Like many people, I have long struggled to fully understand wokeness and identity politics.
Now, as a half-Spanish / South American female from a rural, lower-middle-class background, not being judged on or confined by my identity sounded like a pretty good deal. After all, my grandparents and mother had ended up in Canada because the quota on Hispanics had already been reached in the United States the year that they emigrated. South Americans and southern Europeans were still an intentionally limited commodity at the time.
Then there was the sexism. ‘Life’s a bitch and then you marry one’, the gentlemen of the town philosophised, while magazines at the grocery check-out offered tips on being ‘the best sex of his life’ (inspirational stuff), and t-shirts advised men to look for someone who could be ‘a cook in the kitchen and a hooker in the bedroom’ (images included).
As all of this may indicate, I don’t really have a problem with woke per se. It’s not like I believe there’s some acceptable level of racism or sexism out there.
The problem is what I call ‘woke-jacking’ – that is, the doctrinal and close-minded perversion of wokeness that too often gets all the headlines. Unable to cope with even the slightest level of cognitive dissonance or uncertainty (both of which traditionally accompany breaking new intellectual ground), woke-jackers tend to take certain ideas and reduce them to oversimplified, often self-serving, gibberish. Many ideas have suffered at the hands of woke-jackers, but probably the one that has suffered the most is identity politics.
Read the full article on Spiked here