What is Wokeism?

How power, privilege and oppression affect us all.

Wokeism’s core idea is that Western societies (e.g. US, Canada, UK etc.) and its institutions are built on a system of power and privilege that benefit straight, white men and oppress other groups that are not straight, white and male. This system of oppression is called the white supremacist patriarchy and all of us participate and sometimes support this system through mostly complicit and in some cases deliberate discrimination. This is not to say that we are all overt bigots or that you can even find such a person easily, though many still exist. It is the systemic nature of the oppression that we have internalized and fail to recognize as individuals. It’s how our institutions like the criminal justice system, healthcare, housing, education, taxation, food distribution, banking, hiring, promotions, elections etc. all perpetuate oppression without ever needing a single bad person within those systems.

There are various visual representations to help understand how the system works. Some use the wheel of power/privilege above while others use the coin model below.

I prefer to view it as a pyramid. Where the straight, white man sits at the summit and other groups of intersecting identities sit below at various levels of marginalization. Each group either oppresses groups lower than it or is being oppressed by groups higher than it. For example, straight white men oppress straight white women who in turn oppress straight black men who in turn oppress LGBTQ black people. But the apex beneficiaries in our society are straight white men. They reap all the unearned privileges of a society built for their sole benefit.

What’s the evidence for Wokeism?

First let’s start with all of the news stories showing the oppression of marginalized people. These include the rampant police killings of black people, sexual assault of women in Hollywood that led to the #MeToo movement, residential schools in Canada and the rise of Asian hate crimes during the Covid-19 pandemic to name a few. Second, we have the lived experiences of marginalized folks who can testify to their more than daily struggles with being victims of racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic bigotry. And finally we have the countless systemic inequities that we see in society that demonstrate the totalitarian nature of the oppression. Black people have worse health, wealth, education, employment and incarceration rates than whites. Women and other gender diverse folks have worse representation, pay, and domestic violence outcomes than men. And groups that have intersecting identities of oppression such as black women fair even worse because they face both systemic racism and systemic sexism.

How did we get such inequities?

First we have countless documented examples of historical oppression through slavery, segregation, lynching, the Tulsa riots, redlining, and the war on drugs. But even after all these were either abolished or reformed through civil war or the civil rights movement there still persisted a culture of oppression that overtly stigmatized marginalized people through the use of blackface, racist/sexist slurs and stereotypes. After much effort to dampen such overt discrimination from our cultural institutions and daily interactions, there still exists a more covert form of discrimination that occurs through unconscious bias, microaggressions, white flight and the old boys club. The iceberg of racism is a good pictorial representation of what overt vs. covert race oppression looks like.

Some say history is written by the victors. But all the systems we have today are also designed by the powerful to maintain their power. This even includes basic tools of how we acquire knowledge and even speak to each other. Many of these basic foundational concepts like race and gender are socially constructed by powerful straight white men to protect the oppressive systems that prevent us from achieving true justice, liberation and equity for racialized and gender diverse folks.

What can we do about it?

First we have to recognize that such systems exist and then actively work to dismantle the system through our own individual actions and systemic policy change at our institutions and governments. These changes come in the form of various Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (EDI) initiatives such as diversity quotas, unconscious bias training, trigger warnings, speech codes and safe spaces. At a government level we can have legislation for pay equity, reparations, hate speech laws, education de-streaming, defunding the police and various other anti-racism and intersectional feminist policies.

What about people who oppose Wokeism?

Most of the time people are just unaware of the privileges afforded to them by these systems of oppression. In those cases we must call them in and encourage their education on the white supremacist patriarchy. We must be a good ally and uplift the voices of those who are marginalized and oppressed by these systems. Their lived experiences must be heard across the nation.

Despite all the evidence based research from reputable intuitions there will be some who may still push back and want to maintain the current systems for fear of loosing their own power and privilege, or to gain more power. Some may try to use emotional fragility as a shield or drum up far right racist, misogynistic tropes. While it may be tough to talk to these folks remember that the status quo perpetuates oppressive systems that literally harm and marginalize the most vulnerable in our society. Being woke is being aware and educated on these systemic injustices and using compassion, empathy and kindness to fix these systems and care for those most vulnerable.