On the idiocy of the white 'woke' white-wash

Americans are oppressed by guns and jails, but their activist liberal elites have been awakened to the astonishing truth that they only seem to be oppressed by pronouns.

Guns will be used in whichever ways, but you can watch your speech and what you said had better be right, or else. Maybe you will be fired and told that the space that is opening up for you by virtue of your rebellion or insouciance to the demands of right-thinking authority is a prison or a place like it.

President Biden thinks (he said this in one of the debates during last year's election campaign) that poor Black people are oppressed because privileged white people say things that hurt their feelings. Aren't you glad, my friends, that he cares about you? Now an army of 'woke' middle-class liberals armed with speech codes will see that all such micro-aggressions are ferreted out. For while 'woke' originated in Black American dialect to mean something like 'aware of how much oppression we have to live with', it has come to be used by mostly white liberals to mean something like, 'possessed of an enlightened higher consciousness that, in being thought politically correct, signals the virtue of those who lay claim to it, while being intolerant of everyone whose virtue seems deficient by the high standards they are waving'. The woke consciousness in this sense is nothing new, and consists largely in a kind of kosher for liberals, a purity code that indeed is partly dietary (vegetarianism as morally mandated) and largely about various aspects of manners and propriety including in speech.

In 2014, there were almost simultaneous protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and across that state at the University of Missouri in Columbia. One group wanted speech codes, the other was the site of invention of the slogan “Black Lives Matter” - because they did not want to be killed by cops. Those who want campus speech codes are mostly elite university students who are on edge for other reasons, understandably and in ways that should motivate the rest of us to support some of their needs and demands. Only there was something of a displacement, so that instead of threatening economic conditions, including the use of massive student loan debt to finance educational opportunities that are needed partly to pay those debts, and the economic insecurity to which most Americans in the lower 99% are or can be subject, some people were claiming that they were oppressed by uncomfortable speech and things like it. White student aspirants to upper-middle-class corporate and professional jobs were targeted by their fellow students, and sometimes by themselves, as deserving the blame for the social problems experienced by their presumptively (even if often in fact) less privileged “person of color” classmates.

Our left-liberal or 'progressive' politics is essentially a mapping relationship that refers outrage about real injustices to puritanical moral codes of right speech and manners. In so doing, it maps left-wing desires onto center-right solutions. The Democratic Party has for decades functioned largely as such an operation.

The speech policing will not likely have much effect on how many people are killed in America. It may not have much effect either on how many people do not have the nice corporate office or sales jobs where what your neighbors say to or around you can be policed. Some of the people who don't have such protections live in segregated environments and some of them don't have a job of that or any other kind. They may suffer unjustly, as many of us believe they do, but minding your manners and speaking politely probably will have close to zero effect on any of this. That doubtless is why such notions have aroused so much sound and fury.

A certain middle-class consciousness is largely defined by a fear of falling. If you don’t stay caught up in various ways with the demands of being in the privileged (university-educated, professional/managerial) class, you could fall and then be subjected to a miserable life. Unemployment, poverty, debt, prison, parole, medical supervision as social control, etc. No one in America who isn’t poor can want to be, if they are not a fool, and this is the dark secret of the middle class. If you fall and find no safety net, or you fall through one of its holes, then you may be really in the shit, horribly. This is one way people are kept controlled.

Often ideological discourse exists in inverse proportion to its utility for solving any of the problems this discourse is designed to conceal while leaving exposed to plain view.

The idea of a black minority oppressed by a white plurality, or a female minortiarian subjectivity oppressed by society’s other half, these notions are displacements. For the real political opposition that matters today has to do with capitalism, not white or male supremacy. Evidence of this is that it is readily possible to envision the absence of such hierarchies and supremacisms, but not to imagine the end of capitalism, and that is what must be imagined. To the extent that an oppositional politics is implied or needed, the opposition that matters is between the super-rich who are the principle beneficiaries of the world’s economy and the leading force in a system that works to their benefit, and the rest of us. Bring back the Occupy Wall Street discourse of the 99% and make the discourse of opposition to racial oppression, including violent militarized policing and mass incarceration (and medicalized social control) part of this!