Woke Projection

When I think of famous social movements, like civil rights and suffrage, I imagine the disenfranchised fighting for their rights at great personal risk to themselves and their families. But when I think of the modern woke movement, I imagine privileged people at elite institutions virtue signaling on social media. Why such a difference?

Imagine you are an idealistic college graduate and you want to do good and do well. What better way than to join a prestigious institution? Maybe you become faculty at an ivy league to educate the next generation or you became a journalist to speak truth to power or you work at a big tech company to help connect the world.

A few years into your job you realize the institution you joined is not as world-changing as it first appeared. Many large institutions in America are decaying, and capitalist incentives have creeped into the cracks at exactly the same time the internet has made it harder for institutions to suppress criticism and manicure their public images.

Harvard's endowment makes enough profit to educate a small country for free, but instead of educating more people they strictly limit class sizes so they can continue their racket of laundering rich kids with smart kids. Meanwhile, the media churns out clickbait and propaganda for people in power and big tech divides and addicts us.

As an employee, especially one that picked your career to have a positive impact, working at an institution that marketed itself as more world-changing than it is puts you in difficult position. Do you keep your head down and keep drawing a paycheck, quit and start over, or lobby for what you think is right at the risk of getting fired?

Right as you're faced with this difficult decision, you hear a story about how society is so structurally broken, and how the people outside your little bubble are so evil, that the only way to fix society is for privileged, smart, good people, lucky enough to be wealthy and/or employed by powerful institutions, to post a hashtag on social media or implement hiring quotas or censor misinformation.

It's not a coincidence that woke has taken the strongest hold in the most hypocritical institutions, not to mention wealthy enclaves like Marin, unlike, say, in banking or firefighting where, for better or worse, there's more congruence between people's intentions and reality.

For someone who took a job, ostensibly to do good, it's easier add a land acknowledgement before your quarterly profits update than to risk your job by questioning where the profits come from. It's also easier to add a "coexist" sticker to your Tesla than to allow BART to access Marin and make it easier for poor people to travel there.

The concept of privilege is central to the woke movement, in part, because it justifies not leave your position of power in order to have an impact. Instead of getting fired for standing up for what you believe in, you get to stay at Google or Harvard or the New York Times despite the fact that those institutions and many others make up the "structure" in structural inequality.

Doing a little good, even for the wrong reasons, is not better than doing no good at all. Intentions matter. When people see someone doing good for selfish reasons, they become skeptical of people doing good in the future, which contributes to the breakdown of trust in society.
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Woke has been coopted as a projection of people who don't know how to reconcile their desire to change the world with their desire to spend summers in Europe. If you squint, the movement looks more like the Doctrine of Discovery than the March on Washington, and it needs to be called out for what it is increasingly becoming, because it lends a bad name to what would otherwise still be a noble movement to address important structural inequalities in society.