Political Philosopher Michael Huemer weighs in on the question: what is wokeness?

I have been known to describe the essence of wokism as “reverse bigotry”. In the past, various forms of bigotry were common: prejudice against blacks, against women, against gays, against transgender people, and more. Wokism proposes, rather than to eliminate bigotry, to reverse the direction of traditional bigotry: replace anti-black racism with anti-white (or pro-black) racism; replace anti-female sexism with anti-male sexism; etc.

Now you might think this an unfair description of the views listed in section 1. For instance, just because someone thinks that America is systemically racist against blacks, doesn’t mean that they support racism against whites, does it?

Two things to note:

One, the people who say that are basically blaming white people for the problems suffered by blacks as a group. They are saying that racism (which is, on their view, one of the greatest evils of the world) on the part of white people is responsible for black disadvantage. Sometimes they say the racism is “systemic”, which means that there need not be any actual racists, but many of them say that the racism is ongoing in the hearts of white people today. Anyway, even the systemic racism was caused by evil white people in the past.

For a thought experiment, ask yourself what you would think about a person who explained most of the evils of the modern world as the product of wrongful behavior or evil character on the part of the Jews, either now or in the past. There are actually people like this. We call them “anti-Semites”, and they are obviously racists. If you replace “Jews” with “whites”, then you just have a different form of racism.

The full article is available here at Huemer’s blog Fake Nous.

Tags:   Michael Huemer · Political Correctness · Political PhilosophyNo Comments