Did Wokeness Leave Us Worse Off?

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0:38You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:50I'm Nadja Spiegelman, and I'm a culture editor for New York Times Opinion. Lately, I've noticed there's this pushback against what we used to call woke. For example, young people are using the R word again. That word retard comes flying in these kids' mouths. Five years ago, people were being absolutely crucified for saying retard. Plot. What is the R word? Retard. And pronouns are dropping out of email signatures. It just feels like we're being a little less careful with what we say and who we might offend. This has been true on the right. And now, maybe it's also becoming true on the left. So where are we with language policing?

1:30And is WOKE dead? For the next few weeks, I will be hosting a series of episodes on how our culture and politics influence each other. I'll be searching for what questions matter and who the right people are to answer them. And for our first episode, to talk about the future of WOKE, I called on my friends, writer and culture critic Aminatou Sow, and New York Magazine writer, Brock Collier.

1:59Thank you so much for being here with me. To start, I wanted to play a game where I'm going to say a word and you guys are going to tell me if it is alive, dying, or dead. Sounds great. Let's do it. Okay. Problematic. Dead. Hmm. Should die. Should die. But it's around. You know what I'm saying? It's like it's around, but it should die. Triggered. That one's going to come back. It's going to come back, but it's dead. I still see quite a bit of that, especially on the internet, which is really disturbing because it's like trigger warning. And then here's a video of like some horrifically violent thing.

2:34Like the word does not work. It's why I love it. I'm just like, thank you for triggering me with the trigger. It's like the reaction came 10 seconds before. So I love that. Microaggression. Dead. Okay. Safe space. Dead. Dead. dead folks with an x dead never alive I mean that one was ridiculous I mean talk about a ridiculous like yeah that really makes me so mad like it makes me because I know people who have like dutifully and earnestly used that and it's like oh my gosh what about um what about Latinx I mean I think that one's difficult because I think for a lot of Latin people or Latin queer people it feels good and for some of them it actually doesn't and they prefer and and i think it can sometimes feel like a western intervention onto them i think that one's complicated i think it should still be like i think people use it it can live if it wants to okay this is the one that will get me canceled i hate latinx and i talk about this a lot with like immigrant friends it's very much like a diaspora war thing for me where i was like hmm it's like interesting Interesting that you need a word to signal like where you are from.

3:50So I don't like it. I would say most of the people that I know don't like it either. And it's just like imprecise to me. I'm just like, what are we talking about here? Okay, perfect. Since we're going to talk about language, I want to start by being on the same page about the language we're using. So when you hear the term politically correct, what comes to mind for you? What does that mean for you? And is it the same thing as woke? Are we talking about the same thing? I think that's what I was going to say. When I hear politically correct, I think, I mean, I kind of hate the word woke, but I do think that woke has almost supplanted politically correct is the thing we're talking about when we're talking about this stuff.

4:30But yeah, I think I would say that. Okay. Like woke obviously has had a lot of different transitions as a word and who uses it and how and to mean what. And I would say that, like, I felt like it seemed like a positive thing to be woke five years ago, and now it doesn't feel that way anymore. Have you noticed this shift? And where are you noticing it? Yeah, I mean, I think when I'm trying to describe my politics to people, I often say that I have some anti-woke sensibilities. And by saying that, I think what I'm often trying to do is distance myself from the woke of five years ago. This kind of way too earnest, super PC kind of cringe, resistancy culture whose politics I mostly support, but the way that it's carried out is cringe to me.

5:25Yeah, I think cringe is the last word. What about you, Amina? Yeah, cringe is a really good word. Thank you to the young people for that one. I do think that language moves very fast. And I think that sometimes, too, when I hear people use certain words, all it does is like carbon date them for me. So like if somebody says the word PC, I'm like, got it. Like you're 1990 and before person. We love that. Last century, you know. And if you say woke, I'm like, great, you're a new century person. But do the words mean the same things to us? And that's not always apparent. And does it go further than time?

