Here is a non-exhaustive list of woke beliefs provided by Michael Huemer in a recent article:
It’s not like we don’t have evidence for this.
I want to say the rationalist thing about police brutality, which is “It’s rare and probably isn’t more likely if you control for behavior”, but we’ve checked already. They’re more likely to experience violence from police officers during any particular interaction, even if you control for behavior. Part of this paper suggests police aren’t more likely to use lethal force against black people, but people got angry about that finding and I don’t need to defend it anyway.
How frequent is police brutality? I’d say that depends on what you count as frequent. 228 black people were shot to death by police in 2018, while around 6.5 million of them had any contact with police at all. Under the (incorrect) assumption that each of them had just one contact, a black person’s odds of getting shot by police each year are around 0.0035%. For comparison, in 2023 an American’s odds of dying from a physical accident were about 0.0665%, 19 times as large. A black man’s odds of dying from police violence are about 1 in 1,000 over his lifetime. The lifetime odds of a violent incident of any kind are surely much higher.
Maybe not all of this evidence is good. But it seems doubtful that all of these are false positives, and it’s especially doubtful that every one of the many surveys checking whether minorities report being discriminated against is wrong because they’re all delusional or something. One funny result you can find is that most people in almost every racial group will tell you their group is being discriminated against while the rest are usually more skeptical:
But this might be explained by the fact that every racial group other than white people is more likely to affiliate with the Democratic Party. As for whether people report discrimination against them, personally, 75% of black people report having experienced discrimination or unfair treatment for their race, with most saying “from time to time”, 42% of women report having faced discrimination on the job, and while trans people are harder to survey, one in four transgender adults report having been physically attacked because of their gender identity. “All of these people are just making it up because of Woke” is much more of a conspiracy theory than “They’re telling the truth”. And even if just a tenth of the supposed discrimination occurring were real, that probably would still provide enough evidence to clear the very low bar of “prejudice is common.”
But, aha, you might say—didn’t Huemer say unjust prejudice? Maybe prejudice is common, but unjust prejudice is not.
Let me start by saying that I think the correct take here is very uncommon and practically everyone is wrong. You usually get “Discrimination is common but it’s actually fine because merit matters! It might be offensive, but it’s true!” or “Discrimination is common and bad because group differences are fake!” Both of these takes suck. The first one sucks because it’s callous and the second one sucks because it denies reality. Discrimination is common, and group differences are real. But if you aren’t a heartless and rotten person, you should be willing to sacrifice at least a little bit (in terms of economic efficiency, safety, and other good things) to reduce discrimination.
Fairness is a good most people care about. There are some efficiency gains from racial discrimination, since you can at times infer productivity from race using statistics. (Just to give you an example, here’s a paper literally titled “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Non-work at Work” that finds what the title says.) But most people would probably be willing to sacrifice a small percentage of the country’s productivity to make sure this happens less frequently. Fairness is a public good—you can’t exclude people from its benefits and it’s non-rivalrous—so the government has a natural place in protecting people from discrimination. If you think we should more explicitly measure whether this is something people care about, don’t worry, we already do that by having elections. You know, those elections where saying “black people deserve their inferior position” is (rightly) poisonous. (Why do you think Republicans always run on “merit matters” instead of talking about how they think white people are the ubermenschen?)
I don’t expect every bit of evidence I’ve provided to be final or without contention. But I do expect that anyone who’s done a comprehensive review of this area will find at least some ways in which prejudice is still here.
Is this one of, if not the, most important problems in the world?
Eh, probably not. Professor Brian Caplan of George Mason University talks a lot about trillion dollar ideas, and insofar as their not being implemented is a problem, they easily outweigh the problems associated with discrimination. Worldwide open borders could nearly double living standards around the globe.
If you want to show prejudice is one of the most important problems in the world, you should show anti-immigration sentiment is driven by racism, which is not as easy as it looks. One study using over 18,000 interviews in eleven countries found that people didn’t seem to oppose someone immigrating to a country more frequently when their race was different, though they did tend to oppose Muslim immigration.
To make quicker work of this topic, let me speak very briefly about the “woke” views I don’t agree with or don’t think are an actual part of wokeism.
