"A Spectre is haunting America--the spectre of Wokeness."
The GOP has a target. America is at risk. Not from communism. Not from Russia. Not from taxes. Not from regulations.
Their message: The danger is wokeness.
Republicans have a new, centralizing target to unite the anti-elitist populists and the remaining establishment "RINOs:" Wokeness. Republicans agree it is bad. Back in the 1990s we heard of "political correctness." Many thought it fussy and overly polite, and it was a subject of jokes. "Chair," not "Chairman." "Administrative Assistant," not "Secretary," and especially not, "my girl." Most people went along.
It is different now. Republicans are in counter-revolution mode. Their message is that open-mindedness has gone too far. The transgender community is the easiest target, with a GOP message that woke liberals treat gender transition as normal personal choice, not freakish:They are destroying women's sports. They are pedophiles, out to groom and seduce our children! The populist message is that racial affirmative action means that Whites are now the ones unfairly treated, which reverses tradition and expectation. Moreover, women get promotions the man deserves. And Christians aren't respected. And Trump supporters are stigmatized because they don't want a COVID vaccination. It fits the overarching theme of resentment of liberals and financial elites. The GOP is Charlie Brown: "How come everybody's always picking on me."
We see signs of backlash from the left, too. Bill Maher voices it. I hear rumbles from Democrats that maybe Democratic leaders pushed Al Franken out of the Senate too quickly, too unfairly. They were too afraid of criticism. Maybe a little bit of due process would have been appropriate. I hear complaints too, from within academia. I hear voices from people generally in sync with changing cultural expectations. They complain that people on the forefront of an anti-racism, gender-fluid, diversity-equity-inclusion movement have gone crazy. They are extremists. They are moral scolds. They are ideologues. They ignore biology. They ignore reality. They are the American Taliban.
Michael Trigoboff reads this blog and comments on it. He worked in academia. He lives just outside Portland, Oregon.
Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff
Why I Fight Wokeness
I write code. I started my career in 1970, went to graduate school in computer science/artificial intelligence until 1978, worked for others until 1988, worked as an independent private software developer until 2001, and taught computer science at a community college until this past June. Now I work as an online tutor for people learning to write code.
I know what it takes to write code. I am very good at it. I am also quite good at teaching other people to write code; see the ratings on RateMyProfessors and Wyzant if you are curious.
The world of code has totally objective standards: your code has to work; it has to be small and fast. These things are measurable, and there is no debate about how to measure them. High-quality code is crystalline and elegant. Code of that quality can be like what’s said about how to tell if someone is a genius: their discoveries are “obvious,” but they are only obvious after the genius discovers them; no one else could figure them out until the genius came along.
My success in this field has been the result of working hard to achieve the ability to live up to these objective and difficult standards. No one can succeed in this field without doing that.
But then along comes wokeness (aka critical social justice ideology), telling us workers of the world of code that we are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and deplorable unless the people succeeding in our field completely match the demographics of this country and “look like America.”
The people saying this to us are typically liberal arts majors who couldn’t write a piece of code to save their lives and who have been taught to believe that there’s no such thing as objectivity. They come originally from the humanities, which they have totally conquered, and now they are gunning for the STEM fields.
Here’s a quote from a widely distributed publication promoting “equitable mathematics instruction:”"This workbook provides teachers an opportunity to examine their actions, beliefs, and values around teaching mathematics. The framework for deconstructing racism in mathematics offers essential characteristics of antiracist math educators and critical approaches to dismantling white supremacy in math classrooms by making visible the toxic characteristics of white supremacy culture (Jones and Okun 2001; dismantlingRacism 2016) with respect to math. Building on the framework, teachers engage with critical praxis in order to shift their instructional beliefs and practices toward antiracist math education. By centering antiracism, we model how to be antiracist math educators with accountability."
Woke ideology is infiltrating computer science departments at leading universities across the country.
Wokeness tells us to forget equality and emphasize equity instead. They reject equal opportunity (equality) and propose the substitution of equal outcomes (equity) instead. Every student should succeed, they insist, regardless of innate ability, level of interest, or willingness to work hard.
The proponents of woke critical social justice ideology often use this picture to illustrate what they want:All we have to do, they claim, is provide every student with what they need, and then every student will succeed. But what if some student needs a box containing 30 extra IQ points or determination to work hard or an intense interest in writing code? Where am I going to find a box like that? The college where I taught didn’t seem to have any of those boxes around.
Which gets us to the fundamental and toxic error at the basis of wokeness: an insistence on this proposition:"Every talent and ability is distributed randomly and evenly among all the different subgroups of the population."
50% of programmers aren’t women? Sexism! 13% of programmers aren’t black? Racism!
How do the woke know that this proposition is true? They don’t. They just want it to be true.
And if someone (Charles Murray or James Damore for instance) questions the truth of this proposition, they do everything they can to hound those people out of the public discourse and cancel them.
We would be better off to not even think about this proposition. It’s too divisive. But the woke are not willing to avoid this issue; they demand that we act as though we already know the answer to the question, even though we don’t. This isn’t science; this is dogma.
There are those of us who believe in intellectual integrity and the necessity of competence and excellence in the practice of the crafts we have devoted our working lives to. We refuse to kowtow to this woke dogma that threatens the very basis of our fields.
If someone writes code that doesn’t work, their race or gender identity is irrelevant. Computers do not know the demographic characteristics of their programmers. When they refuse to run incompetently written code, it’s not out of prejudice against the programmer. When the bridge falls down, sensible people do not blame the bridge for prejudice against its designer.
I don’t care what color or sex you are as long as your code works. I am willing to stand by that. I am willing to fight for it. Equal opportunity.
And that’s why I fight wokeness.
I agree in part. Don’t throw out competence. But one could take notice of how the culture of code writers might subtly exclude women or people of color and adjust that.
Wokeness is not about job placement or promotional favoritism, it is about challenging implicit or explicitly assumptions that may deny others opportunities for which they are qualified but have no chance to demonstrate their competence because of these assumptions. Wokeness is also about respect for others who might look, act, or think differently from mainstream culture, something in short supply recently and something most of us can improve upon.