Wokeism is the elite’s effort to protect their privilege: Oscars edition
Timothy P. Carney
When you are in the elite, there is always a threat that someone else will knock you out of the elite. That is one reason elites tend to build barriers to competition and entry.
This is especially acute for America’s current elite, which fashions itself a meritocratic elite. If you’re in the elite not through some inheritance but through your own skills or accomplishments, then you are precarious in your elite status. Elite precarity is one of the most important facts about American life today.
Insiders, though, have tried-and-true ways to protect their status. Jargon is one.
Jargon is about creating a new language that is not terribly logical but which signals insider status. You can only properly use the jargon if you fully immerse yourself into the insiders’ culture. This makes it impossible for new entrants to compete unless they join the club.
Medicine, journalism, finance, economics, academia — they all have their silly and obscuring jargon.
Wokeist speech police can be best understood as enforcers of jargon. Calling people Latinx, refusing to talk about women but instead deploying ridiculous terms such as “menstruating people,” all obviously obscure more than they reveal. The purpose of these speech rules is to set tripwires for anyone not on the inside.
Wokeism is a way for insiders to keep out competition. Anyone who uses last year’s term is now a racist who needs to apologize. What was representation last week is appropriation this week, and if you aren’t hip to that, well, you’re canceled.
Only when you understand wokeism in this way can you understand why there was a freakout about an underdog nomination for Best Actress. One director, who thought the black female lead of her movie should have been nominated, flatly stated, “We live in a world and work in industries that are so aggressively committed to upholding whiteness and perpetuating an unabashed misogyny towards Black women.”
Here’s the most telling objection, via Chris Bray, from Los Angeles Times film critic Robert Daniels:
“Although it’s easy to point a finger at Riseborough for taking a slot from Black women, broken systems persist when we focus our ire on individuals … what does it say that the Black women who did everything the institution asks of them — luxury dinners, private Academy screenings, meet-and-greets, splashy television spots and magazine profiles — are ignored when someone who did everything outside of the system is rewarded?”
Got that?
That case that Andrea Riseborough’s nomination is racist is grounded in part on the fact that she was a low-class outsider.
Bray tries to make sense of this:
So it’s a story of oppression, in which the Motion Picture Academy has attacked and harmed black women to inappropriately elevate a white woman, but it’s simultaneously a reverse-image injury of social class: a low-class outsider, a person of poor status, inflicted injury on high-class insiders, who were deprived of the appropriate degree of honor despite participating in “luxury dinners.” The oppressed underclass is the much-pampered insider status group who’ve been denied their proper honors by a low-status oppressor who came from outside and below, grinding the people above her under her racist boot as she, as she — well, shit, I’m lost. The oppressed had suites at the Peninsula, okay, while the oppressor should just shut up and go back to her trailer park.
Always remember this about wokeism: It is class warfare. The more absurd it is, the more effective it is. Because it proclaims as dogma a set of beliefs that nobody believed the day before yesterday, it creates a system whereby the only way to stay in good graces is already to be on the inside.
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