The Waning of “Woke”?
Many social scientists, as well as political and cultural commentators of various kinds, have begun to argue that Critical Social Justice (usually referred to as “wokeness”) “peaked” in 2020 and has since been on the decline. There is evidence to support the position that there is a growing resistance to Critical Social Justice and a general sense of culture war fatigue. The overall attrition rate for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) roles was 50 percent higher than non-DEI jobs in 2022, as many companies began phasing out certain DEI positions. Further, while job postings for DEI positions expanded by nearly 30 percent between 2020 and 2021, they dropped by almost an equal percentage between 2022 and 2023.
Support for the Black Lives Matter movement declined from 67 percent at its peak in 2020 to 51 percent in 2023, and a majority of Americans say the increased focus on race since the 2020 George Floyd protests has not improved the lives of black people. There are also signs that other areas of Critical Social Justice focus have decreased in popularity. Analysis by sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, arguably the most meticulous documenter of this trajectory across many spheres of society, reveals, among much more, a decline in relevant journalistic word usage as well as a drop in cancellation events, a decrease in academic output using Critical Social Justice theories, a greater confidence of students to express their views, and a greater pushback against DEI from both employers and mainstream outlets.
This is supported by research examining the language of 725 corporate social responsibility communications undertaken by Adam William Chalmers and Robyn Klingler-Vidra. Whereas companies once primarily used the term “civil rights movement” when discussing issues of social justice, their language shifted in 2015 and became dominated by “wokeisms” such as “allyship” “diversity equity,” “equity and inclusion,” and “racial justice.” Since 2021, this language has been in decline.
There is certainly room for optimism that Critical Social Justice is losing its social prestige. Some portion of this shift was inevitable because Critical Social Justice has always been destined to implode for three primary reasons. Firstly, Critical Social Justice has a concept of society that is not rooted in reality and relies on methods that do not work. The need to take the claims of the theorists and activists on faith is one of the reasons it is often likened to religion. Unlike religion, however, we do not have to wait until after our deaths to find out if its texts and prophets have steered us right. The failure of Critical Social Justice to accurately describe social reality and effect positive change is becoming increasingly hard to deny. Its DEI programs have spectacularly failed to decrease racism or reduce disparities in workplaces and instead either had no effect at all or worsened them. Its intense and divisive focus on racial and LGBT identity politics has not improved race relations or the acceptance of sexual minorities but contributed to a resurgence of race-consciousness and white identity politics and a reduction of support for same-sex relationships.
Secondly, Critical Social Justice is too unstable and cannibalistic to become a long-term ethical framework for most people. Because it works on “problematizing” everything, including itself and its allies, its ideas become complicated, contradictory, and confusing and change at a rapid pace all the time. Terms and concepts that were acceptable a few months ago may not be so today. “Allyship” and “checking one’s privilege” were once required signs of commitment but have since been problematized in some quarters (but not others) as performative and self-centering and replaced with “solidarity” and “complicity.” “Diversity” has been a core feature of Critical Social Justice activism, but, in some circles now, it can be seen as an attempt to make members of marginalized groups conform to white, Western ways of knowing and avoid the hard work of “decolonization.”
This is not user-friendly for real people, most of whom have jobs and cannot keep up with all this. It also creates a culture of fear where committed and well-intentioned people can be problematized and even canceled for making a verbal slip or missing a metaphorical memo.
Thirdly and relatedly, Critical Social Justice has alienated too many people. It gained some general popularity in the first place because it contained a kernel of truth. It is genuinely naïve to think we can just change laws and prejudice and discrimination will just go away. If biased attitudes remain, and they do, discrimination will still happen on a more covert level, and there is a need to be alert to that. Following the rush of equality laws in the 1960s and 70s, which included the decriminalization of homosexuality and made discrimination on the grounds of race and sex illegal, many liberals on both left and right were concerned about the way in which such discrimination had just been accepted for so long. What were we still not questioning? People looking into this is surely a good thing.
Nevertheless, the methods of Critical Social Justice in practice have been steadily alienating more and more people. White women have been consistently problematized not only by Critical Social Justice scholars and activists for their voting patterns but also in the popular press, as evidenced in the birth of the “Karen” meme.
Gay men have been scorned for failing to be consistently intersectional (or queer), while the visibility of lesbians among gender-critical feminists (colloquially known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists or, disparagingly, TERFs) made them increasingly suspect as a group. Parents of all political persuasions and races have become alienated from the movement after raising concerns about their children being taught that their race determines their values, beliefs, and experiences and their interests decide their gender identity — and after being informed that it is they who hold regressive views and are racist or transphobic. Artists like Adele and Rebel Wilson have been criticized by Critical Social Justice advocates for simply losing weight, thereby alienating those who think managing one’s weight and being attentive to one’s health is important.
Critical Social Justice took a particularly steep nosedive in credibility as an ethical movement for social justice following the response on elite university campuses to the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that often extended beyond anti-Israel protests to antisemitic slurs and abuse. The congressional testimony by presidents of three such American universities made international headlines when they all equivocated when asked if calls for the genocide of Jews would be considered harassment according to their campus policies. The uproar in the wake of this testimony led to the forced resignation of two of the presidents, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania and Claudine Gay of Harvard University. The presidents’ responses made perfect sense in the logic of Critical Social Justice, and the entire episode called considerable attention to the ways in which DEI policies and activist Critical Social Justice scholarship, particularly in the form of the “decolonize” movement, have contributed to this hostile atmosphere by framing everything in a simplistic oppressor/oppressed binary. Renowned cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, a long-time member of the Harvard faculty, beautifully summed up the reaction to Gay’s testimony given Harvard’s well-earned reputation for promoting, if not enforcing, Critical Social Justice ideology on campus: “The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context.”
