When Helen Zille, the DA’s minister of wokery, wrote her seminal revolutionary text, #StayWoke: Go Broke, in 2021, even she couldn’t have predicted how quickly the forces of good would win the battle against wokeness. The blurb that Exclusive Books uses for #StayWoke: Go Broke is a rallying cry for that very battle.
“It’s time to fight back. Each day, more South Africans are targeted, labelled, and hounded out of society for expressing their opinions — ordinary opinions that just a few years ago were accepted as rational common sense. Have you been ‘cancelled’ by an online mob that won’t stop harassing you until you’re fired from your job? Helen Zille almost was — but she survived by fighting back. In #StayWoke: Go Broke, the best-selling author and defining South African political figure explains why the woke Left constitutes a greater threat to South Africa’s future than the populist Right does. Now more than ever, liberals must strengthen their spines and fight for their values — or be eviscerated in the Culture Wars raging across the English-speaking world. If you’re looking for an incisive, indispensable survival guide through this tumultuous period of South African history, then #StayWoke: Go Broke is for you.”
There’s a weird specificity to the ideal reader conjured up by the blurb, that is, someone who has been cancelled by an online mob until they are fired from their job. Are there really enough of those to push you onto the best-seller list? And shame, it’s quite the heart-tugger when you think of all those poor people who express ordinary opinions, opinions that just a few years ago were accepted as common sense, like “women belong in the kitchen”, now being hounded out of society. Nobody ever thinks of the common people!
But leaving that tragedy aside, it appears that in fact Zille’s fellow anti-wokeists in the US are winning the fight to make culturally sanctioned bigotry great again, and to prevent the Great Evisceration foretold by the prophet. Verily, woke has gone broke. Recently, The Economist published “America is becoming less ‘woke’”, a statistical analysis that reveals that woke opinions and practices are on the decline.
The magazine analysed how influential woke ideas are today, and found that the heyday of wokery was in 2021/2022 and it has since receded. “In fact, discussion and espousal of woke views peaked in America in the early 2020s and have declined markedly since. The Economist has attempted to quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business. Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021/2022 and has been declining ever since. The only exception is corporate wokeness … which has also retreated in the past year or two.”
At this point you might ask, why are we concerned with a report that looks exclusively at the US? Why are we being subjected to the colonisation of ideas? Well, not all colonialism is bad, silly! Haven’t you read Zille’s book, which is a spirited defence of cultural appropriation, when cultural appropriation consists of stealing American ideas like “woke” and repurposing it for your own local ends? Because woke as our own local conservatives and contrarians use it is very much a US construct. The Economist even gives us a bit of an origin story for it.
When weaponised for the culture wars, though, wokeness takes on different meanings depending which side you’re on
Apparently, one of the early uses of the word was by US blues legend Lead Belly, “who sang about nine young African Americans in Scottsboro, Alabama, who were wrongly accused in 1931 of raping two white women. They got an unfair trial; all nine later had their convictions overturned or were pardoned. In a recording in 1938, Lead Belly warns black Americans travelling through Alabama to stay ‘woke’, lest they be accused of something similar.”
As The Economist puts it, “even the most committed anti-woke warrior would grant that the man had a point”. When weaponised for the culture wars, though, wokeness takes on different meanings depending which side you’re on. For Republicans in the US, and indeed for the MAGA remoras of South Africa, wokeness is used to signify anything that they consider to be virtue-signalling or political correctness.
Drawing on an example from a few weeks ago: you’ll remember the quote from Roman Cabanac, John Steenhuisen’s newly appointed chief of staff, when asked about the criticism he was bound to receive as a podcaster with a chequered past of incendiary comments. “I am very comfortable with the appointment because fortunately, there are not many woke people at the department of agriculture as we are here to work. I am, therefore, not bothered if the woke crowd is critical of my appointment.” Alas, it wasn’t wokeness that did for him (if he is done, that is). It was old-fashioned allegations of racism.
I came across an example of how meaningless the word woke has become on a Facebook group I belong to, which is dedicated to talking about old South African bands. A large chunk of the members seem to be white men reliving the heady rock ’n roll days of the 1960s and 1970s, so they’re of a certain age. One of them had a comment removed by the Facebook algorithm. It was a one-word comment, so I assume Facebook thought it was spam. The person whose post was removed wrote: “So I just had my comment removed and a warning, why? Because I saw a post and hadn’t heard of [the band] so simply posted ‘Who?’ … If the admins of this page are so fragile woke and pathetic, then gladly, PLEASE DO BAN ME!”
I can’t even begin to imagine what’s going on in this person’s brain, that they think having “Who?” taken down is because of wokeness. It’s like blaming wokeness because your steak is overcooked. That’s how meaningless the word has become, thanks to its overuse, and misuse. And sadly for those trying to evade responsibility for unsavoury opinions, the days of being able to answer criticism by accusing your critics of just being woke are ending.
The Economist reminds us of a story that illustrates just how ridiculous accusations of wokeism can be.
When a bridge over Baltimore harbour collapsed this year, it wasn’t because it was hit by a cargo ship, “but because one of the nearby port’s six commissioners is a black woman whose human resources firm helps companies assess how diverse their workforces are, among other things — or so a Republican candidate for governor of Utah asserted”.
But we hit peak wokeism three years ago. “Polling by Gallup found that the share of people [in the US] who worry a great deal about race relations climbed from 17% in 2014 to 48% in 2021, but has since fallen to 35%. Likewise, the term ‘white privilege’ was used 2½ times for every 1-million words written by the New York Times in 2020. Last year it was used 0.4 times per 1-million words.”
There are loads of examples, but just to pull out gender: “Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question. Opposition to trans students playing in sports teams that match their chosen gender rather than their biological sex has grown from 53% in 2022 to 61% in 2024.”
And The Economist’s analysis of the decline of wokeness includes both sides, those who are pro-woke and those who are anti-woke. Its researchers do this “by looking at ideas and actions associated with this sort of activism, for good or for ill. It measures, for example, talk of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ in the corporate world, regardless of whether it is being invoked as a way to correct the underrepresentation of women and racial minorities or as an example of pious window-dressing. Some of the yardsticks we use apply only to the more doctrinaire form of woke activism, such as the number of drives to censure academics for views deemed offensive. Others capture only the more positive aspects of the movement, such as polling data on the proportion of Americans who worry about racial injustice. Either way, the results are consistent: America has passed ‘peak woke’.” And, interestingly, “some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the Left”.
So what’s the takeaway here? Is wokeness over, or has it just become less useful to all sides because of the way it’s been misused and weaponised? Happily, it seems that there are some lasting benefits of wokeness. But as the report points out, it’s the “woke battle” that Zille wrote about, and which the milksop-MAGAs of South Africa were using as part of their branding, that’s losing its effect. It all feels “stagy and artificial, like professional wrestling”. As The Economist report suggests, the hope is that we can now discuss actual issues and policies based on facts and diverse opinions, rather than dismiss necessary dialogue with accusations of wokeness that are designed to bludgeon.
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