To be woke is to be aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues, especially issues of race and social justice. But this concept has gained power because of its academic underpinning in the form of the fashionable critical race theory, and its which displaces reality with what is deemed politically correct.
However, the behavioural characteristics of wokeism, in giving expression to critical race theory, bear a remarkable resemblance to the practice and belief structure of religion. As practised over the centuries and in a myriad of beliefs, religion contains common elements that are now observed in the lives of the wokeist elite in many societies.
Associate professor of linguistics at New York’s Columbia University John McWhorter is one of those who have identified how the behaviours of critical race theory stalwarts go beyond followers of religion in that it makes specific cult demands not only on believers but on the whole society. In contrast, while Christianity has shed the pursuit of a theocracy, CRT's true believers drive hard for the submission of all. Late last year, McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America was published, and it continues to get attention in response to its relevancy in explaining the “catalogue of contradictions” exposed by practitioners’ responses to current issues.
McWhorter says that white people are proud of themselves for taking on board since the 1970s the social precept we should not only get rid of racial segregation but we should not be prejudiced, be a bigot. This has become a form of self-righteousness.
[That pride has] “slowly transmogrified into a kind of replacement for Protestantism where your grace is that you are not a racist. So you have white people who are ready to demonstrate this at the same time as you have black people who, after the civil rights revolution, are still haunted by insecurity because of how black America was treated for almost 400 years.
If you are a human being seeking a sense of purpose and security and well-being and comfort, you might choose the victimization complex. Any human being can do this but if you're a black person a particular way to do it is to exaggerate about racism and to found your sense of significance on being a victim of something now referred to abstractly as systemic racism.
So there are many black people who enjoy the condescension that comes from a lot of whites in treating us as these delicate creatures… .
We're not allowed to admit how much better things have gotten. There's a certain kind of person - and they are of all colors - where if you point to the good news, they don't want to accept it. It's unpleasant for them to hear how much better things have gotten and they're thinking that their job as moral actors is to find evidence to go against it.
That's a weird thing. It's probably unprecedented in human history for a group of people to not want to admit that things are better. We live in strange times, but that's what happened in the late 20th century in the United States.
Referring to the Calvinistic doctrine of certain people being predestined by God to be saved – the Elect – and others to be damned, McWhorter expands on why CRT, expressed as wokeism, has become a religion:
“The Elect” is my term for not just woke people … it's woke people who are mean; it's the nasty woke people; it's the nastiness that we've seen especially since last summer, during our so-called racial reckoning.
What I mean by the elect is they're people who seem to think of their purpose as being to demonstrate that they're not racist and to police the rest of us for racism and to defenestrate and shun people who they deem to be not anti-racist enough.
Which leads us to “virtue-signalling”:
So their idea is that they're doing something that's maximally good for humankind. To battle power differentials and especially ones about race is the paramount goal of the concerned human being. Everything is supposed to be centered on that and this is important. All people won't understand it but this is so important that it's okay to hurt people - and it's okay to do things that you wouldn't urge your own children to do - in the name of this larger good.
Prof. John McWhorter Source Although the people don't think about it, all of this is very, very Cultural Revolution, very Stalin, frankly metaphorically it's Hitler in many ways, but as with all of those people the elect today, the woke people who are okay with being mean in the name of wokeness, think of themselves as having come to the ultimate answer.
The parallels with religion, especially evangelical religion, are almost uncanny, especially given that most of these people look askance at Christianity in its more extreme forms.
But white privilege is Original Sin. The idea is that if you're white you're privileged and that will never change. Even if you're poor, no matter what you do, that's Original Sin.
The idea that we're waiting for America to come to terms with racism has no meaning. What are the terms? To come to terms with race doesn't mean anything. What it is, is the Rapture. It's that business of the End of Days and Judgment Day.
The reason that if a person says something that isn't sufficiently anti-racist they have to be chased out of the room or their job is because it's about heresy.
The parallels just go on and on, and so you have a clergy, you have writers who are looked to say things over and over again, many of which are very hard to square with reality.
Frankly people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, and now Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X Kendi, are priests of this religion. They don't think of themselves that way, they're certainly not saying it, but the way their writings are received is not as informational tracts but as scriptural counsel.
So it's a rather alarming movement because you can't reason with people who are working from religion rather than logic. That's not to say that religion is idiocy in itself, but a part of religion is that you sequester a part of your brain away from logic that goes from a to b to c.
You have to suspend your disbelief and the new wokeness - Electivism - is religious in that way and the people in question can't be reached, and that's scary given how much power they're beginning to amass.
McWhorter spoke about Andrew Sullivan losing his staff position as a writer for New York magazine because other staff reckoned him not woke enough, and Don McNeil being forced to resign from the New York Times because he used the forbidden “N….” word when speaking to a bunch of teenagers.
These Don McNeil kind of stories are now legion and the idea that he deserved to lose this job is not something that a critical mass of people would agree with. It's the Elect who think that he should lose his job.
What's going on is that the Elect get their way because we're all so deeply afraid of being called racist. It's a reign of terror. The reason that a person can get fired for some minor transgression like that, that nobody would ever have blinked at or would have given him a smack on the hand about just 10 minutes ago is because nobody wants to be called a racist on social media by these people.
If there was no Twitter there'd be no Elect - part of this is technology - you don't want to be called racist on Twitter. So the problem is that this fear means that people lose their jobs for no moral reason.
It means that educational institutions are being turned upside down, into these anti-racism academies that don't give people a real education and excommunicate anybody who questions it.
That's a serious problem right there. It's vastly transforming our whole intellectual, moral and even artistic culture, and what bothers me so much about it is that it's mendacious.
It's all about fear. It's not that these people are convincing most of society of these very narrow extremist and self-indulgent views that this hyper wokeism has. It's that everybody's just afraid of them and I think it's time that we stop being so afraid.
What's driving all of this are whites who have found their sense of purpose on showing that they're not racist and teaching other people not to, and […] a kind of black person who loves to paint white people as the enemy because, therefore, you are a noble victim – the noble victim complex.
Those together, when you have black people with that problem, and white people with their problem, [are] the Elect, and can that be powerful because those people like to call other people racists and once there's social media [in the mix] that can be really, really scary unless you're somebody who has the [peace] of not minding being despised. That's not most people.
All this is affecting the broader world culture, and while there is benefit in exposing racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination against parts of the human family, we must beware the nature of the reform movement so that the cultural winds nudge the manner of change in the direction of truth, moderation, patience and a sense of common cause rather than toward the nastiness, hypocrisy and posturing that spring from the true Original Sin that contends for control of our heart.
💢 Watch McWhorter interview here
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