5:57Like if a white person says to you, I'm woke, what do you think of that? I mean, I'm laughing. I am always, I am always like, it has been ridiculous since day one. I just want to be so clear about that for me because I don't know what they're saying. Like, I was like, are you saying that I should trust you? Or are you saying that you are considerate about people, which is not what woke has meant in the black community, at least, where it originated from. So I've never known what that means. It's always just like a, it's very much like the dad from Get Out, you know, I'm like, okay, got it. If Obama was running a third term, you'd vote for him.

6:33Cool. I don't know what that means, you know? And then also now you have people on the right also like using this word woke to mean something completely different than what I think a mainstream Democrat is saying. So it is very confusing to me. Yeah. But I also feel like there is something, and it does have to do with age, but I feel like there's something generationally that is happening that is interesting in terms of how people think about sort of the superficial signaling of their politics. That is changing. And it's kind of what I want to talk about. I just I really I want to know if you guys agree that there's like something happened during Trump's first administration where people were like, this is not us.

7:13Like whatever this man's values are, we need to prove that it's not the same as the values of white progressives. And so we're going to knit pussy hats and we're like white people are going to do crazy things like read books about anti-racism and they're going to post black squares on Instagram. And it's all going to be about. You're triggering so many bad memories. And it's all going to be about signaling in a very like I think at the time a very like well-intentioned like passionate way that like Trump's values were not the same as many Americans values. And like how could we draw those distinctions.

7:49And then I think maybe during the Biden administration, a lot of the things that signaled that became part of the institutions like HRifying pronouns and the ways in which universities were grappling with all of this. And I would say maybe now, because so much of the signaling has been institutionalized, there's a rebellion against that from both sides. Do you guys see that? I agree with that. But I do think like that black square moment, I think that still happens. Like we still get stuck in these virtue signaling woke social media cycles where it's like any issue that comes up, you know, there's this pressure to post and then you post these infographics and then all of a sudden there's a realization two months into whatever conflicts it is that those aren't doing anything.

8:34so then we start to get mad at people who are only posting the infographics and then it stops and then the next time a big issue comes up we do it all again like it just feels like monotonous no I agree with that also like I remember the black square day so well because I didn't know what it was and then one day I woke up and it was just you know and I was like great now you've told me exactly who I need to unfollow on this feed you know like I just I'm like I don't need this This is so silly. It's like you're posting a picture because you don't know how to say, like, I don't have racist values.

9:07Yeah. For anyone who doesn't remember Black Square, can you remind us what Black Square is? Yeah, the Black Squares were, what was that protest? Was it George Floyd, maybe? Yeah, it was the summer of 2020. Yes, the summer of the troubles. Around the time of the Imagine video. Right, the summer of the troubles. Right, the Imagine video. So to be fair, it was COVID. Like, a lot of things were happening, right? You have George Floyd getting killed. You have a lot of other protests that are happening, like around trans issues. But I think the Black square specifically was to signal that you were not a racist person, which what a ridiculous way to signal that, you know?

9:43Yeah. Brock, how much do you think of this culture comes out of the Internet specifically? Oh, I think it's almost like when we were trying to define woke earlier, I think when I'm thinking about what that means, everything I'm thinking about is happening. on the internet, you know? Also, I think to what you were just saying, like thinking about that Black Square moment, like it seems silly in retrospect, but it felt very serious at the time. To some people, you know, I remember getting confronted by a coworker. Like, I haven't seen you post yet. And, you know, and that we had to have - Post in general or post the Black Square?

10:14That square. And then we had to have a conversation and that was really difficult at the time. Like it felt, it was really intense, you know? I also think what you were saying about the Biden years, I think the reason it feels like we're having this kind of backlash to this culture right now is because of the institutionalization of it in our workplaces and on campuses. And I don't think even good liberal people feel like the anti-racist training that they're doing in their office is helping anyone. Even people who respect people's pronouns and believe in non-binary identity or whatever, I don't think that they think that putting it in their signature is helping anyone.

