That's woke! a phrase that's had more than it's fair share of use: from being too obsessed with sorting recycling to calls for radical reparations. Today woke politics is found across US and European parliaments and campuses, but how it hopes to achieve social injustices is firmly rooted in its views of discrimination. For its supporters, equal rights can be distractions for tackling inequality. What's more pressing are the roles of identities in society and how social levels are formed around these categories of groups in society. In this short article, I do my best to explain what being woke is, revealing why it's not just a misrepresentation of who we are, but an ultimately contradiction for addressing social injustices.
Identity Over Individuality
Categorise yourself, not just by your gender, race or sexual orientation but together with your lived experiences based on language, body size and other parts of your identity. This is how identity is used in woke politics, supposedly the most vital tools for navigation and understanding social interactions and knowing your place in the world among discrimination.
In this sense, equal rights are not equipped to address inequalities, identity categories trump universal protections and any reconciliation process needs to be ranked on groups of identities and expected experiences. This might mean receiving preferential treatment and willingly sidelining equal protections in law and following social rules expected reflect an obscure identity present.
These innate characters do play a role in how we organise ourselves, and recognising how they've been used in the past to challenge equal, legal protections is important. But that's not what being woke is about. Identity is used to characterise and classify, silencing personal facets and individual experiences, favouring grouped identity behaviours and assigned description of social preferences, wants and needs with limited thought for the universal legal protections.
Dangerous Identity Divisions
We mustn’t look far to recognise how identity categories deepen divisions as well as be used to justify exclusionary politics. Across the world, we've shown that when identity becomes the centre of political notes, it frequently scapegoats and legitimises shared understanding of basic universal claims to protections and rights . We shouldn’t forget how good we are as humans at marking 'them' vs. 'us'.
Certainly, there’s value in recognising shared and unique experiences of discrimination across various social groups. However, the identity-driven framework of woke-ism often pits groups against one another, fostering a sense of competition for recognition and resources.
This zero-sum mindset conveys a discouraging message: people from different identity groups are fundamentally unable to understand each other.
You are who we say you are!
So being woke is less about how you identify in terms of aspects that you may have chosen, built or decided to attach to. Instead, the woke movement ties belonging and social recognition to fixed identity categories. If you are black you are first and foremost black and tied to the experiences of being so. If you are a woman, no worries, your discriminatory experience of being so are already defined, explained and agreed upon. And if you are disabled, well that too comes with certain narratives that are propped up by not your personal experiences, but those based on the hierarchy prism of identity, and remember, nothing else!
This may resonate with those who define themselves primarily by the characteristics they were born with. But for others, this approach feels alienating. It forces people into rigid categories that often create stark divisions between “haves” and “have-nots.” In this worldview, identity is a non-negotiable framework for how one must engage with it. Those who resist these rigid categories often face backlash, accused of betraying their ‘assigned’ identity group or face being labelled as racist, inconsiderate and subject to being 'cancelled'.
What’s most troubling about this shift is how it often diminishes the importance of individual experiences in the fight against discrimination. Instead, the focus turns to broader, identity-based narratives that can overshadow the nuance and diversity of personal stories.
Belonging is more than Identity
I have told you why the woke movement doesn’t resonate with me, but what is the solution? Is it to ignore identity altogether? No, and that would be a step back too, but it’s to move beyond exclusively identity-based divisions. Instead, let’s focus on fostering a broader sense of belonging that goes beyond rigid categories used by the woke movement to define experiences of discrimination and build on existing freedoms and equalities that have taken so long to be cemented into our constitutional laws.
Interested in this topic? Want to hear more of my thoughts about it? Take a look at my academic article "Does the Woke Movement Advance Equality? A Critique of its Exclusion of Power-Holders and Class-Based Discrimination" which explores the above points in more detail!