I wrote this reflection as part of an online conversation. It is lightly edited.
P*, you shared that “the woke movement is dividing people everywhere - this is an embarrassing movement, but at the same time how can we fight it? How do we take action against it?”
I don’t know your experience, but I can say that this is certainly not the case in my own experience. Especially for those of us who belong to multiple marginalized communities, there has never been a time when these deep, painful, cruel divisions did not exist. We have inherited and then lived with these divisions our whole lives, born the crushing terror, despair, and cruelty of them in our bodies, hearts, and minds. Maybe you have known this experience, too?
Whatever the case, the divisions we are seeing now are not the first fractures; they are not cracks along the surface. These fissures are manifesting from deep below, erupting from ancient wounds that have long gone unhealed. It is our collective failure to tend to this woundedness, and not the woundedness itself, that is the root of the problem.
What is embarrassing to me is not that people cannot – and will not - indefinitely bear oppression, comfortable in a life-denying silence, but that so many of us have so easily and so often fallen into a comfortable co-existence alongside that cruelty: ignoring, denying, tolerating, sometimes even protecting, and sometimes even egregiously benefiting from all the ways that bigotry, discrimination, prejudice, exploitation, marginalization, and oppression have slipped into our cultures and institutions. We have to engage with these issues, even if they make us uncomfortable. Bringing attention to these divisions is the honesty required for healing and transformation, even if it is painful.
So, I don’t want to “fight” or “take action” against the “woke movement.” But I do want this kind of uprising to become unnecessary. And while there are many paths before us, personally and collectively, the one I hear suggested most often and most loudly here in southwest Missouri, USA, is to oppose those calling attention to oppression and calling for change. This is an attempt to push society back toward the way things have been: reasserting or reinventing the oppressive cultures and structures. For an example in the US context, think about the end of chattel slavery being replaced with prison slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, mass incarceration, and the like. It may even come with a narrative of progress, since what is now recognized as unacceptable (e.g., slavery) is abandoned, while the new forms of cruelty are safely out of awareness. To this approach, I say my firmest NO. This is the path that has brought us to new levels of pain and woundedness again and again.
But I say my wholehearted YES to the calling and vision of the Beloved Community. We can respond, even to impossible situations, with a fierce compassion that embodies mutual care, mutual respect, and a way of being where everyone's voice is heard and needs are recognized and met. This means that we will listen to and center the experiences, lives, and wellbeing of those who have suffered marginalization and oppression, and then participate in the transformation of our lives and communities.
Out of respect, I do not personally use the term “woke” or phrases like “woke movement.” However, these words are (as others have mentioned) often used in a derogatory way against me. Others have pointed out the futility of labels. And, trust me, I would love to live in a world where the labels were meaningless. I am a private person and I really don’t need other people knowing that I am queer (bisexual, demisexual, genderqueer), but that privacy isn’t an option if I care about my or the community’s wellbeing. I wish it was irrelevant that I have spent my working class life hovering above and below the poverty line. I wish my neurodivergence was irrelevant. I wish my whiteness was irrelevant, that there were no long histories and intractable systems of racial oppression here in these otherwise beautiful Ozarks hills. I wish the long histories and intractable systems of religious harm and violence that send people to me, in desperate need of spiritual care and healing, were irrelevant. But these realities exist, and my silence and inaction will not make them go away.
So, this is my plea - for all who oppose the “woke movement,” please – do not make us into your enemies. Instead, make all these things that wound and hurt us a thing of the past, a distant memory that remains as a warning of how human society can go wrong. A beautiful expression of this vision, and its practice, is offered by adrienne maree brown:
“Where we are born into privilege,
we are charged with dismantling any myth of supremacy.
Where we are born into struggle,
we are charged with claiming our dignity, joy and liberation.”
I would lie if I didn’t say that I have found this conversation deeply saddening. It hurt and it still hurts. I wish it wasn’t necessary, and it is a deep practice in itself to find the energy and patience to respond with as much love and wisdom that I can muster. I guess those who have named the “woke” as a problem feel the same. I hold all of us together with the aspiration: may we learn to live and love in such a way that all this woundedness can be healed.
Whatever unfolds, I will continue to travel this path, in solidarity with others in a beautiful movement for healing and change. It is a path of love, and I am grateful for all who have traveled it - past, present, and future - and for the precious opportunity to go together.
