To my fellow Americans I have an urgent alarm: Stop distractifying over “wokeness” and deal with the wolf at the door. Firing folks over “forbidden” words …
To my fellow Americans I have an urgent alarm: Stop distractifying over “wokeness” and deal with the wolf at the door. Firing folks over “forbidden” words or views is absurd. Shaming the interracially clueless is counterproductive. But arguing “wokeness” right now is the strategic equivalent of Titanic musicians debating preludes. The urgency of now is not the social cancellation of frat boys in blackface. It’s the political cancellation of multi-racial democracy. Americans who value living in a democratic republic need to wake up and smell the bear spray. As I “racesplain” to my white friends and relatives: Ask not what “help” minorities need; ask what, in a national reckoning on race, you must do to save democracy from those who “ would shatter the nation rather share it,” as Amanda Gorman said in her inauguration poem. Racial reckonings aren’t about the struggles of racial minorities. They are about white Americans’ struggles with each other over waning racial control and how much racism to allow now. In 1619, the answer to that question was anything needed to subjugate nonwhites.
