Turning Equity Into Oppression

What the "Woke Wars" really tell us

Last week, conservative author Bethany Mandel went viral (as she’d predicted). As co-author of “Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating Our Youth” (I’m not linking), she was asked by the interviewer to define “Woke”. She fumbles around for an answer for 30 seconds (a lifetime in an interview). As she begins to recover, she says the following:

It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression.

I suppose one shouldn’t pile on as anyone can have a moment in a live interview, but I found what she finally came up to be shocking. What, exactly, are “hierarchies of oppression” supposed to be? I understand the “reimagine” but how does this “reduce” society?

I’ll risk cliche here by referencing George Orwell. On what planet does recognizing structural discrimination result in “hierarchies of oppression”? Conservatives denying the existence of the former while worrying about the latter seems a textbook definition of DoubleSpeak.

Last Wednesday, Mandel went on Twitter to provide the definition of wokeness that eluded her the day before. I took the opportunity to create one of my first “I fixed it for you” posts. Here is her tweet and my repair:

Mandel’s initial tweet is helpful in demonstrating how the conservative anti-wokeness campaign is based on misdirection and exaggeration. Let me unpack it. First, note that the word “radical” shows up twice in her relatively short tweet. What is radical about the idea of discrimination shaping outcomes? Or that we should desire a society where this is less true? This “radical” label is thrown around by politicians and opinion leaders and podcasters to distinguish these ideas from “normal Americans” (even though polling data shows that the majority of Americans recognize the reality of institutional discrimination in some form).

Second, she seems to argue that social institutions are built to create and sustain discrimination. That’s why all disparity can be explained by those institutions. This totalizing of the argument then requires a pushback of equal magnitude for the critics. Concern about how educational instruction might explore ideas giving light to the discrimination must, to her, result in eradication of those ideas. That’s how you get suggestions that we not address WHY Rosa Parks had to move back in the bus. It’s how you get attacks on all kinds of books in school libraries under the guise of “protecting children from hardcore pornography”, as DeSantis puts it.

Third, she argues that the intended outcome of wokeness is “equality of group result”. This is key to the “hierarchies of oppression” argument. If one assumes that structures of power, economics, and status (Max Weber’s structures of stratification) are finite resources, then group equality must require redistribution. For the discriminated group to achieve equality, others must be discriminated against.

Finally, these goals will only be achieved because “the woke mob” comes storming the gates with torches and pitchforks. Conservative critics create the fear of the woke mob by cherrypicking bad behavior from groups of individuals or companies. Disney critiques the “Don’t Say Gay” bill so they are the corporate mob. Law students at Stanford shout down a conservative judge, so that’s another example of how “they” act. Meanwhile, actual mobs on January 6th weren’t mobs at all but sightseers who got carried away.

Here’s what I tried to do with my edit of Mandel’s tweet. First, the belief is not radical. It is a recognition that institutions contain patterns and practices that result in differential outcomes by race, class, or gender. It’s an important sociological concept that this institutional discrimination occurs without the people following those patterns and practices being prejudiced in any way. Simply following the rules within the institution has differential effects.

Not everything is institutional discrimination. But there are areas (for example, housing policy, education funding, criminal justice enforcement) where decisions made years back create today’s differential outcomes that require attention. Once we know that differential outcomes are results of historic practices, there is a moral obligation to address them. Simply repeating the end of MLK’s Dream Speech is not sufficient.

These changes will come about not because of protests by the woke mob but because people of good conscience recognize the institutional patterns and decide to act to mitigate those outcomes.

In Alan Bean’s SubStack newsletter last week, he had a guest post from his father-in-law, Charles Kiker. Charles documents the ways in which his life was shaped by white privilege from the home his great-grandfather built on former Cherokee land in Georgia to how his grandfather’s stepfather got land in Texas after a “second Trail of Tears” to the bank that loaned the family money for a house that others couldn’t have gotten. Charles writes:

White Privilege? Who, me? Yes, me! That’s my story. And many of my generation and our descendants could tell a similar story. We are not responsible FOR the wrongs done by our white ancestors to people of color: Native Americans, Black slaves, and defrauded Hispanics. But we are responsible TO their descendants who have played on an unlevel playing field.

That’s not reflective of a hierarchy of oppression. It’s a recognition of one’s blessings and a desire to see those shared broadly with others who didn’t have those opportunities.

That’s what this fight over Wokeness is about. Some want to address the historical realities. A vocal minority wants to deny the relevance of those realities and claims foul if anyone dare question the existing power structure.