 |
Bird perched on the Empire State Building, overlooking Manhattan, New York. Credit: Jason Munshi-South and Marc Johnson |
If by 'woke' we refer to the ancient concept of being 'awake' or 'enlightened', then the state of being ‘woke’ is ultimately unachievable, like attempting to cultivate the perfect farm. Yet, the pursuit is itself absolutely mandatory for the conscientious being: through consistent commitment to that pursuit, you will have enriched the soil, cultivated the land, and given rise to a harvest that will empower many who themselves will cultivate even further growth atop the foundation that you have nurtured.
Woke is not an outcome earned; it is an undying process lived.
Becoming woke begins with a recognition of unfairnesses across interpersonal (between individuals) and institutional behaviors, ideologies, social standards, and superstructure policies.
"Wokeness" begins in the mind. Despite how obvious that is, it's essential to identify that origin, in order to develop beyond the foundational stages of 'wokeness'.
But wokeness is a developmental process, very similar to the process in which an infant must grow up to become a healthy, sociable, and functional adult in cooperation with human society.
However, becoming woke is not a matter of chronological or biological age in itself. Plenty of older people, who only recently began learning about activism and social justice, can themselves be in the infancy of their revolutionary maturation. Age is not an independent predictor of one's stage in this process; nor is one's academic or institutional knowledge and experiences.
And that is a tremendous point of discomfort and contestation for people whose bulk of knowledge and self-esteem depends on their validation and status in academe and other mainstream institutions.
But, in the arena of social justice, your only true credentials are your years of experience in collaboration with the grassroots towards the pursuit of social justice.
If the early development of your wokeness is suspended in its early phase — that is, the phase in which we become capable of conceptually detecting and labeling social unfairnesses, oppressions, and so forth — then numerous dangers emerge for the individual, the individual's own village or allies, and for the oppressed populations that said individual seeks to liberate. And yet, despite these dangers, this individual will lack a deeper capacity for self-interrogation to grow aware of this infancy and the harms that it can cause others, during this individual's own pursuit to "stop harms and injustice".
The mental life of someone in the early phase of becoming 'woke' is characterized by a predominant focus on everything outside of one self. Most of one's fingers point to others. Most of our analyses and blame focuses on someone else. And, when we are called to account for our own wrongs, we are often inflamed with our own ego-defenses, whether we reveal these or not.
This mental life of the newly-woke produces two predominant categories of social output: 1) a great sense of outrage, and 2) self-righteousness.
The outrage component is profoundly important, because it enables us to identify and openly name injustices; it compels us with a willingness to physically engage in activism; it activates us to interrogate our surroundings, our own understanding of the world, and more, all of which shapes our foundation for becoming someone who can redesign and invent our world, and who can improve and heal the suffering within it.
And yet, during this infancy, outrage does not instantly make us into wise and fearless warriors. While it enables us with courage to perform call-outs and partake in various protests, we are still prone to fearfulness towards confronting the worst monsters of our society. So, instead, we tend to confront individuals who we know will not fight back and will not confront us with volatility and hostility. Confronting people like this satisfies our urge to identify, to label, and to punish. Unfortunately, at this phase, we are capable of committing those behaviors towards the very comrades with whom we should be reinventing society — again, because, on an unconscious level, we know very well that our comrades are the least likely to strike us back.
Therefore, the self-righteousness component is dangerous.
In this early phase of wokeness, we must, by definition, divide the world into simplistic categories for the sake of building a new understanding of the world. This phase tends to divide most things and people into either "good" or "bad". The more rudimentary our wokeness, the more impulsive, rigid, and unforgiving are the categories, criticisms, and labels that we apply to others. The infancy of our wokeness equips us with a "morality gun", and we tend to spray this gun liberally, often striking both deserving and undeserving targets.
In this phase, one can easily become the very type of unforgiving priest-like, entitled, authoritarian, judgmental, or cop-like figure that we decry. This phase is not, on its own, capable of construction: it is not yet equipped with the knowledge, skills, and wisdom to know how to build a better world, to build villages, to construct communities, to generate tenderness in the hearts of a broken and plundered society. Instead, this phase is marked by a deep desire to deconstruct and tear down that which one identifies as archaic and harmful and "problematic". Rightfully so, but within limits.
This phase is incomplete, yet all too unable to detect its own incompleteness.
On the contrary, the more sophisticated our revolutionary maturation grows, the more we diversify, nuance, and complicate our philosophical, social, and political "categories" into which we "place" the individuals or institutions in our midst; the more versatile and agile becomes our tool-belt for how to appraise and engage with various types of dissatisfactions , conflicts, and people; the more capable we become of dealing a strategic and powerful blow to a worthy injustice; and yet, simultaneously, the more gracious, tender, teachable, and self-interrogating we become.
