If you’re familiar with online left circles you’ll have seen the furore surrounding the CIA’s recent recruitment ad. If not, the ad in question shows a Latin American woman who speaks of being a “woman of colour,” a “cisgender millennial” with “generalised anxiety disorder” who is “intersectional” and refuses to accept “misguided patriarchal ideas.” She is shown walking slow-motion through CIA headquarters in a black suit and a t-shirt emblazoned with a pink feminist symbol. It ends with her saying, “I am unpologetically me, I want you to be unapologetically you. Know your worth, command your space. Mija, you are worth it.”
Inspiring stuff. It’s heartening to know that, regardless of race, gender, or physical ability, people can command their space in an organisation with a long and transparent history of corruption, torture, murder, and tyranny. Makes you feel seen.
As many people have already pointed out, the ad is indicative of the current political climate, where representation, symbolism and empty-headed rhetoric are what is now considered progressive; where women can ascend to the highest levels of government spewing meaningless platitudes about female empowerment whilst having backscratching love-ins with men repeatedly accused of sexual harassment; where military units dropping bombs on foreign countries can do so in good conscience as long as their helicopter is draped in pride flags; and where the response to all of these points is met with “So, you want Donald Trump to win!?”
The bigger argument — and one that has been long doing the rounds within left political movements — is of ‘woke’ culture and its excessive focus on identity politics being incompatible with addressing the more deep-seated, systemic injustices of class. After all, if an organisation like the CIA can so easily appropriate woke messaging for its propaganda, what does that say about the substantiveness of woke culture?
To be anti-woke is seen by many as being dismissive of identity politics as a whole. You are, to coin a phrase, a ‘class reductionist,’ i.e. someone who believes that the problems and social inequalities faced by marginalised groups pale in significance to the greater class struggle. As Adolph Reed Jr. argues, this is mostly bullshit and a conscious attempt to, once again, take the focus away from class:
“Class reductionism is the supposed view that inequalities apparently attributable to race, gender, or other categories of group identification are either secondary in importance or reducible to generic economic inequality,” says Reed. “It thus follows, according to those who hurl the charge, that specifically anti-racist, feminist, or LGBTQ concerns, for example, should be dissolved within demands for economic redistribution.”
Reed goes on to say that while there may be scattered elements of class reductionists on the left, there is no serious contingent that honestly suggests we just ignore the plights of minority groups and pretend that the injustices they experience don’t exist or should be downplayed or ignored altogether.
Given the left’s constant inability to reach a conclusion on any issue without tearing each other apart, there is a clear problem with language. Words mean different things to different people, and no one can seem to come to a consensus on exactly what wokeness is. For some, it simply means a greater awareness of the inequalities that afflict these communities. Because the CIA has co-opted wokeness is not grounds for dismissing anti-racist language, just that it needs to make a few small adjustments. That wokeness has become a bastardised version of identity politics, however, should be a greater cause for concern than many seem willing to admit.
The fact of the matter is, whether or not woke ideology is actually a thing, to the majority of the public who view it as a stick for the smug, scrubbed lot of the liberal intelligentsia to beat them with, it is. Whether its for failing to use the proper terminology for 90 different genders or for checking their ‘white privilege,’ elite language only serves to scold those members of society who don’t live up to the expectations of the enlightened.
We can’t just ignore the obvious delight in Donald Trump’s crass tweets, the success of inflammatory right wing commentators like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson, or ‘alt-right’ provocateurs like Steven Crowder, Milo Yiannopoulos and Lawrence Fox making a killing in rousing the anti-woke sentiments felt by many. Young white men in particular have found the strident humourlessness of woke culture deeply off-putting and, somewhere along the line, seem to have coalesced around a muddle of far-right figures and talking points prepared to take full advantage.
The success of Joe Rogan isn’t hard to understand either. While the more easily offended left/liberals clutch their pearls over his unrepentant lack of refinement and a few choice guests, his audience revel in a show that doesn’t obey codes of decorum or political correctness; having discussions with whoever he wants about whatever they want to talk about. And if you can’t understand the cheap thrill of that when self-righteous liberal take it upon themselves to cast judgment on who is and isn’t worthy of a platform then maybe you just don’t have the common touch.
It does nothing to debunk the argument — long used by conservatives — that left/liberals have a deep-seated contempt for the very people they pretend to care about. Liberals, of course, could give two shits about this, even as they pretend to, but leftists are supposed to want to win friends and influence people. To continue upholding a style of language that alienates the people is to continue to fail at bridging the gap that has long existed between them.
If activists have a hard time winning over working class whites then uniting people across the racial divide has been near hopeless. Despite numerous reports that the most effective political messaging points out wealthy elites use of race to divide poor whites and people of colour, there continues to be a distrust of class politics amongst liberals and, specifically, black liberals.
Political commentator Briahna Joy Gray points out that there seems to be a general view of the “black intelligentsia” that white people will not support any policy they believe black and brown people will ultimately benefit from. While Gray doesn’t disagree with that assessment, she is puzzled as to exactly what the plan is from there:
“If your argument is framing a policy as for black people actually makes it less likely to succeed,” says Gray, “is the plan to double down on doing that because you hate the idea that doing otherwise is to somehow ignore racism or to cater to racism? Is the plan to not pursue those policies at all, even though they help everybody that needs to be helped the most.”
Continuing to ignore universal policies and focus disproportionally on those that may or may not benefit marginalised groups — simply on the basis that those groups have been previously discriminated against — is not a winning tactic. All this does is serve the interests of the corporatist power structure that wants us all to keep fighting about race at the expense of making any real progress.
There is nothing new about this. Martin Luther King Jr’s oft forgotten Poor People’s Campaign sought to bring together poor whites and blacks in the shared interests of health, housing, education, and employment. It was largely successful — certainly more so than any other movement since — but after King’s assassination and state infiltration, it fell apart and is now relegated to a mere footnote in the history of the Civil Rights movement.
Obsessive focus on identity and what politics can do for you as an individual rather than for the collective is just narcissism masquerading as progressiveness. As Gore Vidal once said in an interview with ACT UP activist Larry Kramer, “Every state tries to categorise its citizens in order to assert control over them.” When politics becomes about you and your group rather than everyone, it can now be weaponised against not only other groups but against any dissenting members. Worst of all, as Gray asserts, “a simplistic view of identity can allow people of a particular political faction to wrongly imply that they speak for all members of their racial or gender group.”
We need to redefine identity politics and separate it from the phoney wokeness that has now sprung up in its place.
