Woke 1.0 Versus Woke 2.0

Over the past 10 years, I have struggled to properly frame my relationship to “wokeness.” In this blog, I want to share a distinction I have come to make between “Woke 1.0” and “Woke 2.0.” As will become clear, I am a fan of the former, and a strong critic of the latter.

As I am defining it here, to be Woke 1.0 is to be aware of (i.e., "woke to") the systematic injustices that marginalized groups have faced and to be concerned about inequality and lack of fairness across many domains of identity and class. I started to become "woke" in the late 1980s when I took an undergraduate class on sex roles and gender differences with nine women. In it, I learned to see the world through a feminist lens. And I learned about the social construction of knowledge and how to see the way dominant voices become normative voices.

Through my doctoral training, my sense of Woke 1.0 continued. I worked in a medium security prison for almost two years and saw the injustices of the prison system (e.g., it was a system that punished blacks far more than whites for things such as marijuana possession).¹

I then worked for Dr. Aaron T. Beck, exploring cognitive therapy for folks who recently made a suicide attempt. Doing so allowed me to make deep contact with those who lived in the broken ecologies of some of Philadelphia’s most troubled neighborhoods. I have friends who are urban planners, and we have talked about how systematic racism played a backdrop to many zoning decisions in many cities across the country.

To be Woke 1.0, then, is to be aware of these issues and to be focused on wisdom and progress in achieving justice and getting to a post-racial discrimination age. It is also to be oriented toward a society that fosters gender equality and LGBTQ+ freedoms.

As a proponent of Woke 1.0, I say to you that if you have never taken a class on feminism or critical race theory or never experienced these issues in "real life," then I strongly recommend you do so, especially if you are a cis gendered white male. I should also say that the idea these courses should be eliminated from our higher educational systems because they represent a threat is absurd.

Crucially, the Woke 1.0 mindset acknowledges that it is a perspective on socio-political issues, and that there are a diversity of perspectives, and that is fine. Part of Woke 1.0 is to be committed to the liberal ideal of reasoned argument, free speech, and differing of opinion through constructive dialogue. As such, Woke 1.0 is self-conscious that it is trying to make value-based claims and it has awareness that these value-based claims potentially bump up against other value-based claims.

For example, one can make the case that America is a great country despite its history of oppression, that there is much to be said for traditional family values, that we have made much progress toward equality, that we should strive to be colorblind, and we should be primarily emphasizing issues of socioeconomic class or protecting the border rather than be focused excessively on race-related justice issues. The point here is that, from a Woke 1.0 lens, I recognize this value-system is not necessarily the only way to see the world, and it can be criticized as problematic or incomplete or misguided. To make such criticisms, even if you are a cis gendered white man like myself, does not mean you are racist or evil.

It is here that Woke 2.0 rears its head and reveals itself to be a completely different beast. Instead of seeing these issues as a complicated set of problems that can be approached from many different angles, Woke 2.0 has, over the last ten years, become the stuff of religious fanaticism². It sees oppressor-oppressed dynamics everywhere, and judges virtually everything through that lens. And it takes a moralizing³, activist stance that splits people into being either good or bad.

Consider how one of the leading voices of Woke 2.0, Ibram X. Kendi, frames anti-racism⁴. According to Kendi, you are either an anti-racist or a racist. Full stop. This means that if you start doubting whether all inequities in racial outcomes can be explained by oppressor dynamics, well, then, you are an oppressor, and you quickly fall in the racist class of supporting the status quo. The world is far more complicated than this simplistic analysis. To take one of a potentially enormous number of examples, consider why there are so few Black kickers in the NFL⁵. There is a massive inequality here, but it is clearly not due to structural racism.

For those who operate from a Woke 2.0 mindset, anti-racism and related issues are not just one issue among many. Rather, they represent the issue that we all need to put front and center right now. And, to do so, we need to transform the way we do, well, virtually everything. For example, in higher education, we need to "recognize" the institutions as racist, and we need to change the way we teach math, chemistry, biology, medicine, and we need diversity officers, and grants to support DEI proposals, and on and on. Indeed, as Woke 2.0 spreads down into the core justifications guiding our educational systems, then everything that we value and that we deem worthy of respect needs to be questioned. Why? Because all our values potentially have their heritage in the dominant values of heterosexual, Christian white men. Thus, from this point of view, oppressor-oppressed dynamics are literally everywhere.

To see how Woke 2.0 can come to permeate everything, consider the case of Tabia Lee⁶. She is a Black woman who was hired to be the DEI leader at a community college who was quickly fired and accused of being a “white supremacist.” What was her crime? Shortly after she was hired, she had the audacity to run a meeting whereby she set an agenda and had goals, and expected people to be on time. According to her Woke 2.0 critics, such acts demonstrated an endorsement of white achievement values. This is, of course, lunacy. But that is the problem with Woke 2.0. It is a closed loop system of justification that already knows what the right answer is simply by looking at who is proclaiming to be oppressed and how loud they are willing to shout.

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From the vantage point of Woke 1.0, Woke 2.0 has been a disaster for the universities because it requires an authoritarian mindset that is willing to police language and thought, which has resulted in a powerful cancel culture.

This phenomenon has been well-documented in the excellent book, The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All―But There Is a Solution, by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott. The prominent social psychologist Carol Tavris offers an excellent review of the book, in her essay The Ghost of Joe McCarthy: Why Universities Have Surrendered on Free Speech Again. Although not explicit, the difference between Woke 1.0 versus 2.0 is clear in her summary. She describes the transformation in the left over the past two decades, from being concerned with issues of justice and having liberal attitudes about free speech to now leading the call to ban ideas and speech based on a DEI ideology that claims such actions make marginalized groups psychologically unsafe.

I hope both the left and universities turn away from Woke 2.0. We need sound arguments and reasoned discourses for how we move the ball forward, and that includes a diversity of political opinions and perspectives.

What we do not need is policing language and thought with a moral righteousness that simplistically determines who are the victims and who are the oppressors, and then tells people they are either with us or against us. That, surely, is the dark road to totalitarianism. Woke 2.0 was an error in extremism. It is time to wake up to this problem and take a few steps back to a much saner Woke 1.0, and then move forward to a more just, wiser way of being for all.