In this matured phase, our goals expand beyond the one-dimensional reflex to deconstruct. Our goal becomes to humanize ourselves, our comrades, and even our oppressors, as detailed in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of The Oppressed.
This mental life is best captured by Che Guevera's famous line, "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality".
For the genuine revolutionary, love is a concept distinct from the shallow iterations of "love" across the Western world, which associate love with superficial pleasure, unquestioning affection, and fleeting euphoria. While this essay is not intended for the purpose of delving into this topic, it's necessary to briefly describe that the revolutionary's love is a multifaceted, multi-pronged instrument that has the knowledge and capacity to both construct and deconstruct; to destroy and to heal; to itemize wrongdoings and to conduct restorative justice and forgiveness; to appreciate that a fellow revolutionary's methods may have subtle wisdom that is, in this moment, inaccessible to myself; to unegostically investigate and take account for one's own wrongs, no matter how "senior" or "woke" one has become. But revolutionary maturation equips us with the ability to know when and to what degree and in what circumstances to apply each or any of these.
How do we evolve beyond the infancy of our wokeness?
The capacity to mentally detect oppression must always be followed by a worldly, physical response to that oppression, whether through words, through protest, or otherwise. Evolution and expansion of 'wokeness' occurs by physically joining grassroots efforts devoted to mitigating or abolishing that oppression. This conscientious process of transforming mental-activities into physical-activities has a profound effect on the development of a ‘woke’ mind.
Those effects are beneficial both for interpersonal associations within your own group (or movement) and also for your tactics towards achieving abolition.
Interpersonally, transforming your concepts of justice into physical work to achieve that justice, by way of group-organizing, exposes you to people with whom you share a bedrock social-consciousness and core principles, but with whose personalities and visions you may run into conflict. The clarity to remain committed towards the ultimate goal (abolishing an oppression), and thus to remain active in the group, forges your capacity and your strategies towards resolving interpersonal-conflicts in your shared pursuit of a greater purpose.
Struggling together towards a shared goal, alongside others, acquaints your mind and your ego with people of varying and often more experience, knowledge, and wisdom; your persistence in this dynamic eventually compels you into humility by appreciating the wisdom, creativity, and behaviors of others, rather than clinging to the primitive urge of egotism that drives us towards wrongfully interpreting others’ words and behaviors through a lens of competitiveness and territorialism. This, therefore, directs us to gradually dissociate our inner-selves from these features of capitalism and colonialism that we have unknowingly internalized. That dissociation is itself a feature of decolonization. And a decolonized approach to human-association is one that astutely determines when to approach a conflict restoratively and when a severe conflict requires expulsion.
Tenderness is a further outcome of toiling for a greater purpose alongside the oppressed; it is cultivated, among many ways, through bearing direct witness to suffering far different or far worse than your own, yet through honor, rather than through voyeurism, saviorism, or inspiration-porn.
Solemn and sincere solidarity with suffering makes the unimaginable imaginable, and the unconscious conscious, and these together draw the obscure and the abstract into greater focus, whose clarity better shapes the architecture of justice that you are working to erect. This bearing of witness elevates the vista from which you assess all things — a vista that allows you to see, to contemplate, and to fight against both the worst horrors of injustice, as well as against what now appears to be wrongs of a smaller scale and gravity.
Although no suffering is made trivial to you, your spectrum of responses to each form of injustice or wrongdoing develops into a rich tapestry of tactics, customized for each type of wrong that you seek to rectify. And this versatility itself instills within you a greater mental-clarity and emotional-agility to assess an event amidst moments of hardship, anxiety, fear, and trauma, which emerge within grassroots-organizing, often from the hands of the defined oppressor-class.
But this patience and clarity does not diminish your rightful impatience with injustice; it does not drive you towards incrementalism, passivity, or reformism — it allows you to meticulously predetermine the effectiveness of (and plausible outcomes from) which strategy to deploy in various circumstances: a call-out, a call-in, a protest, an intervention, a boycott, or otherwise. In turn, you achieve the sophisticated revolutionary-intellect—akin to our elders, those known and unknown—towards creating and implementing activist strategies, while also reprogramming your reflexive approach towards in-group conflict-resolution, rather than having every conflict result in the needless severing of ties. These dual benefits from organizing as such—that is, developing such emotional and cognitive complexity—enables you and your movement the longevity and sustainability required to achieve profound structural social-justice.
In Hollywood films, the “revolutionary” figure is often portrayed as hardened, calloused, solitary, severe, and emotionally vacant — a complete superimposition of the mythical, rugged, cowboy who emerges from a colonial white-supremacist vision.
In reality, however, the greatest revolutionaries have known equally when to wield force and when to wield an olive-branch — when to be fire and when to be gracious.
