Thread by @nils_gilman

A thread about rightwing backlash to Woke.

What is Woke? Woke is, above all, an effort to end the traditionally-accepted bullying behavior of privileged people. Unfortunately, Woke, like all moralizing movement, is itself prone to bullying behavior.
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Let's start by accepting Woke's point of departure: there's one type of bullying that has long been accepted -- the bullying of women by men, of brown people by whites, of workers by bosses, etc. In short, the traditionally privileged bullying the traditionally excluded.
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Such bullying has run the gamut from physical violence to subtle demeanings. And it has been pervasive. Indeed, as the #1619project correctly suggests, such bullying is woven into the habitus of most of the institutions of American life. It sucks.
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The position of Woke is that such bullying needs not just to end, but to be terminated ('with extreme prejudice'). And here is where the problem begins; because of course, insisting on terminating something is itself an act of power, that often can lead to bullying.
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This is exactly what anti-Woke people see in the Christakis case at Yale, in the bakery case at Oberlin, in efforts at "deplatforming" in general, etc.: they see Woke leading a bully brigade.
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So one way to look at Woke is as a paradigmatic example of Nietzschean 'slave morality,' whereby the weak try to use morality to bully strong (e.g. the traditionally privileged -- the people who took for granted that it was good and right that they should be the bullies).
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It's made worse by the fact that many people in traditionally privileged groups were only privileged in one dimension of their lives (say, being white, but poor & bullied by their bosses). For them, having their one source of social pride undercut by Woke bullies is horrible.
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Especially when that undercutting comes comes in the form of them (or people like them) being (as they see it) bullied by the very categories of people they long got some palliative social satisfaction out of knowing they could bully.
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This is what WEB Du Bois meant when he talked about the "wages of whiteness" -- the way that being white served in America as a 'psychic wage' especially for poor whites who were otherwise quite put-upon.

And, after all, who likes getting their wages cut?
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On the right, this is usually expressed as, "I'm sick and tired always worrying about offending someone in some offhand way, especially when the consequences these days can be catastrophic." In fact, the material consequences are usually mild. But: Woke bullying is very real.
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What goes unremarked in this formulation, of course, is that such a situation is precisely the one that African Americans, gays, women, etc. have ALWAYS faced (with the consequence of mistake often being not just a dressing down, but a lynching or a rape).
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What Woke is, then, is essentially a leveling of the bullying playing field -- which, naturally enough, is odious to people who considered it natural that the playing field be tilted toward them. ("When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.")
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All this explains why people who hate Woke love 😡: every day & in every way he performs the rich white man's enduring right to be a bully -- it's been his schtick for years. The bullying is a feature, not a bug: and his ability to get away with it is what delights his fans.
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