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 ," borrowed from African American slang and used since 2013 by activists in the Black Lives Matter movement, refers to an awareness and an "awake" attitude toward the injustices, inequalities, and discrimination of which "minorities" (ethnic, sexual, religious, etc.) are perceived to be victims, but also toward the "privileges" that certain categories of people are perceived to enjoy (white, heterosexual men, ableist men, etc.). The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it positively as follows: "Being actively attentive to important facts or issues, racial issues, and social equality."
A " woke " activist , described as left-wing or "progressive," defines themselves by their awareness of various "systemic racist, sexist, and classist oppressions" and their commitment to intersectional politics, the goal of which is to achieve "social justice," which they believe requires "racial justice." This practice of constant vigilance legitimizes censorship. It involves silencing those deemed "dissenting" through denunciation, harassment, and intimidation. Those accused are forced into silence and resignation, which amounts to normalizing the professional exclusion of ideological deviants.
Woke culture, or wokism, is the identity-based and victim-oriented 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. To be vigilant or "awake" is , from the "wokist" point of view, to demonstrate "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" terminology, "microaggressions" are words, attitudes, or behaviors that can be perceived as hurtful or offensive because they are supposedly racist, sexist, anti-LGBTQIA+, fatphobic, glottophobic, Islamophobic, and so on. As Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning demonstrated in *The Rise of Victimhood Culture * (2018), the term "microaggression" refers to ordinary or commonplace violence, imperceptible because it is supposedly "systemic" or simply because it doesn't exist and belongs to the realm of "woke" fantasies. But in this victimhood universe, the number of victims of "microaggressions" continues to grow, along with the number of professional activists who come to their aid within institutions and businesses for profit.
A contemporary form of sophisticated and pretentious stupidity, woke stupidity is recognizable in particular by its paranoid, inquisitorial, and purifying lexicocentrism. Its proponents 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 "patrimony," a sexist term emblematic of patriarchal culture.
One might think this description is from a bad dream, or that this brief account is just a joke. But it's not. In these activist circles, humor is absent; laughter itself is considered offensive. A serious demeanor is the order of the day. How could anyone dare laugh at the spelling of "LGBTQI+" (and much more)? In the world of the "awakened," populated by potential victims, laughter is forbidden, no matter how imaginary the victim. The neo-antiracist "awakened" activist engages in a new way: they are not preparing a revolution to achieve a utopia; they accuse, denounce, and call for the exclusion, even the social and cultural death, of those they designate as guilty. They aim for their "cancellation," in the vocabulary of " cancel culture ." They also demand "reparations," insatiably. He acts as a symptomatologist, an inquisitor, and a purifier, maintaining a state of perpetual vigilance in a society he perceives as structured by a few oppositions, the principal ones being dominant/dominated, oppressors/oppressed, and racializing/racialized. His frenetic practice of deconstruction leads him to profess a generalized relativism that obliterates the distinction between fact and fiction, as well as between truth and falsehood. From this perspective, universalism—that is, the demand for universality—is reduced to a deceptive and toxic invention of the "white" West. This is one of the axioms of neo-identity-based anti-racism, this pseudo-anti-racism that spreads in the wake of workaholicism.
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 virtuous decivilization program, rooted in a utopian messianism that promises its followers entry into a new world, free from racism and sexism, even as it fuels all forms of essentialism. Deconstruction is the path that, through the erasure of traces of a cursed past—that of the “West” alone, criminalized because of its “whiteness”—leads to redemption. It is this religious or para-religious character of “wokeism” that John McWorther astutely analyzed in his 2021 book, * Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America* . In *The Woke Religion* (2022), Jean-François Braunstein, in turn, rigorously examined the various aspects of this intolerant neo-religiosity, dangerous to 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, a research director at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), is a philosopher, political scientist, and historian of ideas. He has published over fifty books. Among his most recent are: * The Postcolonial Imposture: Imaginary Science and Pseudo-Antiracism *, Paris, Éditions de l'Observatoire, 2020; * Antiracism Gone Mad: 'Systemic Racism' and Other Fables *, Paris, Hermann, 2021; * Why Deconstruct? Philosophical Origins and Political Avatars of French Theory*, Saint-Martin-de-Londres, H & O éditions, 2022; * Where Is Antiracism Going? For or Against Universalism *, preface by Isabelle de Mecquenem, Paris, Hermann, 2023; and * The New Opium of Progressives: Radical Anti-Zionism and Islamo-Palestinism *, Paris, Gallimard, coll. "Tracts", 2023.