The coalescence of all this internal and community work—each enabled by your willingness to continue returning into this difficult space—complicates the rubric from which you otherwise identify some action or person as simply either an enemy or a comrade; it makes you at once more 'tough' while also more magnanimous and gracious. Together, these allow you to embody the restorative justice that you seek to institute in social structures; and they decolonize from within you the retributive inclinations that we have internalized from our colonial landscape.
It drives us towards Ubuntu.
To the contrary of all the above, the less experience and time that you have cultivated amidst grassroots-organizing and among oppressed populations, the more inclined you are to function similar to a priestly-class or moral-police of totalitarian character: you issue commands or complaints, and others must comply; they push against your commands, and you respond by expelling them from the discussion or the group altogether.
This simplistic binary of approach stems from having honed only your mental-activity of “identifying” persons and behaviors that you deem to be oppressive. Yet, experiencing the complexities that emerge from attempting to transform the theoretical into the material — this process enhances your versatility for how to engage with people of various role, conflict, dynamic, situation, power, harm, and more.
Without that committed process, your prevailing impulse to any challenge — be it from an in-group member or from the oppressor-class — is to react with volatility and with a lost grasp on your ultimate priorities and goals, even in situations within which self-examination and humanization are instead necessary.
While it’s rightful to sever ties for self-preservation with people whose behavior is unapologetically and unalterably abusive or oppressive, any activist that seeks to abolish structural-oppression must determine a threshold for behavior that deserves expulsion (“canceling”) versus behavior that deserves a restorative approach towards the problematic person.
Without a well-defined threshold, and without a thorough history of grassroots experience, we are primed to engage with our every challenge or dissatisfaction with the maximal severity and inflexibility — similar to an adolescent.
In this inchoate phase of 'woke' development, one's skillset for human-engagement is yet un-agile and un-versatile. This leads to senseless assumptions and accusations, whose outcome results in the fracturing and atomization of a group, which obstructs your path to the ultimate goal: the abolition of structural-oppression.
If bereft of the mental benefits from long-term community organizing and collective-struggle, your vision of group-cohesion and broader activism remains parochial and myopic, and thus your capacity to heal yourself and others amidst internal conflict, and to generate revolution amidst external attacks, is ever stultified by the doctrines of Western colonialism that you have unknowingly imbibed since childhood, with its features of punitive, hyper-individual, escapist, fractious, self-righteous, yet hypocritical policing. You are at once a cop and a priest, and yet you rationalize this behavior as “justice”, when it is, in fact, quite the contrary.
Justice — social justice — is the pursuit of humanization, not only for our self, but also for our comrades, and even for the oppressor; not only on the grand, distant, or structural level, but implemented here and now, in the granular and interpersonal level.
Without undergoing the revolutionary maturation to embody and produce such humanization, and instead arresting ourselves at the phase of woke-infancy, we become destructive and counter-productive to the very efforts, vision, and principles that we claim to support.
Characteristics of someone arrested in their infancy are often: vitriol, the weaponization of trauma-language, the mislabeling of challenges to your position as an "attack" on your humanity, the ad-hominem devices to discredit and disarm a group-member who presents more sustainable and wiser approach towards a goal, moral-policing, priestly judgments, self-righteousness, and other colonial behaviors.
All of this causes needless fractions to social-justice groups and movements, in turn weakening our overall numbers and therefore diminishing the expanse of our energy, the quality of our ideas and tactics, the strength of our power, our capacity to imagine a new society, and our ability to cohesively, efficiently, and successfully bring such changes to fruition.
Ultimately, the grassroots dissolves into factions and silos.
Without masses of all peoples, a minority institutes its own strategies, timeline, and vision on a whole: primitive totalitarianism. Our vision of equity quickly devolves into a recipe for oligarchy. But any revolution of undemocratic character is a revolution that recycles and enhances all systems of violent oppression.
It is a messy, unpaved, and toilsome path, but this is the obligatory and unavoidable burden that we are honored to embrace, if we are to sincerely seek social-justice.
And that requires the versatility that revolutionary maturation cultivates.
Versatility is the defining feature of a woke being — the elegant versatility to constantly assess for when (and upon whom) to unleash magma and when to emit affection.
Ultimately, 'woke' is not simply about "how much shit you know" about the world; it is equally what you know about (and how you fight for) the humanity of your comrades and rivals, even when it demands abolition of your own ego.
Becoming woke requires more than rhetoric and criticism towards social injustices or people; it requires holding — first and foremost — yourself to the very standards that you hold society and by being a microcosm of the world that you are working to build.
It is within this quiet concept of 'building' in which we discover that abolition of oppression demands far more than the simplistic operation of verbally tearing down oppressive structures and oppressive peoples.
To achieve these ends, we must evolve versatility in mind, tactic, and action. Revolution of society must be in tandem with revolution of ourselves. Grassroots organizing is the only arena in which I have found the fruition of both.