Woke and Wokeism

1) To be woke is to believe that there is "an invisible power structure" that has 'cis' White males at the top; your position in that power structure is set by your race, gender and sexual orientation.

2) Political, economic and cultural power must be targeted at correcting those "invisible societal injustices."

3) Begun as a "challenge to the system," Wokeism has now become the "system in America."

4) Wokeism has many deleterious effects:

a) To be woke is to reject "the idea of the individual having agency in their own lives"; instead, your race, gender and sexual orientation "determine who you are and what you can achieve."

b) A woke society is a fearful society: "A culture of fear" has "replaced our culture of free speech in America."

c) A merit standard for admittance, employment and promotion is rapidly being replaced by a victim standard.

d) People are increasingly divided: "We lose our ability to become one people": the "sacred places that can bind us together... the companies where we work, the churches where we worship, the universities where we learn" become a political bastion for advancing "this race and gender and sexual orientation-based view of the world." Thus "We lose those spaces where we otherwise used to come together":

e) Whites can look to a future as "permanently powerless scapegoats": America's great historical figures will increasingly be seen as "losers who had labored for a collapsed and discredited cause." Because of slavery Whites will have "no basis for making claims in the public sphere."

Helen Andrews is senior editor at the American Conservative. Extrapolating from the permanent guilt of White South Africans over Apartheid, Andrews sees the same future for American Whites over slavery. This is "what Black Lives Matter" and "The 1619 Project" have in mind for White Americans.

BLM and 1619 advocates embrace the moral certainty with which we condemn Jim Crow and extend it to everything White Americans have ever done until - like White South Africans - we will "feel grateful just to have our continuing presence tolerated."

White Americans can never look forward to a day when they are "no longer blamed for everything that goes wrong in their country." As slavery "recedes into the past, its role as a political explanation grows... every ANC [Democrat] politician blames lingering racial disparities on the legacy of racism."

"So white South Africans will never achieve any political power no matter how hard they try, and they will never cease to be blamed for the country's misfortunes. That is the very definition of a dead end... the most South African thing about our [America's] politics is the current effort to push White Americans into that same position as permanently powerless scapegoats."

Woke, Inc.: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam(2021)

Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence (2022)