Any American who is my age and hasn’t spent their life with their head in the sand is aware of social injustice in the so-called “Greatest Nation on Earth”.
Our country has a rich history of great accomplishments, of which we are justifiably very proud. Bad things, even shameful things, have occurred here as well, just like in all nations on earth.
We’ve experienced slavery, religious “witch” trials, Western vigilante justice, Jim Crow laws, real estate “redlining”, lynching, and mob violence/hate crimes against immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Germany, China, Mexico, and residents of non-Christian faiths. We have deprived, and continue to, deprive citizens of voting rights and many States have engineered laws to deprive women of reproductive rights. “People of color” have always received a different type of treatment under the criminal justice system than White Americans. Our Native Americans were treated like vermin. We’ve had Presidents who lied to us.
The United States is not perfect, not by a long shot, and efforts to better our Nation should be ongoing and encouraged by all. Our elected officials should be working to resolve our imperfections, not cast blame.
The word “woke” recently came into the popular culture. It is an African American slang term, derived from the word “awakened”, to reflect an awareness or alertness to social injustice in society. Apparently, it came into popular usage via the Black Lives Matter protests in recent years, particularly those pertaining to the brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police officers.
Apparently, many millions of White Americans who had not given much thought to social justice prior to 2020 were “awakened” when they watched on TV the police brutality against George Floyd and chase-down and murder of Ahmed Arbury by vigilantes in Georgia. It is highly likely that these “woke” citizens contributed to the record 80 million Americans who voted in 2020 to replace Donald Trump as President.
Now, there is clearly an anti-woke campaign going on in America, courtesy of the Trump M.A.G.A. cult, the Republican politicians who are courting Trump’s favor, and of course the mouthpiece of right-wing politics, Fox News.
The idea seems to be that “wokeness” is a bad thing, that being aware of something deficient in society is wrong, and that acknowledging, or acting on, social injustice is a personal failing… that these ugly truths are not to be mentioned in polite society.
In other words, a denial of obvious systemic shortcomings in American society and government, not dissimilar to the denial by the same folks that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election by seven million votes.
There seems to be a belief that if one pretends that something doesn’t exist, then it doesn’t. In essence, there is reality and there is the reality that one chooses to live in.
However, “facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” (Aldous Huxley)
Unfortunately, “people of color” cannot forget or un-see their 500-year history in America. Their forefathers were unwilling immigrants: they did not choose to live in their reality, which has been a second-class citizenship even after the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution guaranteed them equal rights and protections under the law. Politicians all over America, not just in the South, have been making African-Americans’ struggle for equality an uphill battle for the past 150 years.
Why?
Basically, because politicians need someone or something to blame for society’s ills. If a politician can get people focused on identifying a boogeyman, voters will not notice the fact that the politician is not solving problems, which he was elected to do. Crime? Blame the Blacks and the Mexicans. The economy? Blame the Chinese, the unions, and the Jews. Social awareness (“woke)? Blame the teachers, historians, the “liberal” media, the atheists, and the Democrats. Fake news? Blame the “other guys’’” news source. The January 6, 2021 Capitol Riot insurrection? It was those BLM and Antifa folks that you saw on TV, not bad-loser Trump supporters.
The current anti-woke campaign has similarities to the “Lost Cause” propaganda onslaught after the Civil War. The reality was that the horrendous carnage was caused by the Southern states refusing to phase-out slavery and attempting to secede from the Union when they couldn’t have their way. The insurrection was not a success. Defeat was not an option to the surviving Southern hierarchy, however, so they engineered a decades-long public relations campaign to re-frame the Civil War as a disagreement between States (the cause was not slavery but “States’ rights”) and the traitorous Confederate leaders and soldiers were re-cast as heroes. The real bad guys, the Lost Cause narrative went, were the slaves: they caused all the economic and social misery that the South had to endure.
So, this blatant lie that was gobbled up by Southerners then justified the imposition of Jim Crow laws which basically stripped the newly-freed slaves of their Constitutional rights and made sure that Blacks would be second-class Americans.
The Lost Cause was the reality that White Southerners chose to believe, and their children and their descendants were taught this in Southern schools. The Lost Cause myth permeated all of American society, to the point that many people in the North came to sympathize with Southerners and feel comfortable and justified in discriminating against African Americans. It is, therefore, no surprise that the fight for civil rights took over a hundred years and is still ongoing vis a vis BLM, George Floyd, Ahmed Arbury, etc.
The hard-core base of the Republican Party is used to believing things that are told to them, whether they are true or not, and prefer not to dwell on unpleasant facts. The big right-wing hullabaloo about “critical race theory” is merely a ruse to discourage a discussion of the systemic racism that clearly exists in America.
If you won’t acknowledge a problem, you won’t discuss it. If you can’t discuss a problem, you can’t solve it.
It is sad to say that the reality of social injustice in our country is being used to divide Americans into political camps: those who are aware and want to do something about it; and those who do not care to acknowledge a problem or pretend that those who dare to raise the issue are un-patriotic citizens.
“Those people are out to ruin the country!”, they say.
It reminds me of the “Red Scare” of the early 1950’s where there was a political and societal hysteria about the perceived threat of actual “card-carrying” Communists, their “fellow travelers”, Socialists, Liberals, Democrats, and other demons who were supposedly infiltrating the Federal government en masse.
The chief perpetrator of the “Red Scare” propaganda was a publicity-hungry U.S. Senator from Wisconsin named Joe McCarthy. Anyone who stood in the way of his grandstanding and lying was labeled unpatriotic at best and a traitor at worst.
“Those Commies are out to ruin the country!”
This hysteria went on for several years, there were lots of televised, sensational House of Un-American Activities committee meetings, and slimy politicians like Congressman Richard Nixon gained notoriety from the proceedings. In the end, there were no earth-shaking discoveries, the myth was shattered, and many people had their lives ruined by McCarthy’s public slandering.
Reasonable question: What is an “un-American activity”? Is belonging to the wrong political party or religion inappropriate? It seems increasingly so lately.
In the past fifteen years, we’ve seen the manufactured hysteria over Obama’s birth certificate, Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Trump’s “Wall” that would deter illegal immigration, and the “stolen” Presidential election of 2020. These were diversions to get people angry and excited, focusing energy on an “important” problem… that was overblown or didn’t exist.
There is a word for this: “demagoguery”. It involves a politician (or political party) appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.
“Wokeness” is a problem if you (as a politician or citizen) are trying to hide or avoid a societal truth. Scapegoating “woke” individuals or political rivals will be successful if the intention is to scare target voters into fearing reality.
As we have seen in recent years, there are a lot of those kind of voters out there, people who will believe anything that a politician tells them. Or pretend that they didn’t hear what they heard or see what they’ve clearly seen.
How does one un-see a police officer choking to death a helpless man? How does one un-see a M.A.G.A. mob beating Capitol policemen who were just doing their jobs protecting our democracy?
Go back to sleep, we are being told.
As Voltaire said, :Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”