How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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And this is where we find ourselves today. The woke university has a biologically diverse but values-aligned student body taught by politically homogeneous instructors. Induction and ongoing training sessions reinforce the importance of holding the correct views and teach the correct terminology for expressing such views. Dissent is squashed, consensus insisted upon. The decolonised curriculum struggles with Newton, Darwin and Hume but embraces unconscious bias training and diversity workshops. Education can still be found but both academics and students have to search long and hard for it. Nonetheless, grades keep rising and certificates keep on coming. Attempts to reclaim the word ‘woke’ by so-called progressives have been largely unsuccessful and woke is today primarily used critically. Yet despite this, the goals associated with being woke not only still exist but have moved from the fringes of political life to mainstream thinking. Woke may no longer be the self-descriptor of choice, but its ideas underpin establishment decision making and corporate mission statements. The premise of all these books is that people are defined, first and foremost, by their skin colour. Needless to say, this is not an appropriate lesson for children. Far from teaching kids to treat others with kindness, tolerance and respect, pushing this worldview on them will only lead to a build-up of guilt and resentment among pupils of all races and ethnicities.

Dr Joanna Williams is a columnist for spiked as well as a regular contributor to The Spectator, The Telegraph and The Times. An academic she is the founder and director of Cieo, which provides a platform for research and debates that universities today dare not touch. Defenders of woke will always cloak their efforts to denounce and cancel their critics with claims of protecting freedoms of the vulnerable; opponents of woke see through this ruse, and must gird themselves for another long march if they are to reverse woke’s advance. As Williams reminds us forcefully, there is a great deal at stake. It’s hardly surprising so few of us encounter racism on a daily basis. According to the latest report from one of the most reliable barometers of Australian society, the Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion survey, that segment of the population with racist or xenophobic views is shrinking rapidly. Even during the long months of the pandemic — when Mr Tan insists that instances of race hate spiked — the Scanlon survey reported high levels of harmony in the community. But there was a puzzling spike of 20 per cent in the number of those who did think racism was a problem; a finding that baffled report author, Andrew Markus, seeing as how it conflicted with Scanlon’s findings in all previous years.

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Woke thinking provides those who run national institutions with a moral mission and a sense of purpose.

Everywhere you look today, people are fashioning a victim identity from the suffering of their ancestors. Well-off students say they bear the scars of the colonial exploitation of their forefathers. Commentators of colour write of how hard it is to ‘endure [the] historical inhumanity’ of slavery. Unable to find a convincing case for victimhood in their own comfortable, learned lives, they plunder the agony of their ancestors instead. Biden’s doing something similar. A gushing CNN piece on his visit to Ireland says his ancestors’ pain left an ‘indelible impression’ on him. He is seemingly haunted by the image of the Famine-era ‘coffin ships’ that left Ireland for America, so called because so many of the passengers died en route. In his memoir he even refers to life’s difficulties as ‘the Irishness of life’. These books are about politics, not literature. Read Woke is about promoting a way of thinking steeped in crass understandings of identity, victimhood and social justice, not introducing children to beautiful language, aspirational characters and morally complex situations. When such books are promoted by schools, as is the case in Scotland, this is indoctrination, not education. Meanwhile, the lecturers’ union, UCU, fails to protect members who are targeted by woke mobs of academics and students. In response to the government’s proposed Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill, UCU said: ‘There are serious threats to freedom of speech and academic freedom from campus, but they come from the government and university managers, not staff and students.’ It would undoubtedly be better not to have academic freedom policed and enforced by a government that shows scant regard for the importance of free speech and, indeed, little understanding of what academic freedom actually entails. But when so many in our universities are intent on denying there is even a problem, we cannot underestimate the monumental scale of the cultural change that is needed. For the Times , then, what counts as news is not Read Woke but that in ‘ a move echoing the conservative culture wars’ and criticism of libraries in the United States’ uppity parents, questioning journalists and anti-racist campaigners have had the temerity to challenge the politicized reading material being provided to children. In September 2020, the University of Edinburgh renamed David Hume Tower ‘40 George Square’ after the philosopher was accused of racism. The university said: Hume’s comments on race, ‘though not uncommon at the time, rightly cause distress today.’ Clearly, staff do not see it as their role to explain to students, calmly and rationally, that if they cannot cope with mere mention of a globally and historically renowned philosopher then perhaps university is not for them. Far from it. Instead, the author of the statement accepts that students are ‘rightly’ distressed. This suggests that – in the face of Hume’s alleged sins – distress is the ‘correct’ emotional response. This begs the question: are the many people not distressed by the existence of David Hume Tower racist? Emotions seem to be as important as words in the woke university.One important difference between today’s elite and an older establishment is the readiness of today’s cultural gatekeepers to deny their status. Many figureheads of the new woke elite […] enjoyed middle-class, privately educated upbringings, yet they use their identities to distract from their social-class privileges and claim victimhood.” Joanna began her career teaching English in secondary schools and Further Education. She started working as a lecturer in Higher Education and Academic Practice at the University of Kent in 2007. She was Director of Kent’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education until 2016.

