A Useful Theory of Wokeness. By A Man.
Woke thinking is really academic thinking, embedded into our daily discourse. And a few other things. Let me explain. Or, if you prefer, mansplain.
If you’re a fan of Monty Python (which probably means you were at high school in the 80s, with some exceptions), you might remember Miss Anne Elk’s brontosaurus theory. It—strike that, the brontosaurus theory—goes like this: “All brontosauruses are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end. That is my theory. It is mine and it belongs to me, and I wrote it. ” Here is a short clip.
My original reason for using that as an intro to this piece was to self-deprecate what I’m about to do, which is offer my theory on what wokeness is, where it comes from, and what it might mean for us. I would be like: Here’s my theory on wokeness; it is mine and it may be as ridiculous as Anne Elk’s brontosaurus theory—and it may not be, but it is mine. But when I watched the original version on YouTube to make sure I was getting the quote right, I saw that the skit has a whole lot more relevance to the subject than I’d anticipated. In fact, I’d say it was quite a synchronistic find. I’ll say more on this later.
Woke thinking; the first factor
So here’s my theory about woke thinking. Woke thinking is academic thinking, embedded into our daily discourse. Let me explain. (Or, if you prefer, mansplain.)
Last year I signed up for a Masters degree. A proper one, my wife, who has a “proper” PhD, reminds me. It’s been years since I did any formal academic studying. So long, in fact, that I had to start from scratch with academic writing and referencing. The one thing I noticed, very quickly, is how much you can’t say, at least not without referencing somebody else having said it first. As someone who is used to writing the way that I am here (expressing my opinions on a blog or in a newsletter), that was tough.
Continue reading below, unless you’d like to…
…listen to the audio version:
…or watch the YouTube video:
I moaned about this on the family WhatsApp group, and discovered that the young adults whom we call our children, all of whom are at university, knew all about this and were quite familiar with it. They had been doing academic writing since school. They were even able to help me with my referencing.
Dad alert. (I’m now going to sound like a dad.)
When I was at school, there was little to no academic writing. We were free to express our opinions. Even at university, as part of a bachelor’s degree, we learned the basics of academic writing, but weren’t required to do much of it. Later, as a journalist, I could also write quite freely. Now, as I kept hearing that phrase inside my head, “But you can’t say that (unless you can reference it),” I began to feel that I had heard it before, elsewhere. Then it dawned on me. I had heard it. In conversation. I couldn’t say which ones, but it echoed in my head as having been heard many times.
Then I remembered a time when that phrase was said out loud. It was a time back in the 90s, when people—usually liberal intellectuals—would actually stop each other in conversation by using that phrase, and then correct what had been said. It wasn’t a big deal if someone did it to you, because we were genuinely engaging in dialogue and that came as part of the dialogue. The person who said it was equally struggling with the topic, they were just coming at it from a more objective point of view. Except sometimes. Sometimes you got people who were overidentified with their liberal objectivity and got all high and mighty on you.
We no longer explicitly say, “You can't say that”; it's implied, it's embedded, it's taken for granted.
These days you can’t say that. You can’t say what I’ve just said. Why? Because it’s a generalisation. In today’s conversation, you’d have to say which person said that. And when. And how many times. And how many people said it, how often, for my statement to be meaningful. And could you even say that they were struggling with the topic, because they’re not here to defend themselves? Besides which, you have no studies, no references, to back that up.
And these days, you wouldn’t say that. You wouldn’t say what I just wrote in the previous paragraph. At least not overtly. You wouldn’t need to. The other person—who has also been through years of academic rigour—would have the same mindset, and so in anticipation of their response, you would already have thought all that, would already be qualifying your original claim, adjusting your warrant, providing your own rebuttal and bringing in new data, new references. All automatically, inside your head, from so many years of academic writing and thinking. And then you would speak.
And that's what I mean when I say that woke thinking is academic thinking embedded into our conversation. In other words, we no longer explicitly say, “You can't say that”; it's implied, it's embedded, it's taken for granted.
I also speculated that this type of embedded academic conversation is the domain, mostly, of students of the liberal arts, most notably sociology. And here is where the world is becoming divided, I feel. It’s not between the woke and the un-woke, it’s between the liberal arts educated and the non-liberal arts educated. And if we look at the demographics of progressive versus conservative political supporters, I’ll bet we’ll find a lot of that in the divide. Now there’s a statement you can’t make without a reference. And I just did.
Woke thinking: the second factor
As I went through my studies, I came across another factor for wokeness that needs to be added to the above academic style thinking as a factor. And this one I can reference. This factor is a learning framework called social constructionism. (I feel the academic pressure weigh as I start to write this. All those marking pens poised.) Social constructionism can be described as a worldview or perspective that suggests (notice my academic phrasing!) that how someone sees the world is not objective or neutral or common sense, even though they themselves may insist that it is. The way each of us sees the world is influenced (constructed) by the historical and social context—or socioeconomic power structure—that we find ourselves in.