10:55And I think they're rolling their eyes and laughing about it in private. Yes. I want to know a little bit more like the context of where you each come to this from. Brock, for you, I think Trump being elected was your first semester of college and you had grown up in Tennessee. So how did you think about these things before coming to college and like how did it change? I mean, I grew up in rural Tennessee and so I was surrounded by Trump voters at the time. who were pretty outwardly bigoted in a fairly rural Tennessee area. And arriving on campus in the heat of the 2016 election was, I mean, it was just crazy.

11:36Like for me personally, having finally gotten to a more liberal place, yes, I could start experimenting with the way I looked and non-binary identity was really kind of bubbling up. And so I started using they, them pronouns and then pronouns became the big conversation on campus. I mean, you couldn't walk into a classroom without the first day starting with a pronoun go around, as they say, you know, going around the circle and saying, hi, I'm Brock and I'm from Tennessee and I use they, them pronouns. Like it really exploded in that moment. And I was for the first time also as someone who dreamed of going to a liberal place, confronting other problems within the left, you know, suddenly finding myself amongst like-minded people, but also discovering, oh, we don't think the same way about all these topics.

12:25And there's going to be pushback on voting for Hillary Clinton or, you know, any number of things. Yeah, we're examples of that. Yeah, I mean, I think who you voted for in the primaries was such a litmus test at the time. The big debate at Northwestern at the time was a professor had invited someone who worked for ICE to come speak to a classroom. There was a huge protest over that because we were trying to figure out, you know, how open we wanted our dialogues. Was it okay to be in dialogue with someone like that? And then Amina, you grew up, I think you speak five languages. Is that right? You grew up in a lot of different places and then you came to America for college.

13:04What was that experience like? I went to an American high school in Nigeria that was very conservative, like run by missionaries, but American curriculum. And then I went to my first experience of being in America was I went to college at University of Texas at Austin. and also I would say a very liberal woke 1.0, woke 2.0 kind of place. But you're still in Texas, you know. So I graduated high school at the beginning of the Iraq war. So my campus time was very much like a war, war, war, war, war. I was a Middle Eastern studies major. So, you know, that conversation's still going on. But watching George Bush just like kind of sweep through office and be this kind of like celebrated like buffoon was a big system shock to me.

13:53And I think was that's like my defining political heartbreak. But to the point about, you know, like language and stuff, I think that being kind of shaped in that like late 90s, like PC madness was, you know, I was like, I was very woke to that because I was like, this is not working. This is it is so not working. if you're just like a regular like not addicted to social media person who is just trying to get through the workday of course you're upset that they're making you do all this like signaling that you're not interested in doing at your the place that you come to conduct capitalism to like pay your bills like who cares about this stuff and so it's like a very intense feeling yeah that's actually where i wanted to go next the comedian um mark maron made this joke i'm gonna paraphrase it, but basically like did progressives annoy people into fascism?

14:47And it's possible. It's very possible. Brock, you've done so much reporting on like the MAGA right youth movement. And I'm curious what you're seeing there. Yeah. I mean, when I wrote a cover story for New York Magazine last year where I went to the inauguration and hung out with, you know, kind of the new right, young, upwardly mobile, kind of good looking, uh, influencery conservatives. And I mean, language was policing was the thing that they brought up over and over and over again. You know, they wanted the freedom to say the R word or the F word or, you know, this was their, really their main concern.

15:32They wanted to make - I did. It's funny. I think I wrote in the piece, you know, some of them seemed very earnest about it. And some of them, it was performative. You know, they were kind of doing it for the bit. But I think largely they really felt that. And something that came up over and over and over again, when I was asking them to explain why they won, why they thought they won, they said, we talk like normal people. They just kept calling themselves normal. And I mean, the truth is they were not always talking like normal people. They were making really messed up and cruel jokes. But I do think that they were on to something.

