The Western Surrender: The U.S. unleashed wokeness on a world incapable of handling it |
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The Western Surrender: The U.S. unleashed wokeness on a world incapable of handling it
No. 5: The movement began on U.S. college campuses, but the country’s individualism renders it largely immune
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All that is great about western civilization is being undermined by a progressive political and cultural project that aims to reject and rewrite our history, prioritize group identity above the individual and embed this agenda into our laws and institutions. Welcome to The Western Surrender, an NP Comment series ranking the five Anglosphere countries by their adoption of these ideas. Today, we start with No. 5, the United States.
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COTTONWOOD, Arizona — In something like its current usage, the term “woke” originated a century ago among African Americans in reference to awareness of racial prejudice. More recently, it came to embody modern identitarian progressive ideology — and then quickly became shorthand in the U.S. for leftist excess. Americans’ long exposure to battles over identity and our insistence on treating people as individuals may have granted us strong immunity to a toxic political movement our country spawned. While wokeness is, at its core, an American innovation and export, the movement is in retreat across most of American society.
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In 2023, after “woke” had already become a contentious term signifying, among proponents, a far-reaching social justice agenda and, among its opponents, a totalitarian ideology that treats people as members of groups rather than as individuals, the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) protested. “The words ‘Wake Up’ and ‘Woke’ have served as a call to action as conveyed by social activist Marcus Garvey who stated, ‘Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa’, and the Negro Mine Workers who in 1940 issued the statement, ‘We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on,’ in advocating against discriminatory pay,” the NAACP asserted in a resolution.
But the NAACP was fighting a rearguard action. Two years earlier, Columbia University linguist John McWhorter, himself Black, published Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He argued that wokeness “is actually a religion in all but name” that irrationally repackages racism in antiracist form. It had its roots, he wrote, in critical race theory which “tells you that everything is about hierarchy, power, their abuses — and that if you are not Caucasian in America, then you are akin to the captive oarsman slave straining belowdecks in chains.”
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