David Brooks should really stop trying to explain stuff to the rest of us. While he has a specific perspective that, for some inexplicable reason, appeals to some fan base out there somewhere, he is most definitely unqualified to speak on certain topics. After the Women’s March, he wasted his words (and valuable space in the New York Times), mansplaining why the marches would do little for social change. In his not-at-all-worth reading nonsensical essay, he boiled down the entirety of the many women’s marches that took place around the country and world to identity politics and women’s issues with patriarchy. Talk about someone without a clue—this tone-deaf perspective makes him come across as if he’s never even talked to a woman before in his life. But, not to worry, he’s not to be outdone. This week, he decided to write about what cool looks like in America today.
The cool person is stoical, emotionally controlled, never eager or needy, but instead mysterious, detached and self-possessed. The cool person is gracefully competent at something, but doesn’t need the world’s applause to know his worth. That’s because the cool person has found his or her own unique and authentic way of living with nonchalant intensity.
This part, to his actual credit, is fairly interesting. Brooks interviewed historian Joel Dinerstein, author of the book The Origins of Cool in Postwar America, about how coolness has been viewed and manifested over the decades. He makes a big point of noting how cool emerged within and has always been associated with black American culture. This is not completely surprising. America has always had a love-hate relationship with black people. While black people have been demonized and systematically oppressed since the beginning of our history in this country, our culture has also almost always been appropriated—with our hairstyles, fashion trends, music and speech giving birth to popular trends that mainly non-black people have capitalized on. There is a saying among black folk that “everyone wants to be black, until it’s time to be black.” We are the embodiment of cool that people want to emulate, without having the lived experience and marginalization that comes with having black skin.
It emerged specifically within African-American culture, among people who had to withstand the humiliations of racism without losing their temper, and who didn’t see any way to change their political situation. Cool culture in that context said, you can beat me but I am not beaten, you can oppress me but you can’t own me. It became a way of indicting society even if you were powerless, a way of showing your untrammeled dignity. It was then embraced by all those who felt powerless, whether they were dissident intellectuals or random teenagers.
That’s where Brooks really should have stopped. But since this is David Brooks and he can’t help himself, he decided to explore today’s version of cool, which he thinks is “woke.” (It’s not.)
Now, the word “woke” is really everywhere right now. So you can’t blame him for taking a wild guess and thinking that woke must refer to those people who are cool. But how he uses it and assigns it to the mentality of people who are most assuredly not woke is problematic and just plain gross.
The modern concept of woke began, as far as anybody can tell, with a 2008 song by Erykah Badu. The woke mentality became prominent in 2012 and 2013 with the Trayvon Martin case and the rise of Black Lives Matter. [...]
The woke mentality has since been embraced on the populist right, by the conservative “normals” who are disgusted with what they see as the thorough corruption of the Republican and Democratic establishments. See Kurt Schlichter’s Townhall essay “We Must Elect Senator Kid Rock” as an example of right-wing wokedness.
This is why people who are outside of a culture probably shouldn’t attempt to define it. Brooks is right that the term “woke” in its current form is attributed to Erykah Badu—both her song Master Teacher and a tweet she sent out in 2012 urging people to “stay woke” in support of the Russian band Pussy Riot. At it’s core it was intended to refer to educating oneself and being aware of social justice issues—from a systemic and intersectional lens. It implies critical thinking and analysis. It is not just a hashtag or a pithy expression to be bantered about. In some ways, it is a call to action. The problem is that now everyone and their mother want to claim some form of “wokeness” (hint David: the term is “wokeness” and not “wokedness” and people in the know actually get this) without doing the critical work, self-reflection, and meaningful activism it takes to actually be woke. In this way, the term has become watered down and gradually lost its meaning over time.
More important, however, is that there is no such thing as right-wing wokeness. At all. Ever. The right-wing poses a grave threat to everything that the aforementioned critical awareness stands for. Theirs are the politics of exclusion, bigotry, and greed. Yesterday, they voted to open debate to end health care for 22 million people. They are trying to build a border wall and roll back voting rights. They don’t want transgender soldiers to serve in the military. They are the party that claims “All Lives Matter,” but remains silent when black people and brown people are systematically killed again and again by police. They are hate-filled and backward thinking and want to go back to a time when women and minorities had little to no rights. This is is the complete opposite of woke. And it is disrespectful and ahistorical to take a word so deeply steeped in black culture and suggest that these people share anything in common with the originators of cool or this word.
Brooks ends by saying that it is unclear what this version of cool (aka woke) will be in modern times. “Cool was individualistic, but woke is nationalistic and collectivist. Cool was emotionally reserved; woke is angry, passionate and indignant.” Times change and movements must morph and change to meet the moment they are in. Woke is one way to describe it, but at the end of the day, this is bigger than a word. Our struggle is about the kind of world we want to create—one based on core values that center around justice, liberation, and equality. These are not things that David Brooks knows much about. He’s better off sticking to writing about sandwiches and leaving cool to the rest of us.