16:10I think that's also the problem with so much of this woke language stuff. I think to the average American, it's read as elite and academic. It's the stuff of campuses and intellectuals. And that's a turnoff. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's also like being transgressive, feeling like you're being transgressive is gleeful. Like it's a place of joy. And I think that like some of these people on the right are like this, we can rebel against this in a way that is powerful. Do you think that's part of what's going on or is it like it's pure just? Oh, I think that's it's why I asked you whether you thought it was sincere or not, because I have such a hard time with somebody hanging all of their politics.

16:54I'm like, I want to be able to say the R word. I'm like, not even taxes. Like, this is what you're like, this is it. This is the pinnacle of what you care about is feels like particularly lazy to me. And I do think that it's about being transgressive. And I think that it's also about being cruel. You know, I think that it's something that I think about a lot. It's like there's language that I am asked to use that I find goofy sometimes. And I always ask myself, I'm like, does it cost me anything to do something nice for someone else? And if it doesn't cost me anything, who cares? You know what I mean?

17:27I think people just don't enjoy being told what to do. Well, but I guess I'm not really... I don't think that we're always being told what to do, but some of this is just basic politeness to me. Before we started this interview, your producer asked me how I would like to be referred to as ID'd. I was like, that's great. That's a professional courtesy. People mispronounce my name all the time. It's fine to do that. So if somebody is like, please call me by these pronouns, and they're asking you that earnestly, I was like, it doesn't cost me anything to do that for someone. And so when I find this kind of like wanton cruelty being the driving force, because again, things are like everything exists in a context.

18:09I think that what I find like particularly grating about the like, I want to be able to use the R word. I want to call women bitches and I want to call people the N word, you know, like whatever. It's I'm like, why do you want to do that? Like, why is it so important to you? what is so important about being able to say that to someone who is telling you they don't want to hear that at the same time though i do think there's a i'm coming from a very i mean i'm 28 and i live in brooklyn and i'm surrounded by like card carrying dsa members but including one right here i do think yeah most people are willing to be polite but so much of this has gotten so fraught on the example of pronouns, for example, because people do not allow people to learn.

18:54People do not give them the grace to try and figure out how to get these things right. I mean, people are militant about this stuff and will bite your head off, bite their professor's head off over a misgendering situation. And that makes it really hard to move forward. I know, but that's interesting because that, again, to me is I'm like, I hear you and I agree with you. Like, I've been in those meetings. Like, you know, I'm like, I'm a member of the co-op. I'm a member of that. Like, I go to the meetings where the people are militant. And at the same time, I'm just like, no one's killing anybody.

19:27You know, like, there is like a fragility, like, built in on both sides of this conversation where I'm like, wow, like, okay, somebody says, call me this. You do it. Like, we don't have to have like a 10-hour long fight over the stuff, or you can just smile and move on. I think we can agree that that's like very silly. It's like Like somebody yelled at you one time in college, like that doesn't have any power over you. And then now I have to live the consequences of, you know, like fascism is knocking at the door because of that is that's a big leap. It is a big leap. But again, I think people just don't like being told what to do.

19:59And that's like a very. Yeah, but welcome to society. Like the government tells you what to do, you know, like and also it's sometimes like I guess I want to backtrack. It's to me, it's not about being told what to do. It's like we have like basic rules of decorum. I guess my problem is also while the left is wrapped up in these debates about decorum and like politeness, the right's reaction to this is to actually dismantle things, right? Like the things that we were doing in college you could not do on a campus. You know, women's studies have been, you know, destroyed. Queer studies, you know, Middle Eastern programs like protesting.

20:37Like we're having these silly little debates about that and they're taking these big actions. That's sometimes my problem with the pronoun discourse too. Like the left young queer people spent so much time enforcing all of this pronoun stuff and what energy was wasted? You know, why weren't we talking about healthcare or bathrooms or something that was not as... I don't disagree with that. And you were just speaking at a university a few weeks ago on these subjects. Do you feel like it's changed on campuses now? This was at a Southern university, a very liberal university in the South, an artsy school on a mountain.

