How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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How Woke Won explores the intellectual roots of wokeness and how this movement, which poses as radical and left-wing, came to be embraced by some of the most privileged people imaginable. In fact, some argue that those most likely to use the term ‘woke’ are those on the right, indifferent to the plight of the marginalised, claiming victim status for themselves and trying to whip up a ‘culture war’.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. As one Guardian journalist notes: ‘ Rarely a week passes without a rightwing commentator warning about the rise of “cancel culture” or decrying the “woke agenda”.

It has introduced a climate of censorship and self-censorship and led to the cultivation of victimhood and dependency. For example, rather than campaigning for all parents to have access to free childcare for young children, woke activists focus instead on encouraging teachers to use gender neutral language in nursery schools. Joanna Williams argues that woke’s moral righteousness and veneer of egalitarianism belies the intolerance and authoritarianism of its leading proponents. Joanna will be known to spiked readers as a prolific author and one of our longest-running and most cherished columnists. As she shows, it has gained a grip over many public institutions from primary schools to universities, the civil service, and cultural institutions.

Joanna is the author of Consuming Higher Education Why Learning Can’t Be Bought (Bloomsbury, 2012) and Academic Freedom in an Age of Conformity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). It has done this by adopting the intellectual architecture of Critical Theory which holds that imbalances of power in society are hidden from view by dominant cultural structures, such as language and the way knowledge is imparted. Their anti-working class animosity was on full display in the Brexit fallout and is revealed in their slurs such as ‘gammon’ for Leave voters. P. Snow’s famous 1959 lecture on ‘The Two Cultures’ (humanities vs science) that sowed the seeds of discontent in Britain.More generally, woke ideology overides social class, divides workers according to identity, and allows employers to act as a neutral arbitrer in workplace conflicts. This was a protest song describing an incident from 1931 in which nine black teenagers from Scottsboro, Arkansas were accused of raping two white women.