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Earlier this month, Barbara Furlow-Smiles pleaded guilty to criminal charges that she embezzled some $4mn from Facebook while serving as a top diversity executive at the tech company. That tawdry episode seemed a fitting end to the year the woke wave crested. In 2024, it is likely to recede.
The term “woke”, of course, has been twisted to the point of deformity. It can mean an awareness of one’s surroundings, usually related to racial and social injustice. Or, it can be stretched to cover such things as critical race theory and identity politics, and a conviction that most problems are systemic and must be addressed as such. At its most pejorative, it tends to denote a censorious and performative progressive tribe.
As a middle-aged, white-ish man, I may not be best placed to pronounce the decline of woke. Still, I can see its problems mounting.
In the corporate world, leaders have come to see that being woke is not necessarily profitable. Disney chief executive Bob Iger recently suggested that its creatives’ insistence on shoehorning progressive social messages into its films helped to account for their poor box office performance. “We have to entertain first,” said Iger. “It’s not about messages.”
Bud Light has been made to crawl since its move earlier this year to partner with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, prompted a conservative boycott led by musician Kid Rock that knocked it from its perch as America’s top-selling beer. (How Bud Light could be the top-selling beer anywhere is a subject for a separate column.)
Its parent company made amends by launching a bro-ey ad campaign featuring professional footballers and paying up to again become the official sponsor of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. Rock seems satisfied and has been spied necking Bud Light again.
My FT colleague Taylor Nicole Rogers tells me that diversity, equity and inclusion executives at big companies are disheartened that the big promises their employers made in the fevered days after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 are no longer a priority.
Attacking woke is not foolproof. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, has not reaped the expected dividends in his campaign for the Republican nomination by promising to bury wokeness. But perhaps that is because it is now de rigueur on the right to be an enemy of wokeness. In a national election year, I expect Joe Biden’s handlers will also hope to muzzle woke voices within his party.
For me, what truly shattered the woke movement was Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel — and the astonishing images of students and activists either justifying the slaughter of innocents or finding ways to condemn Israel before it had yet dropped a bomb. (It has since dropped many, with the Gaza death toll reaching 20,000, according to officials in the Hamas-run territory.) The problem, say critics, is that the woke conception of the world — obsessed by systems and identity — mishandles Jews and Israelis. It tends to cast them as wealthy “white oppressors”, and so cannot see them as victims.
In my ultra-progressive suburb, where people plant signs on their front lawns advertising the many hatreds they oppose, fellow Jews have been startled by the lack of solidarity from groups they have supported in the past. To them, and now me, the woke banner we marched under a few years ago feels hollow, even hypocritical.
Then came the now infamous congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT earlier this month, in which they struggled to answer whether calls for the genocide of Jews violated their codes of conduct. Their hedging was a revelatory moment for an idea undone by its adherents’ excesses and clumsy application.
Sometimes eras collapse in one horrific gasp. A friend reminded me of this passage from Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album”, in reference to the Manson murders: “Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
It is too soon to say whether the woke era ended on October 7 or merely reached a crossroads. But the racism it called out, and its poisonous legacy, are still haunting us. So too sexism and myriad other social injustices. We will have to find new ways to think about and confront them.
Joshua Chaffin is the FT’s New York correspondent
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