Wayne O'Leary

The World of Woke

It had to happen, I suppose. The woke left has come to Maine, bringing along its adjunct the language police. We’re about to start renaming things to eradicate all vestiges of perceived racism.

Maine has little in the way of offending statuary available to be torn down, so the wokesters have chosen to focus on the written word in the form of place-names. The first order of business: changing the designation of two small islets in a tidal river near the coastal town of Castine presently called the Upper and Lower Negro Islands.

In May, a town meeting attended by a few dozen people voted very narrowly to submit a recommendation to the US Geological Survey (the final arbiter on island names) for a renaming, thereby chalking up a great victory over the heinous forces of structural racism in America.

Exactly who was offended by the existing nomenclature remains a bit unclear. We do know the catalyst for the proposed change, however; it’s an academic-dominated public-history project called Atlantic Black Box, whose director attended the town meeting. Black Box is dedicated to forcing the New England region to reckon with its “complicity in the slave trade” and “extensive involvement in the global economy of enslavement.”

In the specific case of the Negro Islands, it appears no one knows exactly when (late 1700s?) or why they were so named. There could have been some tangential connection to the slave trade — or not. Essentially, the contrived name controversy seems to be an outrage in search of a cause.

At any rate, the term “negro” has only rather recently become a pejorative, and mostly for political reasons. My dictionaries refer to “negro” as simply synonymous with “black person”; it’s not the offensive N-word, after all. Martin Luther King Jr. himself referred to his own race as Negro in his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech. As for Maine’s Negro Islands, their linguistic banishment recalls the air-brushing of out-of-favor comrades from politburo photographs under the old Soviet Union; it’s a form of cancelling history.

The foregoing excursion into local and regional cultural affairs serves as a useful introduction to the woke movement and its extremist ideological foundation, critical race theory (CRT), which has taken over portions of the progressive left by way of academia, supplanting economic populism and threatening to dominate the future of the Biden administration. The Atlantic Black Box Project, one of its offshoots, is heavily laden with board members associated with educational and cultural organizations engaged in expounding on slavery and racism, and propagating CRT itself.

Brown University and the University of Wisconsin (Madison), centers for this sort of pursuit, appear from the Black Box précis to be major academic influences. The précis is filled with loaded references to structural or systemic racism, historical “complicity” on the part of the white majority, and past “white violence” heretofore covered up in the liberal North. Not a pretty picture.

Among other things, the woke movement’s answer to such offenses is applied politically correct language aimed at de-racializing American society. Speech, CRT insists, is not neutral in power relationships between racial groups. Whites, consciously or not, have always been privileged enforcers of white racial supremacy and have used language, including nomenclature, accordingly.

More concretely, wokeness, reinforced by CRT’s academic jargon about white privilege, social oppression, unconscious bias, and the like, has found its way from the campuses into the day-to-day mainstream of business and politics. At the corporate level, as in higher-education, anti-racial-bias training is now de rigueur.

In politics, we’re talking about slavery reparations again and heading back to the affirmative-action programs of the 1960s. The latter has manifested itself in the Biden administration’s appointment policies. To signal his racial sensitivity (and to solidify the support of a key voting bloc), the president, who previously announced that his first Supreme Court selection would be a black woman, recently picked his first five lower-court judicial nominees, all of whom are “people of color.” Not much balance there.

Biden, using woke terminology, further characterized his stimulus jobs program as an effort, in part, to address “systemic racism.” He thereby accepted a key premise of the woke left. No longer are questions of economic inequality and corporate malfeasance key issues; the reform agenda is now all about race. As the New York Times put it in April, “Mr. Biden has positioned addressing racial inequities at the center of his domestic policy agenda.”

None of this is apt to quell the radically woke among us; their demands run deeper and call for a complete transformation of society, which mere politics can’t satisfy. Besides, woke is now an intellectual cottage industry, complete with “social entrepreneurs” having vested interests to advance.

Woke is dedicated to the proposition that America is a thoroughly racist country and has been from the start; only a reckoning and cleansing will expiate its guilt. Since the country’s founding, so the thesis goes, it’s been based on white supremacy, conscious or otherwise, and on the subjugation of black and brown peoples. Furthermore, the dominant whites comprise a homogeneous group that has benefited disproportionately at the expense of “the other.”

Woke’s big mistake is supposing all white people are alike and have done equally well in America. That’s not the case. Black slavery in this country was preceded by white slavery. About half of all immigrants to America in the 17th and 18th centuries were indentured servants or “redemptioners,” bought and sold and bound to masters for years until their passage debts were worked off. Their journeys here and lives for years thereafter were harsh. Thousands died en route in conditions comparable to black slavery’s infamous Middle Passage.

These “bondsmen” (and women) were ethnically heterogeneous — English, Irish, Scottish, German, Swiss — and uniformly impoverished. Some were actually kidnapped to provide cheap colonial labor. Upon arrival, their lives were controlled by an exploitive merchant and planter aristocracy. They couldn’t vote; only the rich or propertied could vote. Most early immigrants only obtained suffrage rights a half-century after the Revolution.

In sum, these were not the privileged beneficiaries of structural racism portrayed by the woke left, which, if it studied real history instead of critical race theory, would recognize that economic class, not race, has been the great divide throughout America’s historical development, the problem that won’t go away in this most capitalist of all nations.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2021

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