The "Woke" crowd took a beating on Election Day. Voters of every race and creed came out to express opposition to defunding the police, teaching critical race theory, and classroom mask mandates.
In Virginia, Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s statement, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” backfired. Enraged parents — many who voted for Biden last year — turned against him and elected the first Republican governor in a dozen years.
In Buffalo, New York, the Woke candidate for mayor, Socialist-Democrat, India Walton, lost to a write-in campaign for incumbent Byron Brown.
In Minneapolis, Minnesota, voters rejected a ballot measure that called for the elimination of the police department in favor of a Woke-style department of Public Safety.
Did Woke folks learn anything from the drubbing at the polls?
Nope. They continue to don their partisan blinders.
MSNBC’s Joy Reid called governor-elect Youngkin of Virginia a “soft white racist.”
Over at CNN, Brianna Keller, claimed Youngkin was elected because of “dog whistle racism.” Van Jones, described Youngkin’s victory as “the emergence of the Delta variant of Trumpism.”
The ever-delusional Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex, made the ludicrous claim that McAuliffe lost in Virginia because he dared to run as a moderate.
At the White House, Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, accused Republicans of “lying” and stuck to the Woke party line that kids “should learn about critical race theory.”
With the left in denial, the anti-Woke movement has an opportunity to build on their ballot box success. And to prepare for the 2022 elections, must reading is John McWhorter’s new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America.
McWhorter, an African-American, teaches at Columbia University and has been published in the nation’s leading left-wing journals.
But he is not your typical liberal.
The Woke antiracism “we’re being sold,” he believes, “isn’t the path to a more just and equitable world for all. It’s the barrier.”
McWhorter’s thesis: Wokeism “has come to excite a grievous amount of influence over American institutions to the point that we are beginning to accept, as normal, the kinds of language, policies, and actions that Orwell wrote of as fiction.”
He argues that Woke ideology “is one under which white people calling themselves our saviors make Black people look like the dumbest, weakest, most self-indulgent human beings in the history of our species, and teach Black people to revel in the status and cherish it as making us special.”
The Woke movement has morphed into a modern secular religion that does not tolerate dissent. Dissenting is a form of “environmental pollution” for disciples.
Hence, Woke inquisitors, or the “Elect,” as McWhorter calls them, demand white people submit to self-mortification because of their “original sin,” namely white privilege.
According to their catechism, for a white person to say “I don’t see color” is racist. To assert one is not racist proves one is racist. Racism is “what makes one white.” And for black kids to “embrace school” is bad because it is “acting white.”
To hold a contrary view is “heresy” and any black thinkers who dare to “question the Elect orthodoxy are traitorous Judases out to make a buck.”
Elect ideology, McWhorter concludes,
…teaches black people that cries of weakness are a form of strength. It teaches us that in the richness of this thing called life, the most interesting thing about you is that the ruling class doesn’t like you enough. It teaches us that to insist that black people can achieve under less than perfect conditions is ignorant slander. It teaches us that we are the first people in the history of the species for whom it is a form of heroism to embrace the slogan “Yes, we can’t!” Elect philosophy is, in all innocence, a form of racism in itself. Black America has met nothing so disempowering — including the cops — since Jim Crow.
McWhorter calls for the Elect “anti-white” ideology to be exorcised from school curriculums and calls for commonsense programs to tackle black America’s problem.
These include making sure kids “not from book-lined homes” learn to read via phonics, ending the war on drugs, and advocating “vocational training for poor people,” and battling “the idea that ‘real’ people go to college.”
Such modest proposals may put the nation on the road to “saving Black America for real.”
McWhorter concedes that if a white man wrote Woke Racism, he would be dismissed as racist. He also expects to be labeled a traitor and self-hating.
Nevertheless, the fearless McWhorter dedicates his book “to each who find it within themselves to take a stand against the detour in humanity’s intellectual, cultural, and moral development.”
During the fall campaign, we witnessed the beginning of a movement dedicated to taking a stand against Woke’s disordered ideology that divides us as a people.
And touting Professor McWhorter’s prescriptions may help in the battle to restore unity and the cogency of our Nation’s original motto, “E pluribus unum”—“Out of many, one.”
George J. Marlin, a former executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is the author of "The American Catholic Voter: Two Hundred Years of Political Impact," and "Christian Persecutions in the Middle East: A 21st Century Tragedy." Read George J. Marlin's Reports — More Here.