“Woke 1” was crazy. Don’t take my word for it; that’s what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said. The globally influential US politician made the comment when asked to explain some of her past positions, like defunding the police, and the internet went, well, crazy.
But the most interesting thing is what the comment implies—if there was a “Woke 1”, there will be a “Woke 2”.
In fact, I think Woke 2 is already here, for reasons we’ll get into. First, a disclaimer: I don’t like using “woke” because it’s become a pejorative term, a kind of rhetorical cudgel. But, like it or not, it’s in the discourse, so it’s important to establish what “woke” means, where it’s helpful, and where it goes wrong.
“Woke” was said to originate with African Americans about a century ago, where staying woke meant being “awake” to racism. From there, “woke” expanded to include awareness of all forms of social injustice, especially the way injustice can be perpetuated in social structures. It then adopted the insights of intersectionality, which proposes that multiple forms of disadvantage—when, say, someone is a member of a marginalised racial minority and also has a disability—can intersect and compound.
There is truth to this. Racism is real and evil, systems can maintain oppression, and disadvantage can accumulate. These are things we should all be aware of and opposed to.
That, however, is not the full story of woke.
Woke went beyond awareness and became an ideology: wokeism. In simple terms, wokeism is a form of critical theory, derived from Marxism, which says that the way we structure society is really a struggle over who has power. Some people are oppressors—they have power and use their privilege to maintain systems and structures to their advantage. Others are victims, exploited by the oppressors to maintain this status quo.
Crucially, oppressors and victims are defined not by their individual humanity, but by their identities, especially their race, sex, or gender. From the reasonable insight that groups often have shared experiences, wokeism proceeds to the conclusion that we’re inescapbly defined by the groups we belong to. To know someone’s identity is to categorise them—regardless of whether you actually know them.
That’s a textbook example of how to dehumanise someone.
It gets worse. As a society, it’s inevitable that we will disagree about important issues. Wokeism concluded that the way to resolve disagreement was to elevate victims, topple oppressors, and dismantle systems—all defined along those identity lines.
Because this was a coherent system of thought, you couldn’t pick and choose elements of the ideology—say, embracethe awareness of injustice and discard the theory of oppression. Nor could you agree with the problem diagnosis but offer a different solution—say, agree that society needs to be more tolerant, but deny that the best way to show love is to prescribe puberty blockers to an adolescent still trying to work out who they are or to uncritically affirm someone’s new gender identity.
This was a package deal, and it did not tolerate dissent. And no wonder, when, by wokeism’s definition, disagreement was simply defence of oppression.
Thus a defining characteristic of wokeism, as observed and experienced by most people, was its willingness to punish differing views and enforce conformity. Sometimes the softer language of “celebrating diversity and inclusion” was employed, but the results were the same.
So Woke 1 was just the first major iteration of wokeism, and the revolutionary zeal that accompanied it produced an understandable and negative response—hence Ocasio-Cortez’s desire to be conciliatory about the “crazy” of that era.
But let’s look at some representative cases, across academia, government, and law, and consider whether they sound familiar.
Start with the calls to “defund the police” that were the cause of Ocasio-Cortez’s recent comments. This is a good example of wokeism. The assumption is that policing is structurally oppressive, using force to maintain the privileged in their position and victimising marginalised identities. This goes beyond observing that policing has disparate impacts—instead, it asserts this oppression is the whole point of policing. While these calls originated in the US in the Woke 1 era, they’ve been repeated here. Quite recently actually, with two Otago academics arguing last year that New Zealand Police are structurally racist, with a “whakapapa … grounded in a long and violent colonial history.”
Moving on to government, the Green Party’s new health manifesto uses the framework of wokeism when it promisesto “Reconfigure our health system towards recognising and acting on oppressive and intersecting biases (e.g. racism, sexism, ableism, fatphobia, ageism, queerphobia, transphobia)”. On the right, the ACT Party adopted wokeist intolerance of dissent when it doubled down on euthanasia reforms that would make it harder for hospices, doctors and nurses, to express their beliefs if they don’t believe assisted death is the best way to care for vulnerable patients.
And the courts recently issued new guidance for lawyers, saying they should know and use clients’ and witnesses’ pronouns. Women’s rights advocate Ani O’Brien points out that the guidelines “assume that using someone’s requested pronouns is an uncomplicated courtesy. In a courtroom, it isn’t always.” That’s why equivalent UK guidancesays, for example, “a female rape victim may find it incomprehensible if the judge and others in court refer to her biologically male attacker as ‘she’”. New Zealand’s guidelines lack this insight.
As these examples show, Woke 2 is already here. Or, in other words, the wokeism that produced Woke 1 may have been less obvious for a time, but it never went away.
So how should we respond?
Not with condemnation, aggression, or fear. That wouldn’t just be ironic, it would be wrong.
If wokeism’s ultimate failing is to dehumanise, then the solution is to re-humanise.
To begin with, we should acknowledge and embrace the truths recognised in the origins of woke—prejudice is real, systems can have unjust outcomes, disadvantage can multiply.
But we should resist the ideology of wokeism.
First, reject the false ideas. It’s simply not true that identity markers divide us from each other in the way that wokeism asserts. Our shared human nature means that the things we have in common are much more important than the things that distinguish us.
Second, refuse to play the game. Don’t enter the victimhood Olympics, by which I mean don’t try to win debates on the strength of your identity rather than the strength of your ideas. And don’t try to crush dissent or cancel difference among people of good will. Deal in persuasion, not compulsion. Yes, there will be limits to what we can agree on or accept, but make them as generous as possible, and recognise your ideological opponents’ humanity by treating them with dignity.
Third, tell the truth. If Woke 2 follows the pattern of Woke 1, it won’t take kindly to being challenged. Challenge it anyway.
Responding to wokeism will take courage; it might even mean paying a price for holding your position in the face of opposition.
But if we’re not willing or able to do this, then Woke 2 isn’t just here—it’s already won.
