‘Wokeness’ is America’s new bogeyman | Opinion

In the 1980s, the specter of Satanists influencing society sparked widespread alarm all across America.

The press reported thousands of claims of Satanic ritual abuse, nearly all of which were later shown to be fabricated. The “Satanic Panic,” as historians now call it, arose in a culture threatened by rapid change and was deliberately stoked by religious leaders who recognized the value of a religious awakening it tended to provoke in response. It strikes me that a similar “Woke” panic is infecting our culture today.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis recently invoked the prevalence of “woke ideology” to justify elected officials telling professors what to teach in universities and how school administrators should serve their students.

2024 Republican presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy and Donald Trump are joining DeSantis by trying to ride an “anti-woke” wave right into the White House. Their imagined opponent is a woke warrior, who hopes to impose their socialist/atheist agenda on the rest of America through an intolerant fury of leftist strong-arming, silencing anyone who stands in the way of their attempts to indoctrinate the sleeping masses, especially unsuspecting students.

The ‘Woke Panic’

I want to assure my conservative friends that the imagined “woke warrior” is mostly a straw man, a caricature intended more as a rhetorical political weapon than a thoughtful social critique. The “woke panic” is just as unreal as the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s.

My academic space — a liberal arts college at a California university — is probably the paradigm of the woke breeding ground imagined by conservatives. While we undoubtedly have a handful of far-left activists in the classroom — and sometimes they wield undue influence — most of my colleagues primarily want to share with our students Thoreau, Plato, Churchill, or whoever inspired them to dedicate their life to learning. Across the university, my colleagues spend their days searching for obscure lizards, testing the stability of new concrete formulations, and doing market research — not conspiring to incorporate “woke” messaging into their labs and discussions.

At least in my observations, 99% percent of the time, 99% of my colleagues are consumed by research and teaching important questions, not advancing some “woke” political agenda. Viewers of Fox News mostly think the reverse.

Defining academia by its extremist wing is like defining Islam by ISIS or the Catholic Church by the Inquisition. While no group should ignore its unfortunate history or the vocal extremists at its fringes, we should not allow them to define us. The conservative caricature of “woke” does not define me or hardly anyone I know on my campus.

Conservatives point to instances where invited conservative speakers have been shouted down or had invitations rescinded due to the “woke mob” — and I have no doubt that these events occur and agree they can have a chilling effect on public discourse — but the fact that universities across America collectively invite literally hundreds of thousands of speakers a year onto their campus and there are a few dozen instances of unfortunate silencing suggests this is a contained outbreak, not a pandemic.

I am not trying to suggest that higher education has no problems needing addressing. I am only saying that the woke/anti-woke paradigm is not helpful in solving them. When the educational culture of America gets mired within the political crossfire, the measured dialogue needed to construct helpful solutions cannot rise above the din of political pugilism. This is not a call for “no labels” (as seems to be fashionable in some moderating circles) but rather a call to useful labels that reflect actual reality instead of poll-testing labels to discover the ones that induce the most fear.

So what should we do? I know some of my liberal friends will want to rehabilitate “woke” as a term, pointing to its long history of especially inspiring African American civil-rights movements. However, for too much of America, “woke” has been so warped and twisted that retrieving it from the abyss of political weaponry seems impossible to me. Like the terms “fake news” and “cult,” we should be comfortable retiring words when they misrepresent more than they reveal.

At this point, it is probably better to hold a wake for “wokeness” rather than try to resuscitate it.

College degree ‘not worth it’

How did we get to this point? While much of the fault lies within the conservative political machine that regularly churns out new ideas to scare their constituents to the polls (see “sharia law” and “critical race theory”), part of the responsibility undoubtedly stands with those in the university who do not regularly communicate to the wider public why we exist. Those of us at the university need to do a better job of sharing our research and teaching, reminding the wider society how our work improves lives.

When 56% of America thinks a college degree is “not worth it,” we are losing the communication contest. If the university gets defined by the fear-mongering imagination of Breitbart and the Daily Caller, then it is no doubt that broad swaths of society question our value.

This means showing the public that the age-old mandate of the university to be open to debates, dialogues and discussions about truth, science, goodness and beauty is still alive. Let’s be honest: There are so few examples out in society where people listen to each other anymore, particularly in terms of politics and religion, that there is a market opportunity to remind the world that conversations can be productive and that we can disagree without being disagreeable.

I share the sentiments of the dean of Stanford Law School who recently wrote to her staff and students after an unfortunate incident involving activist students and administrators attempting to silence an invited speaker: “The cycle of degenerating discourse won’t stop if we insist that people we disagree with must first behave the way we want them to. Nor will it stop if we try to shame each other into submission…it stops when we choose to replace condemnation with curiosity, invective with inquiry.”

The best response to the weaponization of wokeness is to demonstrate on campus and to the public that a university is a place that replaces “condemnation with curiosity, invective with inquiry.”

This “woke panic” will only recede when we heed these words and embody their spirit.

Satan never totally disappeared from conservative rhetoric after the 1980s, but the threat diminished over time through education and communication. Let’s hope that the same will occur with the imagined “woke” boogieman today.

Contributing columnist Stephen Lloyd-Moffett is a professor of religious studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, California.