Now I’ll go back into dad mode; I’ll mansplain, and tell you my experience of that, and why and how it is significant.
I grew up in South Africa during apartheid. I received my exposure to the liberal perspective quite early in life. You can’t say that. My best friend, who came from a liberal academic family, told me that when I was 11. What he said made sense to me and I took it on. Later, I was exposed to another liberal approach, and it was this: stopping to listen to the stories of the victims and not seeing it through my lens, but theirs. Which meant first recognising that I had a lens at all.
Here’s how it happened. At the end of my first year at university, I hitch-hiked to Cape Town for my summer holidays. In South Africa, Cape Town is liberal central, as San Francisco is to America. And the university (UCT) is Cape Town’s progressive liberal beating heart. I stayed with the friend of a friend in a student commune. One day we got into a conversation about apartheid. I expressed my rather pragmatic and ultimately, I discovered, quite uninformed point of view. For he corrected me with a story about a person which served as a reminder of what really happens on the ground in the lives of black people.
Though I don’t remember the details, I remember the moment clearly. In order to accept what he was saying, I had to recognise my own worldview, which was that we all make our own reality and if we complain then we are being, well, victims. I saw that black people couldn’t do that in the way that I did, doh, because they didn’t have the freedoms that I did. (I’m simplifying it for the sake of brevity.) I had to see that my own view was constructed by having been brought up white in South Africa.
I don’t support the approach that a person’s view is necessary less valid the more privileged they’ve been. I think we are capable of more than that.
So, I could say I became semi-woke in that moment, before woke was a thing. It changed my life, and made me the Guardian reader that I am today. However, I will add that I’m not a supporter of the way that this social constructionist philosophy gets applied today in the form of the oppression Olympics, where a person’s view is necessarily less valid the more privileged they’ve been; where it’s assumed that you can’t have any real understanding of another person (although you should!) unless you’ve actually lived their experience. I think we are capable of more than that. And so to my next point.
Enter coach mode (the irony with woke folk…)
Here’s the irony, I find, with woke folk. (And by the way, I’m no longer in dad mode, I’m in coach mode.) Woke folk, by definition, have “woken up” to the way that the social power constructs have shaped their thinking. Their thinking before they became woke, that is. But once they’ve seen this, and become woke, they seem—and yes, I’m generalising—to operate as if the rule no longer applies to them. As though they’ve freed themselves being subject to a social constructionist viewpoint—that evil viewpoint that keeps power structures in place. They—the more self-righteous among them, let’s say—appear to believe they’re above it. And then, no different from people who’ve found religion or any other belief, those self-righteous woke folk believe they have found the “right” answer. Which, of course, in their minds, they have. After all, they are saying all the right things, all the things you can say. They have the references to back it up.
Meanwhile, out on the streets, are the “uneducated” masses, trying to speak what’s on their mind without having to reference it, or limit it to the sociological studies that have been done, and what has been proven, or declared true by the academic body of knowledge. To the mind of the woke, those people out there are wrong. And of course they are. If they were to write a paper about it, they’d fail—and, having failed, they’d be cancelled.
Finding the common ground (between woke and non-woke)
In the field of coaching, which is what I’m studying, there is a great divide between the academic and non-academic practitioners, and it’s getting wider. Even the academics acknowledge that. I could provide references. Some academics are proposing philosophical frameworks that can bring the two sides together. They’re extremely complicated papers to read. You have to twist your brain into a pretzel to understand them. I have a simpler solution. To the non-academics, I say, you have to be willing to have your ideas tested. To the academics, I say, listen. Open your minds to what is being said that doesn’t have a reference. It’s often valid. And one day, if you work together, you might create the reference.
I have the same message for the woke and the non-woke folk out there. For the non-woke, let your ideas be tested. For the woke, listen to those unreferenced ideas. Let each other in. I’ll say more about this in future missives.
Back to the beginning. Now you’ve heard my theory. As you can see, it’s a brontosaurus kind of a theory. Funny, but not. A work in progress. Some referenced, some obvious, and some intuited. I also said how the Monty Python’s brontosaurus theory skit was more apt than I’d realised. You can see the full video at this link. I invite you to watch it and see if you can pick up all the subtle digs at the academic mindset. For example, whenever the interviewer says “it”, Anne Elk asks for a clarification, just as my supervisor does when I use the word “this”. You must give the antecedent, she says, again and again. It (the video) is hilarious. And so is my academic journey, at times. The good news is, I’m, learning, though I promise not to become too woke. Oh, and I love my supervisor, she keeps me on my toes, making sure I don’t just say (random, unreferenced) stuff!