What is ‘Wokeness’? A Response to Bishop Barron
Recently, Pablo Kay wrote an article “The Ones With the Answers” in the May issue of the Angelus. It is an important topic that is relevant to the lived experience of Catholic around the world and is especially pertinent to the people of Los Angeles. The article is an interview with Bishop Barron and focuses on the social teaching of the Catholic church. However, rather than relate the social teaching of the church to the possible overlap of movements typically categorized under ‘woke culture’, Bishop Barron mischaracterizes it and misses an opportunity to connect with a growing base of Catholics. “Wokeness” typically includes movements such as Black Lives Matter and Metoo and highlights systemic inequality in all levels of society.
Bishop Barron recently wrote five critiques of ‘wokeness’ ideology. But as a prelude, he describes ‘wokeness’ as subscribing to the philosophers: Marx, Nietzsche, Sarte Derrida, and Foucault. Let’s begin with Marxism. James Lindsay, author of “Cynical Theories: how Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody”, describes ‘wokeness’ as a “fusion of the critical theory school of neo-Marxism, which is a form of identity politics, and radical activism that has a very particular worldview that separates the world into liberationists versus oppressors or oppressed versus oppressors.” Bishop Barron’s definition seems to be on par with Lindsay’s so I will engage Lindsay’s point as Bishop Barron’s.
It can be reductionist to think of neo-Marxism as simply a classification of oppressors and the oppressed. Rather, ‘wokeness’ can be seen as an active verb that seeks to reveal injustice in society. It is worth mentioning that ‘wokeness’ is usually a term used to trivialize the movement to expose systemic oppression in society and is typically used to diminish its endeavors. The term ‘Systemic’ here indicates racism that is ingrained in nearly every way people move through society in its policies and practices. We can see systemic racism in America in a number of ways. First, it can be seen from the perspective of employment before the pandemic. According to Business Insider, “since the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdowns across the country triggered a recession starting in March, employment for all racial groups has fallen dramatically, and fewer than half of all Black Americans had a job in April and May.”[1] Another study shows the following data from 2009 during the Great Recession:
Almost a quarter of the African-American population in the U.S. is living in poverty. In March 2009, the unemployment rate among African Americans was 55% higher than the national rate and African Americans had the highest unemployment rate of all racial/ethnic groups. The recession has been especially devastating for black men, who have seen nearly a 9% rise in unemployment since November 2007. The economic status of African-American families has been threatened due to the subprime lending crisis as many have lost their homes or currently face foreclosure. Many African Americans continue to face an affordable housing crisis in communities with quality schools and services (Congressional Back Caucus Foundation Inc.,2009:5; De-Navas-Waltm Proctor, & Smith, 2008; Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009).
One could ask why this it and could easily write this off as simply a symptom of the African-American people, that they are justly deserving of lower employment due to poor decision-making. Being ‘woke’ means not settling for easy answers lest we fall into fallacy. The Brookings Institute names three possible causes that are worth considering. One cause is a series of proximate causes: Education, skills, and work experience.[2]
It is generally known that African-American men graduate at a lower rate than white men. “For instance, data on bachelor’s degree (BA/BS) attainment by race and gender in 2019 show that .24 and .28 have such degrees among Black males and females, ages 25 and over; comparable percentages among whites are .36 and .37. If adjusted for undercounting and incarceration among Black men, the gaps between them and the other groups would be higher.”[3] The question is, why? Why do African-American men graduate at a much lower rate than other groups?
For this, we can look to the Economic Policy Institute. In a study, it shows that a lack of school integration will lower standardized scores, bolster segregation by economic status, and widen the performance gaps between white and black students. According to the study, “black children are five times as likely as white children to attend schools that are highly segregated by race and ethnicity”[4] and that “black children are more than twice as likely as white children to attend high-poverty schools.”[5]
Now I want to stop here for a moment. The next logical question might be why black children are going to impoverished schools. That would likely lead to a whole slew of other situations that would beg further questions about systemic racism and home ownership amongst African-Americans which is notably much lower than white Americans. One could look at the higher incarceration rate of African-American men in the United States or higher rate of police brutality of African-American men. I have not even begun to talk about the history of racism in the United States that has been behind laws like the ban on cannabis or inter-racial relationships or Operation Wetback and how these things affect large populations for future generations by interrupting intergenerational wealth. Note here that I have not even gotten to the second possible cause for high unemployment among African-American people!
