The most dangerous thing about ‘woke’ — it’s fashionable
Dan Hannan
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The revelation came while I was watching Antiques Roadshow. So, this is what drives the “woke” revolution. I should explain that the Antiques Roadshow, a BBC program that has been running since the ’70s, has a special cultural place in Britain. The format is always the same. The presenters rock up in a pretty provincial town, local people ransack their attics for heirlooms to be valued, some bits of old junk turn out to be expensive, and everyone gets excited.
The show is broadcast on Sunday evenings, and its audience is disproportionately elderly, which is to say, disproportionately white. White people are 87% of Britain’s population, but 96% of the over-70s.
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Anyway, in this episode, a pair of sisters showed up with a golden robe that had been presented to their grandfather, a colonial administrator called Sir Harold Kittermaster, by his friend Haile Selassie.
After offering a valuation, the presenter pressed the sisters on whether they would be happy to repatriate the robe to Africa. The women, looking flustered, said that, yes, of course, they would. And that was when it hit me. The whole demented moment through which we are passing is really all about fashion. People go along with “woke” for the reason they go along with every other trend: because it’s awkward not to.
The presenter, whose mother was from Sierra Leone, was simply parroting the bromides of the age, and the guests could not immediately articulate what was wrong with it. But if you think about what he was suggesting, the objections are obvious. First, the garment is not, even by “woke” standards, colonial loot. Ethiopia was an independent state on good terms with Britain. Second, to whom would it be returned? To the current pretender to the Ethiopian throne, the Eton- and Oxford-educated Zera Yacob Amha Selassie? Wouldn’t that be rude — to throw back a gift?
Of course, all these considerations are trumped by the ruling idea of our age, namely that anything done by white men in Africa must have been wrong. Racial politics trumps what would normally be considered good manners. Thus, for example, the Church of England has returned two Benin bronzes that were given to the then-archbishop of Canterbury all the way back in, er, 1982.
In some ways, these gestures are a form of conspicuous consumption, a status marker. It has recently become voguish, for example, for wealthy people with slave-owners in their family trees to make payments by way of atonement, a trend started by a New York-based BBC journalist called Laura Trevelyan. Now, I have no doubt that Trevelyan, whom I used to know slightly, is perfectly sincere. But none of this would be happening were it not for the odd cultural moment we are passing through.
“Fashion” may seem a trivial word for it. But terrible things can happen for reasons of mimicry. The dreadful rise of school shootings, for example, seems to be driven mainly by copycat violence.
Now, giving away your own money is perfectly laudable. But the fashion does not stop there. Consider the proposal in California to pay reparations to black residents. Who owes the money? To put the question more precisely, who is more likely to have a plantation owner as an ancestor: an African American or the descendant of Polish serfs? It is precisely because such questions are impossible to adjudicate fairly that our civilization rests on the idea that we are accountable for our actions, not those of relatives.
Dwarfing even the gargantuan sums mooted in California is a $33 trillion claim by Caribbean nations against various European powers, mainly Britain. Again, never mind the absurdity of making, for example, the son of a Jamaican immigrant to London pay his cousins. In what possible sense is the state of the United Kingdom liable? Its chief contribution was to become the first country to work to extirpate slavery.
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Between 1808 and 1867, the U.K. spent 1.8% of its GDP annually on the campaign to abolish slavery — a sum calculated by Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape to be the most expensive foreign policy in human history. That sum alone would have wiped out any liability many times over, even if we pretended there was a liability in the first place.
But none of this is about rational calculation. It is about an inchoate sense of bad guys vs. good guys, evil colonialists vs. innocent victims, and exploitative white people vs. everyone else. That’s why no one claims reparations from Arabs, Chinese, Africans, or anyone else. They are not foolish enough to invite it.