Illustration: Matt Kenyon/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Illustration: Matt Kenyon/The Guardian Opinion Protest Here is the news from the US: Woke 1.0 is over. But what did progressives do wrong? Nesrine Malik A movement with safety, dignity and equality at its heart may now be blamed for the rightwing backlash. But within it were principles worth carrying forwards
E very once in a while, the discourse gods send a tablet down to the people, announcing that a previous era is dead and a new age is upon us. Recently, it was the “ vibe shift ” – a post-pandemic change in culture that encompassed everything from fashion to politics. The vibe shift consolidated with Donald Trump’s second election, a harbinger of the end of fragility and of movements for racial and gender equality – a rejection of the long 2010s with their hashtags and pink pussy hats and women’s marches and protests. The vibe shift has recently been followed by a calling of time on what has come to be known as “Woke 1.0” – a term that represents what is now seen as a culture of hysterical overreach triggered by the momentary breakthrough of movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. “Woke 1 was crazy,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this month, quoting a New York City councilman. And there we have it, time to walk back some things said and done in the giddy heat of those moments. It was crazy!
This rush to the future away from what some perceive to be an embarrassing past groups together various disparate phenomena. But I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Woke 1.0 (or “peak wokeness” – I wish the gods would use less trivialising ways to refer to roiling social tides, but there we are) was about politics and culture and also about the behaviours and trends it triggered. It was about concrete problems: policing of minority communities, the right of women not to be sexually harassed or violated, the systemic racism and sexism that damaged both. And it was about reforming the cultural structures that created and perpetuated those systems; asking university curricula to expand and diversify intellectual sources, recognising the long shadow of glorified imperial histories, and updating institutions – from the media to the academy – in order to enfranchise change. None of this is “crazy”.
What did happen is that accompanying those movements was an adoption of postures and behaviours that signalled that one was on the right side. Some of it was performative, risible and low stakes; the black squares posted on social media and the taking of the knee in kente cloth. But some of it was more material in terms of tone, attitude and outcome. Some on social media made it their business to scold the language of others, others lost their jobs or reputations in cases that were questionable or even unjustified . A fixation on diversity and representation made a big song and dance about appointing minorities in high places, indulging the Joe Biden administration , reducing action to appearances.
A vast array of protagonists and platforms, all with different mechanics, are lumped into what is now being called an absolute “orthodoxy”. But what this part of the moment constituted was essentially two things. The first was a sort of mimetic fashion (rather than politics) that was adopted because that’s how trends work. The second was a storming-the-barricades sense that something that was too late to arrive, that was thought would never arrive, was finally upon us – an opportunity to mak…