Wokeism And Whiteness

Some think the 1960s improved our society but I believe the events of that era did more harm than good. Street protesters along with news media, academia, and entertainment, hyped and magnified the effects of racism and social injustice. They hoped to make the public think these issues were America’s most serious problems. And, for a while, they succeeded.

During Barack Obama’s presidency it was claimed that we lived in a post-racial society. But that post-racial opinion was quickly squashed by race hustlers who feared losing their livelihood. Racism complaints, mostly uncorroborated, had been too successful to abandon. However, new justifications had to be found. So equality of opportunities was updated to equality of outcomes.

Various strategies have been used over the years to end racism and social injustice. But, despite the accomplishments achieved, activists continued to claim that more societal changes were needed. Finally it was realized that correcting individual cases of racism was too slow. Wokeism’s claim that Whiteness prevented social justice was accepted. The elimination of Whiteness became the new goal.

Wokeism has become a powerful self-righteous phenomenon similar to a Puritanical religious revival. Its proselytizing has propagandized a significant segment of the population. The following example illustrates how thoroughly Wokeism has indoctrinated this generation.

The college town of Basingstoke, England held an enthusiastic celebration of Black Lives Matter. An outpouring of residents took part in honoring Black Lives Matter and BLM was eulogized in the local newspaper. Some time later, signs were posted in Basingstoke bearing the inscription: “It’s okay to be white.” Woke residents were offended by these signs and angrily tore them down. The local newspaper characterized them as “hate crimes” and demanded a police investigation into the postings of the signs.

The “It’s okay to be white” signs were originally part of a social experiment. They were posted on university campuses to test the reactions of professors and their students. As expected, gullible students thought the signs were posted by White supremacists. This experiment indicates how hyper-vigilant campuses around the country have become over the issue of White racism.

In prior generations, the innocuous phrase “It’s okay to be white” would not have been interpreted negatively and certainly not considered a hate crime. But since the 1960s, news media has created a lopsided narrative world that magnifies racial and social injustice. And media blames White supremacy for social injustices.

Wokeism politicizes language and currently the word Black is valued while the word White is disdained. Consequently, the statement ‘Black lives matter’ is esteemed whereas ‘all lives matter’ is denigrated because it would include Whites.

This anti-White trend is growing and there doesn’t seem to be any significant resistance to it.

One of the reasons why anti-Whiteness is thriving is because many White elites are using their influence to sustain it. An example is the support of White Rutgers professors for a White-hating Black professor.

Dr. Brittney Cooper is a Rutgers University associate professor for “Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana Studies. Responding to White parents objections to Critical Race Theory, Cooper stated: “Critical Race Theory is just the proper teaching of American history.” That was a fairly mild response but most of Cooper’s anti-White reprimands are intemperate and often include foul language. A couple of examples: “White people are committed to being villains in the aggregate,” “Whiteness is largely an inconvenient interruption," and ‘We got to take these mf***ers out”

Although there have been demands for Cooper’s resignation, many White Rutgers professors have defended her. Their defense included this sentence: “We wish to express our unequivocal solidarity with Dr. Cooper, to affirm our support of her academic freedom, and to decry the harassment and intimidation she now faces.”

The Associated Press and most major newspapers capitalize Black while printing White in lower case. The New York Times tried to justify printing White in lower case with this strange explanation “White doesn’t represent a shared culture and history in the way Black does.”
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This is a contemporary media judgment rather than an historical one. Media tends to portray Blacks and Whites as concepts rather than as actual persons. The truth is the cultures that White European colonizers shared were more similar than the various tribal cultures of African Blacks.