My Question for the Formerly Woke
Before a Woke 2 takes over, let the proponents of its predecessor explain how and why they’re moving on.
There is a difference between changing your mind and shifting your tactics, between evolving in your views and abandoning them because they’ve become unpopular or politically perilous.
When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, quoting a political ally, recently suggested to ABC News, with a laugh and a smile, that “Woke 1 was crazy,” she became the most prominent progressive figure distancing herself, whether subtly or overtly, from what is known as wokeism — from the stringent positions on race, policing, gender, identity, social justice and language that constituted progressive orthodoxy over the past decade or so. Ideas once upheld in doctrinaire terms, with dissenters dismissed as lazy ( do the work ) or inhumane ( you literally don’t want me to exist ), are now treated as an embarrassing phase, the gawky formative years of cultural and political progressivism.
James Talarico, the Texas Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat, has admitted that “there are some statements that I’ve made that I certainly regret,” and that some of his old comments may now seem “cringey.” (All this when a journalist asked him about his past assertion that God is “nonbinary,” a claim Talarico now says was “intentionally provocative.”) Some commentators on the left have joined in the revisionism, acknowledging, for example, that cancel culture may have occasionally gone too far and that, yes, elements of the woke agenda may appear silly in hindsight.
It’s a noteworthy evolution, especially for anyone who was around to witness the die-on-this-hill dogmatism of the peak woke era — say, circa summer 2020. (If Woke 1 was really crazy, then Ocasio-Cortez, who called for abolishing prisons and adopted terms such as “menstruating person,” was a resident in good standing of the asylum.)
So, before that time goes farther down the memory hole, discarded as just one of so many vibe shifts, I have one question for the formerly woke:
If you can dismiss it so casually now — all the defunding and abolishing, the BIPOCing and Latinxing, the canceling and decentering and my truthing — how much of it did you truly believe at the time? How much was conviction, how much was a pose, how much was groupthink, how much was fear?
