Wokeness

Thursday

Damian Thompson

Is Black Lives Matter a religion for woke white people?

The most memorable footage of the Black Lives Matter protests, and perhaps the creepiest, doesn’t capture any acts of violence, any looting, any chanting of slogans or — so far as I can make out — any black faces.Instead, we see hundreds of mostly young people sitting in the parking lot of a public library in Bethesda, Maryland, raising both pasty-white arms in a gesture that suggests both surrender and worship.An invisible speaker is reciting a list of promises that the crowd repeats. This is what we hear: Speaker: '… about racism, anti-blackness or violence.' Crowd: '… about racism, anti-blackness or violence.

black lives matter religion

Wednesday

Tyler Grant

How to write 2020’s Great American Novel

So I sat down to write the Great American Novel. And like with all improbable tasks, it’s helpful to map out potential issues to spare yourself from a career-ending catastrophe (and to provide excuses to wax poetic to your friends when you ultimately leave a manuscript incomplete). First, it’s helpful to take a cursory survey of the current literary landscape: writing about my time in China, Thailand, or Taiwan will launch the entire Berkeley creative writing class into chants of 'exoticism' and cause a Slate writer to prematurely return from a gulag LARPing weekend to pen a 1,200-word thinkpiece on literature as colonialism. Reading the room, I’m going to stay close to home.

great american novel

Tuesday

Freddy Gray

Nobody is woke

The word ‘woke’ has quickly degenerated into a meaningless term of abuse. Nobody says ‘I am woke’ these days, at least not seriously.  It‘s like claiming to be a keen nanny-statist or ‘bien-pensant’. At one level, then, wokeness exists only so that journalists like me and social media warriors on the center or right can fight it. It’s not just the word that has become hackneyed. The whole idea of being woke – suddenly alert – to racial or social injustice is not real, and never was, and therefore the movement against it is similarly fake. Right-wingers have the same concept and call it 'redpilling’; in both cases, it means a sort of lobotomized enlightenment for people who enjoy feeling aggrieved.

woke
laurence fox
Jarvis Dupont

Laurence Fox made me go into hiding

Last night I posted an incredibly innocuous tweet about Laurence Fox and the outrage it caused was predictably excessive. Now, for those of you not in the know, Laurence Fox is a privileged white British male actor who last week publicly said some of the most toxic and hateful things this country has heard in centuries. On the BBC’s political forum debate show, Question Time, Laurence was asked about his thoughts on the hateful racism Meghan Markle has been regularly subjected to from the British tabloids and his heartless response shocked the nation. I can hardly bear to type this, but he DENIED that any criticisms directed towards her were motivated by racism and called the UK...oh God...this is killing me...he called the UK a ‘lovely and tolerant country’. Jesus.

Wednesday

Ben Sixsmith

GQ is a holy text of woke capital

In general, there is no point in reading articles you know are bound to make you mad. Life is too short. Read a good book. Enjoy a walk with your loved ones. Learn how to fashion something out of wood. Sometimes, though, an article crosses our path and we are gripped with the despair and anger one might feel watching a drunk driver veer across a crowded street.One such article is GQ editor-in-chief Will Welch's introduction to the magazine’s ‘New Masculinity’ issue. ‘When I found out that I would be the editor-in-chief of GQ,’ Welch writes:‘...most people said stuff like “Amazing!” and “Congrats!” But one particularly perceptive friend reacted in a way that I'll never forget. “Yikes,” she said.

gq

Wednesday

P.J. O’Rourke

Puritanism is back…and welcome to it

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Cole Porter sang: ‘In olden days, a glimpse of stocking / Was looked on as something shocking / But now, God knows, / Anything goes.’ Everything went, and with it: humor. World War One was followed by a licentious riot of amoral libertinism, with the collapse of religious convictions, ethical norms, societal conventions and plain good manners. Nothing was sacrosanct and this turned laughter into hard work. Like going to see Waiting for Godot and waiting for the punch lines. Or skating over the thin ice on the river of despair in the novels of Evelyn Waugh.

wokeness puritanism