The term “woke” comes from the English verb “wake”, meaning “to wake up”. It originally had a positive value, since it claimed to point to the need to wake up in the face of injustice. It was therefore initially used to describe people aware of issues of social justice and racial equality. But the rise of reactionary currents, notably in the United States, gradually turned the meaning of the word into its opposite. All those who in one way or another oppose DEI policies, that is, policies promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, as part of the fight against discrimination towards historically minority or minoritised groups, have in fact an interest in making those who defend them look like dangerous citizens.
The word “woke”, whose meaning is at first precise, soon merges with the cooking vessel of the same name, give or take a letter (in French, “wok”). A great many ingredients are mixed into it for the needs of the recipe. But unlike in the kitchen, the ingredients are not chosen for their quality, but for their power to arouse the disapproval of at least one category of the population. Thus the juxtaposition of the qualifiers attached to the word “woke” by its opponents lets them hope to group together a large number of people who, without ever having heard of wokism, find themselves in agreement in condemning one of the elements involved: transgender claims, decolonial struggles, critique of patriarchy, etc.
In France, a collective of academics, many of them in the humanities, has created this common enemy for itself. For them, there would exist a wokism that at once advocates a “delirious identitarianism”, attacks the presumption of innocence, starting with that of sexual aggressors, encourages positive discrimination (accused of “racism” by the Trump administration), and labels defenders of secularism as Islamophobic. But above all, wokism would help Trump and Putin to increase their power over their populations and more broadly over the world. How?
For these academics, wokism would constitute a “convenient foil” for Trump and Putin by allowing them to attack democracies on the pretext of abandoning the common-sense morality according to which transgender people do not exist. But Putin, who attacked Ukraine on the pretext that it was run by a Nazi government, evidently does not need a single woke figure to exist in the West in order to accuse it of being entirely gangrened by wokism. As for Trump, the fact that he forces universities that refuse to hand over students who took part in demonstrations against the current policy of the State of Israel to part with all their foreign students shows that he does not need wokism either to attack the fundamental rights of universities.
The second reason put forward by this collective of academics for opposing wokism is said to be that critiques of colonial ideology are exploited by Russia and China to strengthen their criticisms of colonial Europe and to substitute their own colonialism for it. But here again, China has quite enough in its own history to fuel the critique of Western colonialism, starting with the abominable Opium War and its terrible consequences for the Chinese population.
Fortunately, this collective has found a way to create a bulwark against this threat to the foundations of universalism and the democratic West. First a fight for reason and scientific rigour, then a fight for truth, and finally a fight for freedom of thought. The problem is that the wall these researchers claim to be building with these three kinds of bricks already has holes in it. Proof of this is that at the end of the same opinion piece, this collective writes that decolonial ideology is “probably not unrelated to the indifference of part of the youth towards the Ukrainian cause.” In plain terms, this would mean that criticising Western colonialism amounts to approving Russian colonialism, which wishes to annex Ukraine. If that is what this sentence means, it would have been better to say so. But even if it is not, it would have been in keeping with the logic of this opinion piece to cite at least one study or author that could even lend credence to the idea that the argument is plausible. For people who claim to defend scientific rigour and the accuracy of reasoning, this is, to say the least, problematic.