“Biology plays essentially no role in explaining group differences in behavior, psychology, or cognition, particularly for the groups referred to in point (1).” If you want one really clear example, reproductive behavior is one: men are much more likely to engage in short-term mating behavior across the globe because they don’t get pregnant, so it’s not as costly. I would’ve used the fact that men commit most homicides everywhere on Earth, but there are apparently people who contest whether this is biological or not, and I want an easy win.
“Group differences in social outcomes (crime rates, socioeconomic status, drug use, educational attainment, etc.) are mainly or entirely due to the prejudice mentioned in (1).” Sorry, but I’m woker than you can possibly imagine, and I don’t believe this. Neither does Professor Orisanmi Burton, who taught the section of Race and Racism I was in at the most liberal university in the US, American University. Real fans of Woke believe that these group differences are driven by institutions, not prejudice. Ori, as he prefers to be called, would often complain about people who think that everything would get better if people simply stopped being racist. So I consider this idea that group differences in social outcomes are driven by prejudice too un-woke to be argued against. (Huemer does mention that this is another common woke view later in the essay.)
Everyone should announce their pronouns prominently. This is definitely associated with wokeism, but it seems to be relatively infrequent. Obama and Biden don’t have their pronouns in their Twitter/X biographies, while Harris does. Ori doesn’t. Even the King of Woke, Ibram X. Kendi, does not have his pronouns in his Instagram biography. The total frequency among all accounts in the US appears to be about 5%. As an “active” belief about what people should do, this doesn’t seem to really exist. The social pressure just isn’t there.
“Cancel culture: Because of this, offensive social or political views should be silenced, and the people with such views should be harmed in their personal lives, e.g., by losing their jobs.” This is equivalent to fining someone thousands of dollars for being an asshole, so I don’t think it’s right. If I suggested implementing a law that does that, even some of the most woke among us would call me crazy.
Are trans women literally women, just as much as cis women?
I’m going to preface this next part by saying two things. First, 99% of people involved with talking about this question annoy me. It’s as if people are addicted to talking past each other and getting angry. Second, if you are incapable of watching for signals to detach yourself from the argument and think rationally, you will likely read what I’m about to say and get mad for no reason.
Trans women who have penises are, IN A SENSE, biologically male. Yes, trans women experience biological changes when they transition and even have some differences in biology before transitioning (for an obvious example, the brain is a part of your biology!) But if you take cells from a random trans woman and look inside, voila, you’ll find XY chromosomes the vast majority of the time. If your idea of “biologically male” is defined such that this makes you a biological male, obviously this is true. Even people who believe trans women are women will, if you force them to stop and think, eventually admit that IN A SENSE trans women are biological males.
So many people involved with these conversations are convinced that deep in their hearts, their opponents really agree with the definition they’re using, so they just have to yell “You’ll NEVER be a woman” and eventually they’ll fold. Alternatively, you can yammer about how trans women are literally biological women on some weird technicality no layman would agree to.
There is one thing and one thing only that people are really arguing about: should we treat trans women like women in contexts we care about, or should we not? The most common form of treatment is the pronouns used to refer to a trans woman. On one hand, I can completely understand where people are coming from when they refuse to do this: when I believe deep down inside that something isn’t true, it’s really, really hard for me to pretend I believe it when I don’t. If you pointed me to a very overweight woman and said “She’s so beautiful, isn’t she?” and really meant it, I would (1) freeze up and stammer because I love and care about people and I don’t want to be mean and (2) ultimately refuse to agree except without appending a dozen provisos. If all you can see is a man when you see a trans woman, and you always use “he” rather than “she”, I pretty much get why.
On the other hand, I think you’re being whiny and silly, because I don’t think my own behavior is correct! The right thing to do is to stop being such an autist and go along with social desirability bias because it allows society to function. You should expect people to get mad when you fail to say the polite things you think are false, just as you should expect not to get the job when you truthfully answer “I don’t have that qualification” instead of finding a way to be a weasel and twist the truth. If you can lie for yourself, you can lie for others.
