Very Weird Ideas About What It Means to Respect Someone's Political Project

"the Black Panthers/the American Indian Movement/rioters at Stonewall/Valerie Solanas just wanted us all to be nice to each other, any fucking questions???"

At the Screen Actors Guild Awards last night, Jane Fonda (who was once cool) said “Woke just means you give a damn about other people.” This has long been a particularly annoying form of defense for the concept of “woke,” a term that’s capacious and contested but which certainly includes the social justice movement that gained immense cultural influence in the 2010s before crashing on the rocks of reality in the past few years. Terms like woke, social justice, intersectionality, political correctness, identity politics - if you use those pejoratively, you must be a monster, because all they mean is “being good and doing good like a good goodie.” This is a form of defense that’s ultimately more dismissive than the critiques it attempts to wave away. On the most basic level of intellectual respect, “woke just means being kind” is insulting, belittling, and infantilizing.

Say you’re a young person who went through a long period of education and radicalization and came out as a passionate advocate for social justice, becoming a professional organizer by working for a lefty nonprofit. You go through the usual Tumblr-Twitter-TikTok education a lot of young social justice types do, but unlike most you’re inspired to do real scholarship. You apply to grad programs and do the work. You read your bell hooks and your Gloria Anzaldua, you unpack your privilege knapsack, you pour over sociology PDFs until late in the morning, you gradually acquire the notoriously abstruse vocabulary, you start a campus political group with your comrades, you attend conferences and march at protests, you write a compelling thesis, you scour online job boards for work at relevant nonprofits, ready to start at the very bottom if you get a chance to do good. You built a whole life around developing a particular ideological stance, informed both by learning and by personal experience. You have a sophisticated, specific, and provocative set of opinions on philosophy, politics, and policy. You are deeply sincere and utterly committed, and you’re ready to spend your life fighting in support of your vision of a more just and fair society. You want to live your life in such a way that your very existence serves as a repudiation of the various ideologies of bigotry and oppression that rule the world.

And now some celebrity lady looks at you and your political project and movement and says, “That just means you give a damn about people.” In doing so, she drains every last ounce of actual political and moral meaning from you and your work, using words of praise that could just as easily be applied to a Mormon missionary or to a particularly friendly cop. Would you find that… respectful? A demonstration of adult admiration? A reflection on your mission as a political being? Or would you find it intensely fucking condescending?