Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino
Cambridge University has been accused of holding a “woke inquisition” after one of the institution’s colleges dismissed a researcher over his alleged links with far-right extremists.
St Edmund’s College claimed that “Dr Carl Noah had collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views”.
“There was a serious risk that Dr Carl’s appointment could lead, directly or indirectly, to the college being used as a platform to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred, and bring the college into disrepute,” said St Edmund’s in a statement.
The decision follows the revocation of controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson’s two-month visiting fellowship by Cambridge’s Divinity School in late March, after he was pictured next to a man in a T-shirt reading “I’m a proud Islamophobe”.
Noah says he lost his post for challenging “left-wing sacred values”, while Peterson accused the faculty of siding with the “diversity-inclusivity-equity mob”.
With these two dismissals, along with the launch of an internal inquiry into the university’s association with the slave trade, Cambridge “seems determined to signal its fealty to left-modernism, or what African-American linguist John McWhorter calls the ‘religion of anti-racism’, the reigning ideology of our high culture”, says UnHerd’s Eric Kaufmann.
Kaufmann argues that Noah is the latest victim of “the guilt-by-association mob” and their “woke inquisition”.
But what is the history of wokeness? And is it problematic?
What is wokeness?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines woke as “originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice”.
The term is most frequently traced to an essay called “If you’re woke you dig it” by African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley that was published in The New York Times in 1962, though some have traced its use as far back as the 1940s.
Since then, the term has been widely used among black Americans, but it took on particular prominence during the beginnings of the Black Lives Matter movement. Through the use of the hashtag #staywoke, activists issued a call to arms against the various racial injustices occurring across the globe.
The term gained wider prominence through its use in popular culture such as the song Redbone by Childish Gambino, aka Donald Glover.
Today, however, woke is most commonly used as a pejorative term, or in a joking sense about any vaguely enlightened act.
Although the term originated from a racially political movement, the “butt of many ‘woke’ jokes seem to be white folk who care - or seem to care - about ethnic minority issues”, says Metro.
Words “that begin with a very specific meaning, used by a very specific group of people, over time become shorthand for our politics, and eventually move from shorthand to linguistic weapon”, says NPR’s Sam Sanders. “Or in the case of woke, a linguistic eye-roll”, he adds.
Is it problematic?
One of the arguments that Kelley made in his 1962 essay was that once words used to define certain aspects of blackness are adopted by a white mainstream, they lose their value.
In 2016, journalist Amanda Hess raised concerns that the term woke had been culturally appropriated. In an article for in The New York Times Magazine, she argued: “The conundrum is built in. When white people aspire to get points for consciousness, they walk right into the cross hairs between allyship and appropriation.”
Elijah Watson, news and culture editor for hip-hop site Okayplayer, told NPR that the word “was something that we were taking seriously and then it kind of transformed into something ironic and then it became a meme and then it became a trademark”.
After writing a definitive history of the term, Watson says he no longer uses it. He compares the co-opting of woke to the way that music steeped in black tradition moves through mainstream culture.
“We made jazz, we made rap, we made all these different things,” Watson says. “It’s sad to say but we’re used to being taken advantage of and to have things stolen from us. But at the same time we’re quick to evolve and adapt because we need to in order to survive.”
But “the more woke is used as a slur, joke or shorthand to mock the hypersensitivity of the left, the more we need it”, argues The Guardian’s Chitra Ramaswamy. She adds that when she was a child, “there were no words for any of this, but the microaggressions, triggering and misogynoir went on regardless”.
In an opinion piece for The New York Times, David Brooks says that while “it’s always good to be more woke”, wokeness “jams together the perceiving and the proposing”.
In fact, “wokeness puts more emphasis on how you perceive a situation - how woke you are to what is wrong - than what exactly you plan to do about it”, he writes.
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