US Ivy league universities’ presidents, all women, shamelessly defended their inaction against those who called for the genocide of Jews on their campuses. The three major universities—Harvard, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—were questioned in the US Congress about anti-Semitism on their campuses, threatening the lives of Jewish students.
They cut such a sorry figure with their diversionary answers. Instead of a straight “No”, all replied with riders and caveats. This is because of where they come from— their radicalised woke mentality which makes them think that they are progressive. In their mental construct, certain communities are the permanent oppressors—despite historical facts saying otherwise— like Jews and Hindus, while the permanent victims are Blacks and Muslims. Anybody who supports these so-called imagined oppressors are in for trouble.
Public institutions and top universities in Europe and America supported the “cancel culture” where words need to be translated into conduct and action applied selectively. Cancel culture has always maintained that words are violence if you are not from the identities they support like Blacks and Muslims.
This they have exported abroad and one sees an abundance of this in public space and university campuses in India as well. Social media adds to these imagined constructs and absurdities where calls to genocide can mainstreamed by people. Worse, they think they do it with good in their hearts. Women’s rights don’t matter as against those whom they support.
Hamas broke the pact earlier than planned on the eighth day when ten young women were supposed to be released. US State Department spokesperson Mathew Miller commented that probably Hamas did not want to turn over these women because they didn’t want them to talk about what happened to them during their time in custody.
The silence of the UN, women’s rights organisations and wokes is shocking. Women have been raped, sexually abused and mutilated by these terrorists and there isn’t any condemnation.
Why is it so—because they do not belong to the identities the wokes support? Has the UN become so woke that it no longer represents all? A weak and feeble condemnation came after two months, which is useless as it is too little too late.
The blatant catering to the bigots and doing it in the name of sensitivity and permanent victimhood even if they are the real oppressors, is an imagined construction on a false consciousness. The situation is such that one cannot speak of Armenian or Hindu genocide in history or even in recent times.
In fact, wokeism undermines the traditional tenets of the Left, it pushes tribal dogma over universal commitments, it punctures the hope of progress itself. Wokeism begins with the concern for the marginalised persons, but ends up reducing each person to the prism of their marginalisation.
The idea of intersectionality was once a useful reminder that all of us have more than one identity. But now, it leads to a narrow focus on the parts that are most marginalised and multiplies them into a “forest of trauma”.
The wokes are so caught up in inequalities of power and culture wars that they have forgotten how to struggle together for justice. Wokism reduces our complex identities to the narrow axes of race, gender (or caste or sexual orientation) alone, and fixates on the idea that only those exactly like us can be our comrades.
It’s assumed that our social position determines our claim to knowledge—only a woman can know this, only a person with disabilities understands this, and so on. But victimhood alone confers no virtue. Valorisation of one’s trauma leads to selfexpression, but not social change.
One must fight the social fictions of race, caste and gender with common ideals, not identities. How does then social and political change happen? When we build coalitions, when people rally together, across gender, caste and race and other identities, for the sake of their convictions.
Even the white people or upper caste people who marched for Black Lives Matter or caste annihilation were doing it out of a commitment to universal justice. Tribal thinking reduces everything to self-interest and frustrates the possibility of egalitarian movements. It mirrors the identity politics of the conservatives.
Woke movements tend to tear down the Enlightenment ideas of universal liberal ideals, reason, progress and so on, pointing out that it was the Eurocentric ideology that justified colonial predations by the West. They point out (rightly) that “universal” is usually coded white rather than brown, male rather than female, straight rather than gay. But this book argues that the Enlightenment thinkers gave colonialism a guilty conscience, something that older “might is right” empires never had.
Those who once called themselves as being on the Left, now call themselves progressive, but they undermine any hope for progress. To be on the left is to stand behind the idea that people can work together to make a real change in their own lives and those of others. Woke theories have an implacable doomsday logic that makes reform seem futile. They miss how things have got better on the racial front, on gender, on confronting our pasts.
Sexual harassment was once like the weather, now it is at least condemned and actionable even if it remains pervasive as in the case of the Hamas. Wokeism is largely confined to squabbling on social media over what discrimination is worse, rather than building solidarity across our differences. The personal is the political, certainly, but when the political is only the personal, then we lose hope. It is time we got back to the universal.
Professor Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice Chancellor of JNU.