21:16And yes, the change was huge. These students were telling me previously they felt like the school was 90 % liberal kids and maybe 10 % conservatives. And they were estimating it was more 60-40. They said that Trump was elected. All of a sudden, these frat houses were hotbeds of the R word and all these things that we're talking about. They said the dress changed on campus. All of a sudden, all these girls and boys are in salmon colored button-ups. The culture at this very liberal school had gotten so, so much more conservative. They said they had about nine kids who participated in, it's a fairly small school, but only nine kids who participated in the pro-Palestine protests.

22:00Wow. And do you think that's because, like, youth movements are shifting? Are just the signifiers shifting? Or is, like, the youth shifting to the right? I think, I mean, the numbers, I think we have, the media talks a lot about the youth shifting to the right. I don't think that's what's happening. I think that the youth are just shifting away from both parties and don't really want to be aligned with either institutionally. And that makes their politics really funny and hard to map onto MAGA or WOKE. Right. Interesting. Steven Pinker came up with this concept called the euphemism treadmill that is basically the idea that we are always going to replace a word that has stigma attached to it with another word because the word is just going to get too loaded.

22:46Like the R word, for example, was the polite replacement for the word idiot. And we're just never going to be able to outrun the stigma because the word's always going to catch it. Do you guys think that there is a way off that treadmill or is this just a thing that happens with language? I just think that's what happens every generation. I think queer stuff is really interesting about this. Like obviously queer is the word that we're using right now to kind of stand in for all LGBTQ plus people. But it was not always that way, though it was very popular in the 90s. And a lot of older gays and lesbians today are very uncomfortable with the word.

23:24And I just think it changes every—it will continue to change. And that's also why you can't quite police this stuff because it's so fluid and flexible. Yeah, I agree with that. I think we're not going to make new words, so we are going to recycle all the same words. I was talking to somebody in their, like, 80s recently, and I used the word horny, and he got so offended. and he was like, your generation loves to use that word. And I was like, I have never had a reaction to this word before. And it was very instructive and very funny. But do you think that there's a way off the treadmill? Like, do you think language is always just gonna - No, I think that language is always gonna do this because we, yeah, it's like the political mood shifts.

24:04People reclaim words, I think, a lot. And I think particularly like we're in an era of people taking, you know, words that meant bad things that were replacement for something that was bad and really bringing those back to the core. And we're seeing real generational anxieties about that. And I don't know, like, again, as a words person, I love all of it. I was like, I just love to see how, like, language is formed and how we do that. And so I think you could be scared by it or you could be really intrigued and see what we do with the language. Yeah. And sometimes I get confused. I mean, like, as a white woman, let me make this about me for a second.

24:43is this your coming out i love it no but like i as an editor also i'm like that we're constantly making lists of people to do things and i have to be like we've only put white people on this list we need some people who are and then i don't know what to say because i've heard from a lot of people that person of color feels so corporate and everyone's a color and but i'm like so just add some people who are not white but then that centers whiteness and like it actually comes out of a genuine desire to be like, what is the word that means what I want it to mean? And it is the most respectful. But at the end of the day also, it's like, just do the thing.

25:16You know what I mean? Like I, like I hear this, like in the summer of 2020, I will never forget the summer of the troubles. I was on a call and somebody said, they used the word BIPOC, which I had seen written, but I had never encountered before. And I'm a fairly online person, you know, and I had seen it, but I guess like my brain had registered that it meant something else. And I was like, wait, who's the BIPOC on the call? And this woman was like, oh, you. And I was like, oh, I'm not bisexual, but thank you so much for thinking about me. Like, I really thought I meant bisexual person of color.

25:47And I was like, that is so niche, you know, but like, I love that for you guys that you've done that. And she's like, no, no, no. It means like black indigenous person of color. And I was like, oh me. I was like, I'm just black. I just identify like, I don't need this thing. But I remember it made me laugh so hard because I was like, this is not like, like God bless, whatever you guys are doing over there. And then when I was really thinking about that call, I was like, this is somebody that I've worked with for so many years who's always like, how do I get more black people to be involved? And then never does.