Dark Woke

Contextual Quote

"The problem is that woke was always dark. One day the woke were emoting deeply about the wretched of the earth, and the next they were calling people “coconuts” or hinting they were race traitors if they failed to hew to the correct left-wing pieties. One day they were haranguing you for killing grandma if you eschewed mask mandates, the next they were fantasizing about throwing grandma down a flight of stairs for voting for Trump. It never took much to see through the displays of performative compassion. Concern for the vulnerable was always a battering ram used to dispose of rivals and enemies.

The real problem was never that the woke were too nice. It was that they abandoned all hope for what might be in order to compete for the crumbs of what is. They embraced a superficially kindly version of the neoliberalism that enjoyed unapologetic support on the right. Thus, “fat people are lazy and a drain on the health system” became “consumerism pressures the poor to make bad choices.” Both emanate from a longstanding disdain of the working class—a thinly veiled disgust at their podgy bodies and their ostensible moral weakness. Both recall the well-to-do wives of 19th-century factory owners who lectured their husbands’ workers about jollity and drink, certain they would not be so destitute if they spent their meagre wages on elite-approved callings.

In all their obsession with particularity, the woke also reproduced the racism and sexism they claimed to oppose. Gender fluidity gave way to the strange notion that any reluctance to adopt the trappings of stereotypical femininity or masculinity were signs that one was not “truly” a man or a woman. The reduction of morality to identity denied the humanity of people who happened to belong to various groups. The declaration, for instance, that “women are wonderful” hides an injunction that women must be wonderful in the ways they are described to be. Those who refused to play the expected roles and recite the expected views entailed by their identity were subject to vitriolic denunciations and violent threats.

Woke was always dark. What we are hearing now is its death rattle—and it’s probably good that it sounds like a chuckle. If the tragedy of what the left became for over a decade should end in a meme, humanity can at least laugh at itself as it leaves that past behind."

- Ashley Frawley [1]