đź”’ Woke 2 But It's Just Creepy Racism This Time
A couple of very important things happened earlier this month: First of all, apparently Woke ended. It’s finished. Time of death was declared on Sunday the 9th of August sometime around 9am when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on a morning show and laughed and said “Woke 1 was crazy!” That of course implies, god help us, the present or future existence of “Woke 2,” which will, presumably, not be crazy? I’m not sure how anyone is going to ensure that, because I have long maintained and still do maintain that “woke” has nothing approaching a coherent definition. This is a position that makes some people very angry.
One of those angry people is Freddie deBoer. In his post reflecting on the death of Woke, deBoer first rages about Garbage Day writer Ryan Broderick (against whom he holds a long-standing grudge for harshly criticizing the Substack platform three years ago) for apparently misdefining the word in his own column. Later deBoer goes on to list examples of extreme Wokeness, one of which is Muslims getting upset about depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
Woke seems to be a very gerrymandered concept indeed, an umbrella that somehow covers transgender bathrooms and hardline Islam, but this isn’t an unprecedented suggestion—in 2024, Indiana Representative Jim Banks categorized Al Qaida as being Woke.
If I’m to be generous and grant that most people who complain about Woke are complaining about a coherent idea, one that encompasses all of Freddie’s examples, it would be something like: When a minority group or individual gets upset about something that’s not worth getting upset about, and an institution takes their side, sometimes taking action against some white person who doesn’t deserve it. That’s fair enough. But also a lot of people say that foreign aid is woke, so you know what, fuckin’, whatever.
If Woke actually is dead and gone then at least you hope that means that everyone will stop bitching about it, but we can’t have that mercy either because apparently now everyone has to do a round of “postmortems” to ensure that it, whatever it was, never happens again.
On the topic of postmortems, British writer Sam Kriss wrote one of the best I’ve ever read. It’s about the Jason Arday affair. You’re probably passingly familiar with Jason Arday, considering that he basically was the entire news cycle for the month of August. If you’ve been living under the Rock of Mercy, the short recap is that a black Cambridge professor was accused of having plagiarized much of his doctoral thesis, and as the story gained traction, people began to suspect that much of his actual life story was also fake.
In the immediate wake of the declaration of the death of Woke, the full weight of mainstream, tabloid, and social media felt not just an invitation but a moral duty to absolutely excoriate this person; to burn his life down and bury the ashes under Woke’s grave, and to put his head on a pike as a warning to Woke 2 and any other future Wokes that might come sniffing around. Cambridge officials, who can’t not have known about Arday’s various infractions, can only have hired him because he’s black. We don’t do that anymore, not in Post-Woke, no no no.
So the media and the internet viciously hounded Arday until he resigned, but that only put blood in the water so they stepped up the hounding, so he killed himself. And even folks on the left don’t know what to do with this information because we’re trying to distance ourselves from Woke now, per Queen AOC, and that means admitting Jason Arday was a Bad Guy who probably didn’t deserve to die but was still a Bad Guy.
Oddly, we have to come up with reasons to signal that we think he was really bad, leftistly, so that we can keep our cred as leftists but without appearing Woke. One of the most repeated criticisms I’ve seen is that he was lying about being autistic and so it was evil for him to have given false hope to autistic kids and their parents that they might overcome adversity and become college professors.
Now, I’m not going to talk much more about Jason Arday because it’s been covered to death (wow, no pun intended there) and I wasn’t even planning to cover it at all and I’ve possibly already lost most of my readers since the sentence in which I dropped his name (anyone still with me, thank you, you are my besties and you will be rewarded) but I want to say one more thing: I was immediately skeptical of the claims that Arday was a huge fabulist and con artist, mostly because I like to evaluate claims myself and these claims felt like vibes, but every single person, left, right, center, and even Sam Kriss in that excellent article I linked earlier, fully accepted the frame that he was guilty of all this fraud and habitual lies. Without having much mind to weigh in about it, I pretty much accepted that this had all been proven somewhere.
Now, however, it’s starting to come out that (most? all??) of what Jason Arday claimed may have been either true or not terribly exaggerated. For example, one of his most absurd claims was that he ran 30 marathons in 30 days, and even Kriss ridicules that, but like, there are contemporaneous news articles about it, and… n-nobody thought to check? Nobody thought to actually look into this at all? And it turns out a bunch of his apparent lies were misquotes that nobody thought to double check? And maybe even the plagiarism thing had more to do with neurodivergent information process than idea theft, and may have been careless rather than crafty, and that was taken into account by the academics who cleared him of malicious wrongdoing?
WOW IT SURE SEEMS LIKE WE JUST STRAIGHT UP WITCH HUNTED AN AUTISTIC BLACK GUY TO DEATH anyway, enough about Arday, maybe his story was still more lies than truth and I haven’t done an exhaustive analysis so I won’t argue with you. Let’s just take a look at our general media and political landscape in this glorious Post-Woke world in which we now live.
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