There are other controversial questions like whether trans women should get to use the women’s restroom, and I could spend time on those. But I’m going to stop here and rate this woke belief as mostly true. Regardless of whether you believe trans women are women or if you believe they’re mentally ill men, the socially useful thing to do in 99% of cases is to treat trans women like women. The only reasonable points of controversy are the edge cases like bathrooms. If you believe trans women are women, like me, wonderful. If you instead think trans women are kinda crazy, remember that usually the right thing to do with your schizophrenic friend is to entertain their harmless delusions.
I admit that it’s not so easy to say this is “mostly true” when the point I’m making is that the argument is about the definition. But again, the argument is about the definition because at its core we’re asking how we should treat trans women. That the right way to treat them is by respecting their gender identity is obvious, because misgendering them causes much greater harm than whatever you get out of saying The Truth. Nobody ever cried because people forced them to submit to social desirability bias.
Is it important to be wary of microaggressions?
Huemer gave these as examples:
[…] asking people with an accent where they are from, or claiming that you don’t see race.
I think he’s mischaracterizing microaggressions. If you take the Wokipedia page as any indication:
Alien in own land: When people assume people of color are foreigners.
E.g.: “So where are you really from?” or “Why don’t you have an accent?”
[…]
Refusal to acknowledge intra-ethnic differences: When a speaker ignores intra-ethnic differences and assumes a broad homogeneity over multiple ethnic groups.
E.g.: Descriptions such as “all Asian-Americans look alike”, or assumptions that all members of an ethnic minority speak the same language or have the same cultural values.
These are much worse than the examples Huemer gave, and it should be obvious that there are better ways to treat people. Don’t want your speech to be restricted? You can say the exact same things without being rude at all: “I don’t mean to assume anything, but were you born here or somewhere else?” and “I know they don’t literally all look the same, but I really do have a hard time telling Asian-Americans apart.” I also recall a case described at my university where a teacher was talking about undocumented immigrants and decided to stare directly at the one Hispanic girl in the class. Just don’t do that!
All of these things are obviously bad. You shouldn’t hang yourself from a cross over them and submit to public humiliation, but your mental space isn’t so scarce and valuable that being wary of microaggressions would be a tall order. If it is, you have a skill issue or a bad moral compass.
Should everyone get DEI training?
There are about 683,280 hours in 80 years of life, which is about how long the typical person lives. We are willing to give up tons of these just to watch TV, yell at each other, and masturbate. So should everyone get DEI training? Absolutely.
If schools and employers each mandated one singular hour of listening to someone talk about the importance of being anti-racist, the effect would surely be positive, even if it’s difficult to measure and observe. These sessions function to raise awareness of social problems people might otherwise be ignorant of. Infinite DEI training would be an annoying blight on mankind, but that’s not what we’re talking about doing.
Allow me to provide you an example of where DEI training might have been useful. My mother was once on a work trip involving some white guys and a black woman. The white guys attempted to schedule a meeting (or something like that; the details are fuzzy to me) and all decided on “Let’s meet up at 7:30 AM in this cafe!”
The trouble here is that a black woman’s hair is not a simple thing to deal with. Men meet their social expectations for work by putting on a suit, and women usually only have to do the same, plus makeup. But unless you want black women showing up to work looking like a mess, they need time in the morning to get ready. It was difficult for this particular black woman to speak up and explain that such an early meeting time would be a huge pain.
I don’t believe DEI training necessarily solves these scheduling difficulties, but it has the potential to eliminate certain social frictions like this one and make life easier for minorities. The cost of DEI training is so low that the only real question is “Do we waste company money on paying $1,000 for an expert to come speak about racism?” when the better thing to do is use common sense and pull a slideshow from the internet.
If that’s not enough for you, consider using these DEI training sessions as an opportunity to encourage people to be conscious of microaggressions and how minorities might feel excluded. If you hate the idea of using the term “microaggressions” because it feels too capital-W Woke, simply tell others not to be a dick in subtly racist ways, and provide examples. Companies do these things because they want to enhance productivity through greater cohesion among workers, and those gains are passed to workers in the form of higher wages. Submit to the will of your DEI capitalist overlords if you want a raise.
