Preface to the book by Nadia Geerts, Woke? The Tyranny of Victims, Brussels, Éditions F deville, 2024, pp. 5-11.
This book by Nadia Geerts constitutes a valuable contribution to the necessary critical approach to the Woke phenomenon, at a time when it began to be imported from the Anglo-Saxon world to spread to European democracies. In her well-informed investigation into this mass of political and cultural discourses and behaviors related to Wokeism, Nadia Geerts combines the perspective of a philosopher and that of a historian of ideas, her objective being to draw up a "diagnosis of the present", according to Michel Foucault's expression. She embodies the figure of a committed intellectual who, as an inventive heir to Enlightenment thought, knows how to resist political-intellectual fashions by casting a critical eye on the conformisms and ideological snobberies of the time, in particular those which, in the Woke left, claim with arrogance and vanity to be "radical".
In the United States, the term " Woke » ("awake"), borrowed from African-American slang and used since 2013 by activists of the Black Lives Matter movement, designates an awareness and an "awake" attitude towards the injustices, inequalities and discriminations of which "minorities" (ethnic, sexual, religious, etc.) are supposed to be the victims, but also towards the "privileges" from which certain categories of people are supposed to benefit (white, heterosexual, "ableist" men, i.e. non-disabled, etc.). The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it positively as follows: "Being actively attentive to important facts or problems, to racial questions and to social equality."
An activist " Woke ", called left-wing or "progressive", defines itself by its awareness of the various "systemic racist, sexist and classist oppressions" and its commitment to policies based on intersectionality, the objective of which is to achieve "social justice" which passes through "racial justice". This practice of permanent vigilance implies a legitimization of censorship. It is about silencing the bad subjects by denunciation, harassment and intimidation. The accused are pushed into silence and resignation, which amounts to normalizing the professional prohibitions of ideological deviants.
Woke culture, or "wokeism", is the identity and victim culture that has taken over from both the intellectual terrorism of the Stalinist era and the Anglo-Saxon "political correctness" of the 1990s and 2000s. Being vigilant or "awake" (Woke), this is, from a "woke" point of view, showing "healthy paranoia" (healthy paranoia), according to the expression introduced in 1968 by William Gier and Price Cobb in their book on "black rage" (1968) to characterize the mistrust felt by African-Americans in all environments where they feel like a minority and stigmatized or stigmatizable. In "woke" language, we call "micro-aggressions" words, attitudes or behaviors likely to be perceived as hurtful or offensive, because they are racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQIA+, fatphobic, glottophobic, Islamophobic, etc. As Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have shown in The Rise of Victimhood Culture (2018), the expression "micro-aggression" refers to ordinary or banal violence, imperceptible because it would be "systemic" or simply because it does not exist and belongs to the world of "wokist" fantasies. But, in this victim universe, the number of victims of "micro-aggressions" continues to grow, at the same time as that of professional activists coming to their aid in institutions and companies, for profit.
A contemporary form of sophisticated and pretentious stupidity, stupidity Woke is particularly recognizable by its paranoid, inquisitorial and purifying lexicocentrism. Its representatives strive to accomplish daily micro-linguistic revolutions, which consist of eliminating and replacing words to purify the language. This is how ecofeminists want to defend our precious "matrimony" and no longer the cursed "heritage", a sexist term emblematic of patriarchal culture.
