do the wokey pokey..

If you’re a millennial who finds themselves in the cusps of privileged spaces such as the university (like most of you reading this) then give me the grace of allowing me to assume that you have or are yet to encounter the word ‘woke’.

‘Wokeness’ has commonly been understood as a phenomenon of enlightenment and the embodying of a spirit of advocacy in everyday life. More likely, woke people have a vested interest in this movement because of violent lived realities- almost always as a result of artificial identities assigned to them by the world ,and the power disparities involved in the imposition of these identities. However, in the past few years, with the woke discourse gaining traction in the public domain and with people seeing an opportunity to capitalize on this, it has been used and abused by entities: varying from said student leaders to big companies, for gains that may not align with the initial intended goals of the movement. It’s initial intended purpose, which was for it to be used as a tool to effect social change, has now somewhat been tainted as a result of this capitalizing of wokeness that I speak of.

I believe this problem stems from the individualistic framework in which we have seemed to understand liberation politics, in that everyone is protecting personal interests and uses that as a means to mobilize, rather than the interests of the collective and of the individual in relation to the collective. It is this that has led to many losing faith in this new wave of activism in that it seems to present itself as a new radical wave of thinking when in practice it seems it take on very liberal understandings of what social justice looks like even though it relies on largely leftist rhetoric to propel itself in the public domain.

The self-congratulatory nature of particularly online performances of wokeness also works as a deterrence for many when it comes to engaging the very important issues this movement has been able to propel into the public domain. Contradictions like this present many problems particularly for people who find themselves at the crossroads of multiple marginalized identities (who are often minorities in these spaces as well), and for well-intentioned people who are willing to do the political work that this project is asking for. Social capital and credibility in these spaces are so intrinsically linked that it becomes clear how erasure and violence can go unaddressed in these spaces.

As students and young people who share a collective interest in the overall bettering and improvement of society we do need to critically reflect on the rhetoric used to mobilize people and believed norms that become reinforced in these spaces in an effort to avoid the uninterrogated consumption of political rhetoric and to create spaces that allow for constructive and reflective criticisms that keep in mind the intended purpose of this movement.