Being ‘woke’ is being alert to all of these injustices which takes us to another term that is popular now, equity. While equality by itself can be distributed like a blanket across many social groups, equity takes into account historical marginalization as a means of properly distributing policy that proportionally helps out these groups.
Bishop Barron says that ‘woke culture’ is concentrated on equality of outcome and not opportunity in his interview, yet nothing I have said thus far has demonized anyone. In hoping for the American dream, there are those of us who have more privilege than others and it would be disingenuous to deny that things like our ethnicity, gender, race, sexual orientation, height, weight, or accent do not influence our opportunities in life.
Being concentrated on the equality of opportunity is about being concerned with these things not being an impediment to the American dream and does not rely on the philosophies of Marx, Nietzsche, Sarte, Derrida, and Foucault, as Bishop Barron says. To me, this is a complete mischaracterization of these social movements and its origins. Bishop Barron bases this on the premises that ‘woke’ culture reduces everything to oppressor and oppressed, relativizes moral value, overly concentrates on racial categories, falsely claims that free market economy defends the privileged, and that it pushes equity of outcome. In response to the free market defending the privileged, one need only look at the wealth and employment disparity between African-Americans and white people. An article by the Washington Posts points out:
“The empirical record thus reveals not just the substantive vacuity of the core economic assumption, but an even deeper analytic mistake. When economists assume that what we’re seeing in normal times is an acceptable baseline, worthy of maintenance by economic policy, we are accepting a set of persistently unjust outcomes along racial lines. The current model embodies and implicitly accepts all the above disparities (and many more, e.g., incarceration rates) as consistent with an equilibrium that the dutiful economist must strive to maintain.”[6]
When an economic system reveals disparity at almost every rung of the American dream ladder and you also believe that every person is equal, then an economic system that shows incredible gaps between groups, especially if these groups have race in common, needs government intervention. A free market economy that drives up homes up to $900,000 on average while forcing evictions across the country on people who can’t afford the higher rent absolutely defends the privileged while also contributing to the growing homeless problems in California and the nation. Programs like Obama Care have helped in providing healthcare for millions of people who did not have it before but it cannot stop there. This is called equity and at the core of this attention to our neighbor is not Marx or Sarte, but Christ himself who bid us to do so or in Isaiah 1:17 “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, please the widow’s cause” or Zechariah 7: 9–10 “Thus says the Lord of hosts, Render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner, or the poor, and let none of you devise evil against another in your heart.” ‘Wokeness’ becomes the message of the gospel and absolutely resonates with “the voices of Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Pope Francis” as Bishop Barron says in response to Archbishop Gomez’s quote about social justice. Bishop Barron has missed an opportunity to engage with a movement that takes Catholic social teaching and allows it to be inculturated into today to be fully and authentically expressed with the gospel in mind.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/us-systemic-racism-in-charts-graphs-data-2020-6#the-employment-population-ratio-measures-the-share-of-a-demographic-group-that-has-a-job-and-its-been-lower-for-black-people-for-years-1, accessed May 10, 2021.
[2] https://www.brookings.edu/research/why-are-employment-rates-so-low-among-black-men/?fbclid=IwAR2JYZ1pRA0MyLR7pTlaI1-0VtlCtZCUcAi7J2y_1F0dKVzdyrfYwx7QoD0, Accessed May 10, 2021.
[3] Ibid.
[4] https://www.epi.org/publication/schools-are-still-segregated-and-black-children-are-paying-a-price/, Accessed May 11, 2021.
[5] Ibid.
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/07/07/built-in-biases-economics-that-sustain-systemic-racism/, Accessed May 16, 2021