One might think that this description is that of a bad dream or that this short story is just a joke. It is not. In these activist circles, humor is not the order of the day, laughter itself is considered an offense. A spirit of seriousness is required. How could one dare to laugh when hearing “LGBTQIA+” (and much more) spelled out? In the world of the “awakened” or the “reawakened,” populated by potentially offended people, we do not laugh, however imaginary the offended person may be. The neo-antiracist “awakened” militates in a new way: he does not prepare a revolution in order to realize a utopia, he accuses, denounces, calls for the exclusion, or even the social and cultural death of the guilty parties he designates. He aims for their “cancellation,” in the vocabulary of the “ cancel culture ". He also demands "reparations", in an insatiable way. He acts as a symptomatologist, an inquisitor and a purifier, in a state of permanent vigilance in a society that he perceives as structured by a few oppositions, the main ones being dominant/dominated, oppressors/oppressed and racializers/racialized. His frenetic practice of deconstruction leads him to profess a generalized relativism, which pulverizes the distinction between facts and fictions as between true and false. In this perspective, universalism, that is to say the demand for universality, is reduced to a misleading and toxic invention of the "white" West. This is one of the axioms of neo-identitarian anti-racism, this pseudo-anti-racism that is spread in the baggage of wokism.
Faced with qualified Wokist activists, the diagnosis is often uncertain: we hesitate between ribboned stupidity and hidden madness. What we call lack of judgment or impaired discernment arises between these two poles: conformist (or snobbish) stupidity and mental disorders, in which paranoid tendencies prevail, which are expressed by a feeling of persecution. The subject who believes he is persecuted translates his delusion politically by denouncing the injustice that strikes him. He can thus present himself as a victim of the "system" or of malicious groups, called "racist", "fascist", "extreme right", "Islamophobic", "sexist", "transphobic", etc. Among the targets aimed at by the accusers, we find the "secularists", denounced as "reactionaries", "racist" or "Islamophobic" by Wokist demagogues. However, a recognized victim identity, which places the subject in a "minority", constitutes today an asset in the media space as in the academic field. This is what largely explains the craze for victim ideology as well as its instrumentalization by Islamist or Islamo-leftist movements.
The destruction of language through inclusive writing is part of this program of virtuous decivilization, which is part of a utopian messianism promising its followers entry into a new world, without racism or sexism, even as it fuels all essentialisms. Deconstruction is the path which, through the erasure of traces of a cursed past, that of the only "West" criminalized because of its "whiteness", leads to redemption. It is this religious or para-religious character of "wokism" that John McWorther finely analyzed in his book published in 2021: Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. In Woke Religion (2022), Jean-François Braunstein has in turn examined, with rigor, the various aspects of this intolerant neo-religiosity, dangerous for freedoms.
Let us have the courage to continue to consider skin color as negligible or anecdotal, and not as an indicator of a substantial identity, an irreducible difference, a superiority or an inferiority based in nature or culture. This is the first gesture of rupture that we can make in the age of identity in which we find ourselves, where respectively racist and neo-antiracist imaginaries dangerously converge. The great American comedian Morgan Freeman perfectly formulated the non-identity antiracist imperative: "Do not speak to me as a black person, and I will not speak to you as a white person." To get out of the identity tunnel, we must strive to make ourselves indifferent to skin color. Well-thought-out antiracist ethics must begin with this act of will, whose horizon is that of republican universalism.
Nadia Geerts convincingly shows that Wokeism, an identity-based and relativist ideology, constitutes a threat to rationality, equality (which it chases away in favor of identity) and freedom of expression. She also establishes, with the required rigor, that it is an imposture, by the diversion and ideological corruption that it operates of the emancipatory aim, this beautiful invention of modern European thought. It thus illustrates a betrayal of the spirit of the Enlightenment.
Pierre-André Taguieff, research director at the CNRS, is a philosopher, political scientist and historian of ideas. He has published more than fifty works. Among his latest books: Postcolonial Imposture. Imaginary Science and Pseudo-Antiracism, Paris, Observatory Editions, 2020; Antiracism Gone Mad: “Systemic Racism” and Other Fables, Paris, Hermann, 2021; Why deconstruct? Philosophical origins and political avatars of the French Theory, Saint-Martin-de-Londres, H & O editions, 2022; Where is antiracism going? For or against universalism, preface by Isabelle de Mecquenem, Paris, Hermann, 2023; The New Opium of Progressives. Radical Anti-Zionism and Islamo-Palestinianism, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Leaflets”, 2023.
