Book review of Sylvie Pérez's book, Putting an end to Wokism. Chronicle of the Anglo-Saxon counter-offensive, Paris, Le Cerf, 2023, 366 pages. €24,50
Ending Wokeism : here is a good resolution and an attractive program, which will certainly be a consensus among the members and sympathizers of the Observatory of Identity Ideologies, while waiting – and hoping – that this imperative will become an essential part of any Republican political candidacy. This thick and very well-documented book tells the story of how the Anglo-Saxon countries (Canada, the United States and England), the first to be affected by wokeness, are organizing the counter-offensive to what has become a tsunami. As France is experiencing the wave with a delay of a few years, Sylvie Pérez suggests drawing inspiration from these initiatives to stem it. The book is simultaneously an opportunity to measure and denounce the woke delirium, a dictatorship of the absurd governed by touchy uneducated people. This is why, before describing the resistance to the movement, it is an opportunity to return to its origins and effects.
A first observation emerges over the pages: woke activists are fighting against chimerical enemies, without in any way solving the real problems – worse, by aggravating them. Their stated goal is to destroy the structures of Western societies – supposedly gangrened by racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia – and to put pressure on institutions to impose a new language, new laws, and by this means, reshape reality and bring about a regenerated world. The woke doctrine is based on three pillars: decolonialism, racialism and gender theory, all three illustrated by multiple examples. Thus, in 2019, the Amsterdam Museum abandoned the expression “Golden Age” from its labels, arguing that since the Dutch prosperity of the time was based on slavery, its formidable cultural influence is now an object of shame. In Cambridge in 2020, two hundred researchers and students signed a petition to complain that the 450 plaster casts in the Archaeological Museum were white, prompting repentance from the administration. In Leeds in 2018, a memorandum recommended that journalism professors not use capital letters so as not to traumatize students, because they are intimidating hierarchical symbols. Etc., etc.
This movement plays on systematic guilt and uses irrefutable arguments: if you think you are not racist, it is because you are. As one article explains ("Unmasking Racial Micro-aggressions"), "this type of racism is so subtle that neither the victim nor the author of the incriminated remark can understand what is at stake". From then on, the new anti-racism fights as a priority against unconscious racism: the UCAS, a university organization, published a report on unconscious bias in 2016 (Unconscious Bias Report) recommending that everyone take training to identify their unconscious racism. Some in France are following this example: in April 2019, UNEF invited, in its Conference against Racism, to "deconstruct the patterns of racist domination, whether conscious or unconscious". John McWorther (Woke Racism, 2021), denounces this new anti-racism and describes Conversely Robin diAngelo's bestseller, White Fragility (2018), of “racist tract”. Indeed, the new anti-racism promotes reverse discrimination, modestly called “positive discrimination”, the only way according to the guru Ibram X. Kendi to repair the segregation of which Black people were long victims. Thus, in August 2022, the Ontario Department of Education published a list of positions reserved “for Black and racialized people”. Among some forty universities, Columbia University organizes separate graduation ceremonies, Multicultural Graduation Celebrations, for different communities: LGBT, scholarship students (to put the poor together), blacks, American Indians, claiming to offer an experience to students "who self-identify in various ways." At the Harvard Drama Center, a performance of Macbeth is reserved for blacks during an evening called Blackout, a magnificent “woke antiphrasis”. At the Multicultural Student Center at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (opened in February 2020), white people are excluded in the name of inclusivity.
In this contradictory and irrational doctrine, gender theory is the area where the denial of reality and the creation of a parallel world reach their peak. Transactivists, who constitute a tiny minority, demand that the entire world be thought of through their inverted categories: the word "woman" has become insulting (it must be said menstruating person, person with uterus), the anus is a "universal vagina" (Andrea Long Chu), girls can have a penis (girl dick). Rose of Dawn, a young British transwoman who falls into the heretical camp when she denies the existence of "trigenders" or "moon-genders", just like lesbian YouTuber Arielle Scarcella: "I don't think there are 97 genders. The LGBT community is a refuge for mentally unstable people who don't seek help". The book contains some real gems of nonsense that Ionesco would not have denied: "A transman gives birth after using a female sperm donor", was the headline Sky News December 29, 2019. The remodeling of language is well underway: the word woman containing the word the Commission, you have to spell it woman*n ou womxn ; the term history is replaced by herstory, to designate the history of women. Alas, France is not far behind: the word matrimony has imposed itself alongside heritage, despite its original meaning (relating to marriage); we find She was once instead of Once upon a time, and since 2021 the Académie des Molières has awarded the Molière for “living French-speaking author”.
