Is Wokeness One Big Power Grab? 'In his 2023 Netflix comedy special, Selective Outrage, Chris Rock identified one of the core contradictions of the social-justice era: “Everybody’s full of s**t,” Rock said, including in the category of “everybody” people who type “woke” tweets “on a phone made by child slaves.”' He is exactly right. Look at the racial caste system in our Blue cities. 'Al-Gharbi, a 41-year-old sociologist at Stony Brook University, opens with the political disillusionment he experienced when he moved from Arizona to New York. He was immediately struck by the “racialized caste system” that everyone in the big liberal city seems to take “as natural”: “You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you.” At the push of a button, people—mostly hugely underpaid immigrants and people of color—will do your shopping and drive you wherever you want to go.' I too was shocked by that. 'He contrasts that with the “podunk” working-class environment he’d left behind, where “the person buying a pair of shoes and the person selling them are likely to be the same race—white—and the socioeconomic gaps between the buyer and the seller are likely to be much smaller.” He continues: “Even the most sexist or bigoted rich white person in many other contexts wouldn’t be able to exploit women and minorities at the level the typical liberal professional in a city like Seattle, San Francisco, or Chicago does in their day-to-day lives. The infrastructure simply isn’t there.” The Americans who take the most advantage of exploited workers, he argues, are the same Democratic-voting professionals in progressive bastions who most “conspicuously lament inequality.”' They accuse us of what they are guilty of. 'Musa sees the reelection of Donald Trump as a reflection of Americans’ resentment toward elites and the “rapid shift in discourse and norms around ‘identity’ issues” that he refers to as the “Great Awokening.”' Are they blind to their own hypocrisy, or just lying about it to preserve the unjust system they benefit from? 'Fooled by superficial markers of their own identity differences—racial, sexual, and otherwise—elites fail to see themselves for what they truly are.' And this great point is made: While elites “increasingly identify as something like disabled or neurodivergent, LGBTQ.” “behaviors, lifestyles, and relationships that are exploitative, condescending, or exclusionary do not somehow become morally noble or neutral when performed by members of historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups.” Read the whole thing and discuss.