The values promoted by woke are today most associated with an emergent elite that is socially and geographically mobile, highly educated and social-media savvy. Woke may not be this elite’s self-descriptor of choice, but woke ideas underpin establishment decision-making and corporate mission statements. ‘Woke’ refers to the side in the culture war that denies it is waging a culture war, yet which repeatedly fires the opening salvos. From radical to mainstream This is a really good book – with smart writing and (despite the polarizing seeming title) a truly inclusive (classically liberal) message about the current stage of the culture war where cultural distinctions and criticisms have gone way beyond concerns of preference and taste to moral evaluations and proclamations on the right to even exist (ie. The Cancel Culture). Debate should be at the very heart of higher education. Keogh knows this better than her lecturers. ‘You have got to be able to freely exchange differing opinions otherwise it’s not a debate’, she says. But in the woke university, dissent is forbidden. All too often, students are expected to fall in line or keep quiet. Survey after survey suggests that most people do not identify as woke, yet woke thinking now dominates advertising, publishing, the media, civil service and our education system. Even our police and prisons are woke. As Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, director of the campaign group Don’t Divide Us, told the Telegraph : ‘This initiative is normalising politically radical and partisan beliefs. It will do nothing to help teachers teach pupils how to read, and has little to do with education more generally.’ She went on to advise schools to put Read Woke’s guidance ‘in the bin’.

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But while the cultural elite has rejected the label of woke, the values associated with being woke are more influential than ever. They have moved from the fringes of political life to the mainstream and now influence the actions of public institutions, national governments and private businesses. In the process, the meaning of these values has morphed and stretched. Some, such as ‘diversity’, have always been vacuous concepts, while others, such as inclusion, have been so expanded beyond their original application as to be rendered hollow. This is the first book published by Spiked, and well chosen as it is emblematic of their commendable determination to challenge enemies of free speech everywhere. With its moral righteousness and veneer of egalitarianism, woke ideology lends authority to the demands made by activists and those in positions of power. One of the many peculiarities of our times is that the people and organisations that are most woke often vehemently deny that this is the case. ‘There’s no such thing as woke ,’ activists and EDI officers alike intone, ‘just being a decent person’. Meanwhile, an identikit agenda that privileges identity over social class, changing words over the real conditions of people’s lives, and the pet-preoccupations of a tiny band of elite activists over the concerns of the majority, prevails. Woke: a catch-all term for everything left-wing and politically correct that manages to be, at once, both an instruction and an insult. A monosyllable descriptor for the politically virtuous but morally insufferable. A new breed of activism, so imbued with confidence that nuance and subtlety and shades of grey can be done away with – indeed must be abandoned – and replaced by censorship, cancelling and the closing down of debate. A language, an ideology, a grand narrative that only some possess and whose ownership demarcates the elites from the masses.