The problem is that this newspeak has penetrated institutions on both sides of the Atlantic: in England, the National Health Service invites "all women and people with a uterus, aged 25 to 64, to have a regular cancer screening smear". For being surprised by this wording, a Labour MP was subjected to a hate campaign. More cynical, the leader of the centrist Democratic Party, Sir Ed Davey, when asked "do you think women can have a penis?", replied "Of course!" (May 2023). In England, municipal authorities are giving instructions to schools confirming gender theory. The very expensive St. Paul's School for Girls in London has thus eliminated the use of the word "girl" so as not to offend. It is never too early to start mental conditioning: at the age of four, the teacher teaches children "Gender is like space; there are as many ways of being gendered as there are stars in the sky." In Oregon, nursery schools require children to speak of "person with a vulva" and "person with a penis" to avoid saying "woman" and "man." As for elementary schools, they introduce genital morphology (vulva, penis, vagina) and transactivist jargon (pansexual, asexual, queer). Across the Atlantic, Joe Biden has taken a series of measures to generalize gender-affirming therapies (gender-affirming care), promising to thwart the decisions of recalcitrant states; its deputy secretary for health (a trans woman) explains how this care is essential to the well-being of children. In this respect too, France is blindly following the Anglo-Saxon model: on September 30, 2021, Minister Blanquer published a circular “For better consideration of issues relating to gender identity at school”, inviting “special attention to be paid to transgender students”, this attention consisting of encouraging them to change their first name without consulting their parents. Sylvie Pérez recalls the irresponsibility of adults who encourage the transitions of minors – social transition often leading to hormonal and then surgical transition, at an age when the person concerned is unable to measure the consequences of their action. But what can be done against such a flourishing industry, whose turnover is estimated at 5 billion dollars by 2030?
The movement is hiding its sectarianism and its totalitarian temptation less and less. The use of intimidation and harassment is proportional to the absurdity of the proposals to which it is intended to convert the recalcitrant. The refusal of debate is consubstantial with this ideology, as shown by the slogan " my rights are not up for debate ". The victims of this doctrine are legion, who have lost their jobs for having uttered a forbidden word, having boasted of their merit in education or competence in the company, or, worse still, having dared to doubt the usefulness of "diversity and inclusion" re-education seminars - and these victims also include women, blacks, homosexuals and transsexuals, populations supposedly protected by the movement. Indeed, the race for purity never ends, and the internal struggles within the woke movement are reflected in a fragmentation as evidenced by the acronym LGBTQQIAAPPO2S (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Ally, Asexual, Pansexual, Polyamory, Omnisexual, and Two-Spirit). The pulverization threatens to prevail over the convergence of struggles. In the spirit of revolution, the old saying "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs" has found new relevance. For example, Sandra Muller, who falsely accused a man of harassing her to launch her hashtag #balancetonporc, said: "Obviously, the risk of wrongly putting a man's life in the air saddens me, and there may be collateral damage. But the benefit of the movement is so important!"
Furthermore, Sylvie Pérez points out, many of these leagues of virtue have been guilty of corruption and embezzlement, proof, if any were needed, that they are not interested in the fate of the oppressed, but in power and the demolition of the West. Thus, the $80 million jackpot received by the Black Lives Matters association in 2020-2021 was partly diverted to purchase a luxurious villa, while another part (2,6 million) financed transgender associations. Diversity has become a business in the hands of "diversicrats" of all stripes, who enrich themselves from generous subsidies, both public and private. American companies spend eight billion dollars each year in diversity trainings, and Google invested 150 million in these programs in 2015, even though very serious studies have proven their ineffectiveness, even their harmfulness.
