings she also passionately defends her actions and justifies herself, suggesting she has internalized the mindset shown in the video. We can all empathize with her, and I wish we would also tell her that this is not the path, and that we don’t support it even if we understand it as the transmission of pain.
In a certain situation or on the wrong day, I could absolutely yell at people on the street too. Maybe I have? But I strive not to.
I love you all, my dear readers. I understand most of you. Your darkest actions and feelings, but for the grace of G-d, would be my own actions and feelings. We are the same.
(I actually may even accept your worst actions. I am looking for words here to distinguish what is best transformed through empathy, and where we most wisely help people by setting a boundary.)
Encouraging reactivity, anger and victimhood in others is weak and self-serving
It is actually hard to gently set a boundary with a hurt person, and tell them when they are tipping into the unacceptable. People look to us for agreement, and by far the easiest thing is to give it. We all know, I think, at some level, how we harm our friends and allies when we do that. We imply they are flawless and not responsible for their own lives and actions. It’s so much easier….
In the woke approach, the woke elevate others’ trauma rather than merely empathize with it. Then they demand absolution for their actions from their self-constructed filter bubbles of “allies.” It becomes manipulative, masturbatory, circular, and self-destructive.
If someone was called a racial slur, denied a job, or beaten, that is terrible. It is natural to become angry. Even depressed. But if they then stew in that anger to the point of being psychologically harmful to themselves or others because of it (even to members of the white, cis, male majority) it is unfortunate. At worst, the anger and self-justification become woven into their identity; we are complicit when we help them do that to feel comfortable or superior in our wokeness.
White fragility, insults and negativity
Hurt people hurt people. The dominos continue to fall after every action or reaction. If a white person is hurt, there is a precept of Wokeism where that suffering is irrelevant, and even evidence of racism. “I am not here to make you feel comfortable” the woke persons may assert. Even if someone is reduced to tears, they are dismissed as “white tears.” The idea that whoever is upset, reactive and defensive is flawed and harmful (fragile, toxic, or racist) misses the point. Wokeism sees the pain cycle and transmission, but gleefully makes it worse, rather than empathically interrupting it.
So another domino falls.
Empathy works best in two directions
“Remember: to hate, to be violent, is demeaning. It means you’re afraid of the other side of the coin — to love and be loved.”
— James A. Baldwin
Wokeism encourages empathy toward the oppressed, but fails when it demands contempt toward the oppressor. This too is understandable, but not justified. Consider the impact: contempt is the antithesis of empathy, and dehumanizes when there was an opportunity for healing.
In reality, we are fighting a cyclic wave of recrimination and anger, not a lack of intellectual understanding. So the next time someone seems upset, please don’t explain white fragility to them. Take their reaction to heart. Empathize as this is essentially the same fragility and the same hurt you have in your own heart. Remember the positive: they are reacting negatively because of their underlying sense of themselves as a fair and loving person. Reach out to and nurture that fairness and love, ignoring the reactive noise. Give up the cheap pleasure of tearing another person down.
Be the change you want to see in the world. Have space, empathy and understanding for another person, even one you disagree with. They are also you, if you have the strength to peer into your own heart and see them there.
