Opposite of woke
ANYONE who disagrees with the right wing on culture or history is dismissed these days as “woke”.
However, on LBC, presenter Natasha Devon posed a pertinent question: “What is woke? I don’t understand it.” But then she and a listener had a Eureka moment: “The opposite of woke is racist – that’s it.”
Now culture secretary Oliver Dowden has signalled his attention to appoint people who are not woke on to the boards of Britain’s major museums and heritage bodies.
He wrote an article claiming “it is the Conservatives who are the party of culture”. Dowden stated: “But just as I’ve never hesitated to stand up for our cultural institutions and am working tirelessly to support them in their reopening tomorrow (17), I will not look on as people threaten to pull down statues or strip other parts of our rich historic environment.
“The tricky bit is putting ‘retain and explain’ into practice. So last week, a new Heritage Advisory Board met for the first time to draw up new guidelines for heritage organisations on how this should
be done.”
He says “museums and other bodies need to have genuine curatorial independence. But independence cuts both ways. Heritage organisations should be free from government meddling, but the people who run them also need the courage to stand up to the political fads and noisy movements of the moment.
“And as national institutions, heritage organisations should take into account the views of the entire nation: the people for whom they were set up, and whose taxes pay for them. That’s why I want to make sure the boards of these bodies are genuinely diverse and not solely governed by people from metropolitan bubbles. I want a grandparent in Hartlepool or Harwich to feel as represented by their decisions as a millennial in Islington.”
I imagine the ideal candidate would be someone who believes the empire did more good than harm, and focuses on Britain’s role in abolishing the slave trade while overlooking the immense wealth it created for this country by trafficking Africans. That is a crude generalisation, but it is the opposite of woke.