As Pinker noted, the negative response to the testimony wasn’t coming simply from a narrow range of liberal writers or from conservative reactionaries. It was also alumni, donors, faculty, and citizens from all over the political spectrum voicing considerable concern, including a White House spokesperson and the second gentleman of the United States. A significant number of individuals across the mainstream have begun to openly and urgently ask: how have we reached a point in which a university’s administration does not support a biology instructor who is forced from her job for saying sex is a binary while, at the same time, it says students can call for the genocide of Jews without censure or penalty? As Pinker rightly pointed out, it was not that Gay was wrong to defend the rights of academics and students to argue even abhorrent ideas like this in the appropriate setting, but rather that they or their universities had demonstrably not defended this freedom for those who contravened the rules of Critical Social Justice—and, in the case of Gay, had reportedly even played a role in punishing insufficiently “woke” faculty herself.
The growth of negative perceptions of the Critical Social Justice movement is demonstrated by the negative connotations of the term “woke,” which has increasingly been used and understood as a term of disparagement to the point where some people believe it to have been invented by its critics. This shift began because people who understood, if not directly felt, the negative effects of the Critical Social Justice movement needed a word to identify the ideology they sought to criticize but often didn’t have the precise academic language or knowledge to do so.
This was especially important because, unlike longstanding political and philosophical movements like conservatism, liberalism, or socialism that describe specific aims to conserve cultural traditions, oppose constraints on freedom, and seek social ownership of the means of production, respectively, the Critical Social Justice movement has tended to give itself titles that encompass the values of anybody who isn’t a hateful extremist—Social Justice, Black Lives Matter, Antifa (i.e., anti-fascism), etc. When it first emerged, this made it difficult for those concerned about growing illiberalism to criticize it without seeming to be against social justice or to disagree that black lives matter or that it is good to oppose fascism. The term “woke,” which captured its identifying feature of theorizing largely invisible power dynamics to exist everywhere and always but that are undetectable to the untrained and uneducated, was thus seized upon as a means of naming the ideology so that it could be better identified and resisted. Today, 40 percent of people in the United States would regard being thought “woke” as an insult, while 32 percent would see it as a compliment. Americans are similarly divided over whether it simply means being informed on social injustice or whether it means policing others’ words. Comparable percentages are found in the United Kingdom, with 42 percent of Britons saying they would regard being called “woke” as an insult (up from 24 percent in 2020) and 27 percent saying it would be a compliment (up from 26 percent). One in seven now identify as “anti-woke.”
As a reflection of this growing expression of public opinion, we are seeing small, if symbolic, moves away from Critical Social Justice in areas where it was once uniformly accepted, including in the entertainment and media industries, where consumers make their opinions known with their wallets. Netflix shelved a plan to adapt Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby and streamed a stand-up special by unapologetically “problematic” comedian Dave Chapelle in the face of an employee protest, telling employees to find another job if its decision was intolerable to them. Its subscriptions increased by 7.6 million, which may not have been a coincidence. Similarly, Disney responded to accusations of political bias with the reinstatement of Bob Iger as CEO and a promise to “quiet things down” on the culture war front and to respect its audience.
These moves correspond with changes in the broader cultural mood. For example, the percentage of the American population that believes trans-gender athletes should participate only on teams that align with their biological sex has risen from 62 percent in 2021 to 69 percent in 2023. Meanwhile, the predominantly left-leaning New York Times has responded to open letters from both GLAAD and its own employees demanding greater conformity with Critical Social Justice ideas, particularly around transgender issues, with statements asserting its commitment to free speech and viewpoint diversity, informing employees that it would not tolerate attacks on colleagues. The New York Times has also increasingly started to feature pieces that openly question issues that Critical Social Justice has tried — and largely succeeded in — making unquestionable. For example, in February 2024, it published a lengthy article titled “As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans: Now, They No Longer Do” that raised concerns about the popular narrative that children with gender dysphoria should undergo transition and called attention to the ideological bias of gender clinics. Although the story ran as an opinion piece, this sort of coverage, which included interviews with detransitioners, has been notably absent in mainstream U.S. media in recent years.
There is reason to be optimistic that Critical Social Justice is losing its social prestige, but there is no cause to be complacent. The ideology remains well-entrenched across institutions, and troubling trends continue. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), for example, continues to record a growing trend of deplatforming in universities, the usage of terms related to queer theory and related trans activism appears to be continuing to rise, and some have argued that, far from declining, “woke” is becoming the new normal. Also, while Critical Social Justice terms have begun to recede in usage among companies in the United States and the United Kingdom since 2021, their use has accelerated among companies in Canada and parts of Europe over the same time period.
Even though the movement is too divorced from reality, chaotic, contradictory, ethically inconsistent, and alienating to survive, it has done a great deal of damage socially and will likely do a lot more before it falls. Precisely how it will fall and what will move into its place remain matters of grave concern.
This essay is excerpted from The Counterweight Handbook: Principled Strategies for Surviving and Defeating Critical Social Justice―at Work, in Schools, and Beyond, which is available for purchase at these paid links: Amazon, Bookshop, and Pitchstone.
Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and was one of the founders of Counterweight. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe that highlighted problems in Critical Social Justice scholarship, she is the coauthor of Cynical Theories and Social (In)justice and writes at The Overflowings of a Liberal Brain on Substack. She lives in England.
July 2024