The right wing’s ‘woke’ obsession could come back to haunt it
What, pray tell, is a “woke” bank?
Somehow, when House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) suggested that Silicon Valley Bank had collapsed because it was “one of the most woke banks,” his point, while nonsensical, was en- tirely clear.
After all, woke has turned into conservatives’ favorite word for anything they dislike.
This week’s bankruptcy brouhaha was typical. An army of partisans greeted SVB’s downfall with musings on, of all things, the evils of diversity, equity and inclusion. Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler called out the composition of its board (“I’m not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but . . .”); Donald Trump Jr. summoned causal relationships out of thin air (“SVB is what happens when you push a leftist/ woke ideology and have that take precedent over common sense business practices”).
None of this has anything to do with the actual cause of the bank collapse — rising interest rates, overinvestment in long-term government bonds or bank deregulation — but, of course, solving the problem isn’t the goal. The goal is to blame the libs. Case in shameless point: Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) insisted wokeness was to blame for the massacre of 19 young children in Uvalde, Tex. Apparently, we’ve stopped teaching “values” in our schools, and we’re teaching “indoctrination” instead. Really, indoctrination? In Texas?
Woke is the word these days, and conservatives are shouting it whenever they can — to the point that what exactly it’s supposed to mean, beyond “thing that I don’t like” has become a mystery.
How did we get here? A bit of woke history is called for. “Stay woke,” the Blues musician Lead Belly instructed listeners to his 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys.” Fast-forward to 1962, when the novelist William Melvin Kelley provided an uptown lexicon for out-oftouch New York Times subscribers: “woke (adj.): Well-informed, up-to-date (‘Man, I’m woke.’)”
The point was basically that you’re paying attention to what’s going on — which, in this country, has always included systemic racial injustice. That’s what protesters were getting at in 2014, after police officer Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. That summer, #staywoke turned into a viral hashtag.
This was where woke started running into trouble: with liberal Americans eager to establish their own credentials as well-informed, up to date and on the side of the oppressed. That’s how we entered the era of callouts, of cancel culture, of campus rebellions over “cultural appropriation” when dining halls served banh mi made out of ciabatta.
Quibbling over bread selection does less to effect realworld change than it does to invite mass mockery. The mindset had also become punitive. Suddenly, polite society was expected to follow a new set of norms that everyone was supposed to magically understand — this word is okay, this word is not — and if you messed up, you should maybe be fired.
This inability to distinguish between self-righteousness and righteousness, between virtue-signaling and virtue, created an easy target for conservatives. They could pounce on the word woke to write off a wide range of efforts to address inequality, serious and unserious alike.
Even the other side of the aisle winced at the sanctimony. See comedians such as Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle bemoaning political correctness because they feel it kills jokes before they have a chance to be told. See Barack Obama bemoaning how young people believe that if they “tweet or hashtag about how you . . . used the wrong verb,” they can feel good about themselves: “Man, you see how woke I was? I called you out.”
See the linguist John McWhorter, arguing that this mind-set has become a sort of religion whose adherents’ “devotion is less to changing lives for people who need help than showing that they understand that racism and especially systemic racism exists.”
Only now conservatives seem to be having trouble with distinctions, too. And they, too, are uninterested in changing lives for people who need help — or changing anything really. Where once they invoked woke in cases of cringeworthy selfcongratulation or over-aggressive word-policing, they’re now invoking it in cases of — well, in all cases.
Wokeness has come to mean everything and nothing all at once, and SVB is far from the only example. Observe rising right-winger Bethany Mandel, asked to define the word. “So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um . . . woke is something that’s very hard to define.” Finally, she managed, “It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression.”
If you think that’s gobbledygook, check out this helpful definition from former president Donald Trump: “You know what woke means, it means you’re a loser . . . . Everything woke turns to sh--.”
But putting a single Black person on the 12-member board of the 16th-largest bank in the country? Hardly the diversity cops running amok. Now some partisans are deriding Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark A. Milley as so woke he’s destroying the military because of a voluntary seminar on “white rage.” This is Mark Milley — an ROTC grad who exudes normie-boomer energy.
Mike Pompeo, when he was secretary of state, indicted wokeism as an -ism destroying the country, alongside, of all things, multiculturalism. Woke is now deployed against individuals, events and values that many Americans have at least some sympathy for. And perhaps with those Americans, right-wingers’ own obsession with wokeness will backfire just as liberals’ overly zealous displays of anti-racism risk undermining their aims. These listeners may, in the end, do what the preachers of today’s right-wing gospel want least. That is, they’ll stay woke.