The final touch to this dark picture is that woke diktats are imposed on populations by means of a denial of democracy. The example of the Yogyakarta Principles, analyzed in detail, provides a striking illustration of this: this declaration on "the application of international human rights law in matters of sexual orientation and gender identity", designed by twenty-nine international civil servants who are members of LGBT associations in 2007 and completed in 2017, confirms the anthropological change advocated by activists: gender identity is defined as "each person's intimate and personal experience of sex, whether or not it corresponds to the sex assigned at birth". This declaration prescribes a certain number of "obligations" to States and decrees a "right to legal recognition" authorizing any person to modify "gender information" concerning them on their identity documents. This declaration, once presented to the UN, became part of international law, then European law, and finally national legislation, outside of any democratic control. Thus, "civilizational transformation occurs by capillarity," and new measures designed by a specific lobby are imposed on everyone and recognized as an essential human right.
However, the bulk of the book focuses on describing the resistance to the woke movement, led by extraordinary personalities that, for many, the author met and interviewed. Across the Atlantic, the first resisters threw themselves into the battle in the mid-2010s: in 2016, Jordan Peterson took a stand against Trudeau's decision to reform the Canadian Human Rights Act by adding two categories to be protected from discrimination and hate speech: transgender Canadians and gender-neutral Canadians. This quasi-constitutional law is among the first to incorporate the notions of gender identity and gender expression. If Peterson lost the battle, he did not lose the war, and this psychology professor's channel enjoys enormous success, as do his conferences across the United States. Among these personalities, many have been subjected to such pressure that they had to resign from their positions at the university: Bret Weinstein, chased out of Evergreen where he risked his neck for having opposed a "no whites day" on campus; Peter Boghossian, who resigned from Portland State University (Oregon), which he considered to be a laboratory for egalitarian utopia; Kathleen Stock, lesbian, author of Material Girls (2021) and a victim of harassment for recalling the biological reality of sex. Others tirelessly campaign against woke madness: John McWorther and Glenn Loury, both Black, host the Glenn Show on racial issues.
The first form of resistance is therefore intellectual, and many academics take up their pens to demonstrate the ineptitude and ravages of the woke dictatorship: John McWorther, in Woke Racism. How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (2021), denounces racialism as a new racism; Joanna Williams, in Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (2016), warns of the erosion of academic freedom on campuses around the world; Ben Cobley, in The Tribe: the Liberal Left and the System of Diversity (2018), shows how the diversity regime has set up a caste system, where the outcasts are heterosexual white males; Jason Riley, an African-American author, publishes Please Stop Helping Us (2016), argues that affirmative action in favor of blacks handicaps them instead of helping them. As for James Lindsay, he has created an online encyclopedia: Translations from the Wokish: a Plain-Language Encyclopedia of Social Justice Terminology, with 500 entries. He gives this definition of "Decolonize: "applies to all sectors of society and consists of erasing all vestiges of Western culture."
The second form of resistance is directly political. Unlike the senile Biden, several political figures have distanced themselves from an ideology that has become sectarian: while he had engaged in progressive struggles during his term, Obama condemned wokeness in 2019, denouncing “this idea of purity, this refusal to compromise, this desire to be woke in all circumstances” because “the world is complex, full of ambiguities, and good people have flaws”. In 2020, Kemi Badenoch, the British Minister for Equalities, raised in Africa, gave a speech against Critical Race Theory as reverse racism and invoked Martin Luther King. A year later, the British government terminated its contract with the Stonewall firm, whose consulting program called “Diversity Champion” indoctrinated children from the age of two. Unsurprisingly, the Conservative Party is more inclined to engage in the counter-offensive: in 2020, the Reclaim Party was founded by Laurence Fox, a comedian whose career was shattered for saying that England was a beautiful country and stating: "These accusations of racism are getting tiresome". In May 2021, the Common Sense Group (CSG), a coalition of sixty Tory parliamentarians, published a manifesto entitled "Common Sense", with the intention of stopping the woke contagion and renewing debate. In 2022, Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, promised to reform this "Trojan horse that has allowed woke nonsense to penetrate public life". On the other hand, the Labour Party is very divided on the subject; regularly, one of its supporters leaves the movement with a bang, denouncing woke intolerance. Likewise, the British Dave Rubin, whose video "Why I Left the Left" has been viewed more than sixteen million times.
