Nils Gilman Profile picture
Aug 22, 2019 13 tweets 3 min read Read on X
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.
1/
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.
2/
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.
3/
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.
4/
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.
5/
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).
6/
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.
7/
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.
8/
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?
9/
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.
10/
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).
11/
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.")
12/
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.
13/

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More from @nils_gilman

Jul 19
I think most of my friends in academia haven't really wrapped their head around what is coming down the pike if Trump gets a second term.

A brief 🧵
First off: universities are likely to be in the direct cross-hairs of a second Trump administration, aiming to defund the perceived power center of the “cultural Marxist” opposition to Trumpian neo-Know-Nothingism.

Think what Chris Rufo is doing in Florida, at national scale.
Stripping NGOs with more than $5B in assets of their nonprofit status would be a first step—this would be popular in several ideological quarters—but the larger strategy would be to perform a “cashectomy” on universities, especially humanities and social science departments.
Read 6 tweets
Mar 24
There is no discipline that hates itself more than anthropology (and rightly so). A brief thread:
The origin of the problem began with what was at first a crucial and good idea: that all human groups are equally imbued with “culture” that defines and integrates those who belong to it. But this initially good idea over time developed an unfortunate consequence…
Cultural relativism, as it became known, was effective at pricking the (often racist) idea that only some people (mostly, the upper classes of northwest Europe) had capital-C Culture, whereas everyone else was culturally inferior — a barbarian or a savage.
Read 8 tweets
Sep 22, 2023
It’s really not hard to define “woke” — it’s “social justice”-focused culture warriors, e.g. people who seek to disrupt the hegemony of patriarchal, heteronormative, white-centered institutions — especially by policing cultural codes of various sorts. lareviewofbooks.org/article/critic…
By contrast, the central focus of “the left” is about *promoting economic leveling.*

Both left and woke aim to de-privilege incumbents — which is why the party of incumbent power restoration often conflates them — but their social ontologies of privilege are radically different.
The concept of “intersectionality” was invented quite precisely to bring these orthogonal political ontologies of oppression and liberation into, if not alignment, then at least productive, collaboration-oriented dialog. YMMV on how well this has worked.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 3, 2023
What are "planetary politics"? A thread:
The basic units of politics frame who belongs to a political community, which in turn define what Chinese political philosopher Zhao Tingyang describes as “what sorts of political actions and political problems are possible or impossible.”
Political units establish the limits of politics in two senses: in a jurisdictional sense, they define where, who & what is ours to rule (and who & what is someone else’s); and in a conceptual sense, they outline what counts as politics, that is, what questions are up for debate.
Read 25 tweets
May 20, 2023
Beijing is about to discover, just as DC did in the 1970s/80s, that loans to the Global South for infrastructure, made during a time of low real interest rates & a commodity boom, are not going to be paid back. As before, this will be painful for everyone. fortune.com/2023/05/18/chi…
This is why I’ve been saying for years that BRI is less of a dastardly plan that an act of supreme and pernicious foolishness
What’s truly incredible to me is that over the last couple of decades China looked very carefully at the postwar American approach to steering development in the Global South — which ended in disaster (I wrote a book about it) — and decided essentially to replicate it wholesale:
Read 10 tweets
Mar 25, 2023
So yesterday I had one of the hands-down weirdest experiences of my life. Bear with me, for a longish thread. 1/16
The setting: Fort Irwin, in the Mojave desert. Irwin is one of two main CONUS sites for training U.S. soldiers for land combat, which involves LARPing highly elaborated simulated combat scenarios. More on Ft. Irwin here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Irwi… 2/16
This was billed as a chance for a small, hand-selected group of us to "observe" how simulated combat training takes place. (My group was interested in this because we're current studying the phenomenon & effects of "recursive simulations.")

But that's not exactly what we got...
Read 16 tweets

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