Woke Is Here To Stay
The fallout over Tony Dokoupil’s interview of Ta-Nehisi Coates shows that woke ideas have permeated the institutions.
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There’s an idea out there that “peak woke” has passed.
Earlier this year, The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg penned her obituary for “wokeism,” claiming that it was on its deathbed. “Diversity, equity and inclusion departments, briefly prized, are being dismantled,” Goldberg wrote. “The era of content warnings and policing of microaggressions may have come to an end.”
The Economist finished burying the movement this fall, as only The Economist can—with a survey. “Discussion and espousal of woke views peaked in America in the early 2020s and have declined markedly since,” The Economist concluded.
In that context, the flap over Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent CBS appearance seems to come from an earlier and almost outdated cultural moment.
During an interview with CBS Mornings, co-anchor Tony Dokoupil, who is Jewish, challenged Coates over his admittedly one-sided depiction of the Israel-Palestine conflict in his new book The Message. In his most incendiary lines, Dokoupil said that the book “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist” and asked Coates, “What is it that so particularly offends you about the existence of a Jewish state that is a Jewish safe place?”
Those lines were provocative but they were, also, part of a civil and substantive exchange. Coates has described Israel as an “apartheid” state and said that it’s “horseshit” to regard the Israel/Palestine conflict as complicated. Dokoupil’s challenge, then, was very much in line with what would be expected of a journalist—to provide the countervailing arguments that get short shrift in Coates’ book. “Why does [Coates] … leave out so much?” Dokoupil said. “Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the First and Second Intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings?”
Many CBS employees—not to mention much of the internet—took issue with Dokoupil’s line of questioning, and, in due course, the CBS brass caved to them. Dokoupil was hauled in for a meeting with CBS News’ standards and practices team and with the in-house Race and Culture Unit. The meeting, The New York Times reported, “focused on Mr. Dokoupil’s tone of voice, phrasing and body language during his interview.” Dokoupil also came in for rebuke during a staff meeting where CBS executives said that the interview failed to meet “editorial standards.”
Adrienne Roark, head of newsgathering at CBS News, said, in a puzzling bit of double-speak, “We will still ask tough questions. We will still hold people accountable. But we will do so objectively, which means checking our biases and opinions at the door.”
This is one of these spiraling media stories that one can grab onto at almost any spot—to discuss Coates’ controversial The Message; or the journalistic ethics of Dokoupil and CBS; or the ways in which Israel/Palestine almost inevitably tears apart any attempt to engage in civil discourse within the American media sphere. My point here is that a clash like Coates v. Dokoupil v. CBS News is Exhibit A for how the “woke wars” never went away, how if “peak woke” seems quieter than it did circa 2020, woke censoriousness is, contra Goldberg and contra The Economist, part of American institutional life, now maybe more than ever. The difference is just setting. Wokeism isn’t necessarily shouted out by protesting college students or Twitter mobs. It’s become part of the air that corporations breathe. The CBS executives’ admonitory statement directed at Dokoupil was, for instance, vintage wokeism. As Nellie Bowles, co-founder of the Free Press, put it in her interview with The Good Fight earlier this year, “Woke is like The Man … It’s won so fully in the institutions that, yeah, it’s The Man now.”
By way of example for the extent of wokeism’s hold, let’s take The Economist’s authoritative-sounding treatment of the decline of wokeism and then contrast the text of The Economist’s piece with the charts from their own research. “The results are consistent,” The Economist intones. “America has passed ‘peak woke.’”
But then look at the “decline” of “woke terms in print media”:
And look at the “decline” in those who believe that “racial differences in outcomes are mainly due to discrimination”:
And look at the “decline” in “woke terms in social science papers”:
What The Economist has done is obviously absurd—comparing rates of “wokeism” only to the 2020-2022 “woke peak” as opposed to the pre-woke era.
Similarly, the hard numbers given in the article’s text are similarly, uh, less than-fully-convincing. “The share of Americans who think that expressions of racist views should be restricted” rose sharply in the 2010s, reaching a peak of 52% in 2021 and “has since declined slightly, down to 49% in 2022,” The Economist writes—making more than they really should of a 3-point delta.
The Economist then claimed that academia has “shift[ed] away from wokery,” with woke terms rising 20% between 2010 and 2022 but then “remain[ing] stable” in 2023.
“Stable,” of course, is another way of saying that there’s actually no decline.
Meanwhile, The Economist does manage to acknowledge that, by several metrics, “wokeism” actually is advancing, particularly in corporate America. “The share of new job listings that mention diversity continues to grow, however, as ever more firms add boilerplate about inclusivity at the bottom of ads,” it writes. Inadvertently, then, The Economist’s article makes the case for a very different thesis—that “woke” is here to stay.