The third form of resistance is legal: in Great Britain, the climate of denunciation led to the vote on a law on academic freedom: the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill and then the Act, voted in May 2023, requiring universities to promote freedom of expression. In the United States, on June 29, 2023, the Supreme Court ruled against positive discrimination, taking Harvard University to court for discrimination against Asian students, who were seriously harmed by the goal of increasing the number of black students. Many organizations supporting people who have been harassed or dismissed for thought crimes help them face the courts, such as Toby Young's Free Speech Union (FSU), or the NGO Index on Censorship, created in 1972 to disseminate the work of Eastern dissidents in the West, and recently reconverted to fight Western censorship. In 2021, the NGO won the trial of Maya Forstater, an accountant who was fired for writing on Twitter that biological sex was a reality.
The fourth form is institutional: to combat academic indoctrination, several free universities have been created: Renegade University, founded by Thaddeus Russell to guarantee academic freedom, has a thousand students and offers twenty course modules. The University of Austin Texas (UATX), created in 2021, obeys three principles: intellectual humility, respect for the dignity of others, open-mindedness in the quest for truth. A summer session was inaugurated in 2022, entitled forbidden courses and on thorny subjects. Peter Boghossian, Dorian Abbott and Kathleen Stock, who were forced out of their respective universities, now teach there.
The fourth type of resistance consists of informing citizens through associations that intervene in the public space. Several organizations have been created in response to the regression of women's rights caused by the presence of "women with penises" - even if they are psychopathic rapists - in women's prisons and in women's sports competitions: UKWomen, Sex Matters (on the model of Black Lives Matter), or Standing for Women, which posted a large billboard in Liverpool displaying the taboo definition: " Woman, noun, adult human female ", a definition immediately labelled as a "hate message dangerous for the safety of trans-women". Other associations, increasingly numerous, bring together parents of children who are victims of transgender ideology: 4thWaveNow (2015), Transgender Trend (2015), Our Duty (2018). The mobilization of these associations led to the closure of the surgical department of the Tavistock clinic, seized by a thousand families. Other sites give voice to detransitioners, such as Post-Trans ou Transitionjustice.org, which offers assistance to victims of transgender medicine. On the subject of racialism, the website criticalrace.org (2021) documents the adherence of different universities to Critical Race Theory and its infiltration into schools. The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR, created in 2018), “is only interested in one race: the human race”. The association Don't Divide US (DDU, 2020), born after the death of George Floyd, brings together those who are concerned about the threats to the cohesion of British society; it is led by an Indian, Alka Seghal Cuthbert. As for the decolonial aspect, the 1776 Unites project (“1776 unites us”) responds to the 1619 Project (launched in 2019 by the New York Times), which chose as the starting point for the history of the United States the arrival of the first slave ship, and not the Declaration of Independence. The website History Reclaimed, founded in 2021 by Robert Tombs, professor of history at Cambridge, fights against the falsification of history by decolonialists.
Others are mobilizing to defend academic freedom and the right to discuss all subjects at university: the harassment suffered by Kathleen Stock at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom) sparked the Gender Critical Academia Network, which defends the freedom of researchers to criticize gender theory. The Heterodox Academy (HxA), a collaborative platform founded by Jonathan Haidt in 2015, brings together 5400 researchers including Mark Lilla; it encourages people to fight against conformity and to have the courage of their opinions. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has become the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression in 2022. The Association for Academic Freedom (AFAF), founded in 2006 by two professors, including Dennis Hayes, regularly publishes an overview of censorship, the Banned List. In Canada, the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS), founded in 2020, documents identity drifts. The Free Speech Champions (since 2021) recruit free speech ambassadors to build a network in Great Britain.
The list is far from exhaustive, but it gives an idea of the abundance of initiatives and illustrates the vitality of the resistance to wokeness in the most affected countries. Sylvie Pérez does not just list all these actions; she analyzes the contradictions of the woke discourse in a lively style, peppered with pretty phrases, such as "The translouve in the cisbergerie"; "At the university, I think therefore I harm", and inspiring metaphors: "The History Reclaimed site contributes to defusing woke mines on the battlefield that history has become"; "We must no longer say what we see, but see what we say". I would express only one reservation: she neglects to point out that the counter-offensive can sometimes go too far, to the point of imitating the wokes, succumbing to the temptation of harassment and censorship. Bill Eigel, senator from Missouri, thus declared: " say vous bring woke and pornographic books in Missouri schools to try to brainwash our children, I will burn them. » Sylvie Perez quotes Raymond Aron: "Intolerance is a contagious disease because it always contaminates those who fight it", and this thought must more than ever serve as a safeguard for us.