What’s going on is a bit subtle. The woke revolution already said its piece. The University of California endocrinology professor long ago apologized for saying “pregnant women” instead of “pregnant people” in class and “imply[ing]” that only biological women can give birth. The University of Michigan music professor long ago stepped back from teaching after showing Lawrence Olivier’s 1965 blackface film of Othello in class. The fear of being “canceled” remains pervasive. Wokeism, now, has been so internalized by the institutions that they barely need to articulate it—and employees have an acute danger sense of what not to talk about. Meanwhile, “peak woke” finds itself memory-holed. An article like The Economist’s depicts it as a temporary blip—a reaction to Trump’s election. Michelle Goldberg, in her New York Times op-ed, finds herself longing for the “progressive urgency” of the “peak woke” moment. A representative NPR piece, from 2023, frames the whole discourse as a Republican talking-point—something that has “been co-opted as a political slogan on the right … [and] could lead to violence.”
All of those dynamics emerged in the Dokoupil fracas. The admonishment by the CBS executives was a delectable bit of muddled corporate speak. “We are journalists and as hard as it is, this means we set our personal feelings and beliefs aside,” CBS executive Adrienne Roark said on the staff call. “Our job is to serve our audiences without bias or perceived bias, to provide objective news that we know and they know they can trust.”
The phrase “perceived bias” (what a wide-ranging idea!) gives the game away. It tips off that the issue with Dokupil had very little to do with journalistic standards and was instead that he strayed outside of the bounds of acceptable expression. By challenging a much-beloved author and his ferocious critique of Israel, he was violating unspoken tenets of the new woke corporate regime. The fact that it’s literally his job to argue with on-air guests seemed to matter not at all to the corporate brass.
A situation like what happened at CBS has become something very close to a new normal in institutional America. Some perspective, even a very radical one, gets favored. Any opposition to that favored perspective goes beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse and is suggestive of “perceived bias.” Corporate management, in its attempt to smooth things over, placates whatever the loudest voices are at the moment and punishes whomever espouses the less-favored perspective. At CBS News—which is a company full of journalists dedicated, at least in theory, to independence of thought—there’s some pushback, but in most companies, employees would simply know where the guardrails are and steer well clear of causing any offense.
It’s not placards or encampments or Twitter mobs but it’s no less insidious. “Peak woke” has profoundly changed the way that American institutions operate. If it’s impossible to have honest, challenging conversations at CBS News—a place whose whole reason for existence is to pursue journalistic truth—then it’s likely impossible to do so anywhere else in the American institutional structure. “Wokeism” may have peaked around 2020, but that doesn’t mean that it just disappeared afterwards. What happened was that there was a culture war and “wokeism” won.
Sam Kahn is an associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.
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Dokoupil committed a grave crime. The crime of blasphemy. To SJWs, Coates is a god. One does not ask questions of a god. You get down on your knees and worship (genuflect before) a god. Dokoupil failed to workship Coates. That is a grave crime to SJWs.
While I can agree with you in part that The Economist was mistaken, it's only because in my opinion they jumped the gun. A charitable read of their thesis is that we appear to be passing "peak woke," not that woke is over.
You're right (also in part) that there is plenty of woke still in our system, but we don't know yet from the data cited that peak woke is behind us. That'll take time. Not weeks or months, but years, and it's possible it may take a generation or so.
Having worked in state politics for a long time, I know that the political -- and thus the media -- dynamics encourage statements of immediate solutions to problems, and it's my theory that this is one of the things that leads to public cynicism about both important institutions. I sat in many meetings with my bosses working hard to find problems that needed solutions, sometimes going out of our way to construct problems out of vague and thin rationales because we had to have a health care issue on our legislative agenda, or a labor issue, or some of-the-moment occurrence, a squirrel that had captured every dog's attention for a minute and a half.
Woke is worse than that, but its solution will be as multivariate as its causes. It's hard to have to wait for things that took a while to build up to decline, and we are an impatient people, built to be deluded by shiny objects and disappointed by solutions that address one data driven aspect of them, but are indifferent to other, more difficult conditions of the problem.
Sometimes we have to wait. And sometimes it does take generations, even several of them, to work out the poisons. That's not a happy fact, but it does seem to be a true one.
I don't blame The Economist and Ms. Goldberg for wish casting. I do it myself sometimes. But they're not wrong to see some good signs. Those of us who live in California see reasons to be hopeful: San Francisco, for heaven's sake, going moderate; voters statewide rebuking their legislature on issues like crime and affirmative action. There will be backsliding, unexpected twists and turns, and god knows what else.
In all of the normal chaos of life in a very populous country, I don't want to be too hard on the folks whose rhetoric of hope is wrong only in that it may be a little premature. I tend to root for hope, and give it a long lead time.