Businesses and other organizations might decide against doing DEI training sessions, perhaps because company time really is that valuable. I have a hard time imagining a hospital deciding its doctors need to listen to a presentation on being antiracist when they’re already working 80-hour weeks. But “everyone should get DEI training” is not the same as “we should mandate DEI training for everyone” in the same way that “everyone should get chemotherapy if they needed it” is not the same thing as “we should have Medicare for All”. DEI is the goal because respect and brotherhood are awesome, even if we might fail to meet it.
Is it harmful to express offensive views? Is that comparable to violence?
I have important news to share: you do not decide what is and is not offensive and what is and is not harmful. That’s not an abstract truth about the world floating around to be discovered. Other people decide what’s offensive to them, and if you keep saying things they really, really don’t like, they’re going to get really, really angry with you and try to punish you.
I don’t mean to argue that it’s totally fine to protest and block visits to a college campus because you find the speaker’s views to be harmful. Whether a harm is great enough to justify such a move is a separate question where the answer is much harder to find. But “Are offensive views harmful?” is a trivial question: people say those views are harmful to them, so they are.
The comparison to violence is much more iffy. We have to mess with the typical person’s definition of violence a bit to make it fit—most people would probably consider harm to the mind to be something distinct from violence. If you saw a scene in a movie where a father yelled at his wife and children and called them slurs, you’d say he seemed like a violent person, not that he had committed an act of violence. Still, the general sentiment expressed by the full statement is obviously correct—should we not believe black people or gay people or other minorities when they say it hurts when people talk about how they’re dumber or disease-ridden?
What about the equality thesis? Reverse bigotry?
Huemer poses “the Equality Thesis” as the core of wokeism.
I talked with anti-woke philosopher Nathan Cofnas about this. He proposed that the core of wokism [sic] is “the Equality Thesis”, which holds something like: all interesting social, cognitive, psychological, and behavioral differences between groups (I assume we mean here races, sexes, and a few other kinds of groups that social scientists study, not “groups” like “smart people” or “professors”) are due to environment, not biology.
This is a much stronger claim to make. I’m going to cheat a little and pivot to an easier claim to defend, and to do that I’ll tell you a bit about myself, one of many American wokesters.
When I was younger, I was very amenable to the Equality Thesis because it seemed to be necessary to satisfy a certain moral intuition I had: much of what people experience is not deserved, and happens because of their circumstances. Racism and sexism are two such circumstances. You might lose out because people just hate black people, or because they think you can’t be smart since you’re a woman. If I wanted to defend this idea, it would be nice if race and sex didn’t have a direct, causal influence on measures of competence, since that would mean discrimination is unjust and irrational.
I no longer think the Equality Thesis is necessary. We can throw it out. Racism and sexism seem much more environmental than one’s biology, but race and sex are just as much circumstances as the way you’re treated for them. Maybe race and sex do have a direct impact on your competence, and certainly if you’re a woman in a field requiring physical strength, that’s the case. But this is something we should all consider to be bad, regardless. We should feel an obligation towards these people, just as we expect them to feel obligated toward us when we’re unjustly harmed.1
The true core of wokeism is just this guy:
If you sense that justice must be even-handed and shouldn’t show favoritism based on arbitrary features, like other woke people do, you’ll probably believe that the veil of ignorance provides a good starting point for justice. Behind the veil, you don’t know who you’ll be born to, what race you’ll be, or whether you’ll wake up one day and realize you have a very strong preference for being a woman. You can’t decide “When I’m playing Uno, I’ll get fewer cards at the start, and I won’t be obligated to take even a single card from another player.” You would instead know that you might be black, and you might be one of the unlucky black people to get sickle cell disease. Eliminating these differences through social obligations would often be prudent, especially if the social benefits exceed the costs.2
Once other wokesters realize the Equality Thesis is unnecessary, I believe they’ll default to something like what I’m describing here, which is the belief the Equality Thesis itself springs from. People like me are motivated to defend the Equality Thesis by our sense that it’s needed to get people to care about each other. But even without it, the right thing to do is to obligate the typical American to pay $20-$40 a year for PEPFAR to save millions of lives in Africa. That is the core of wokeism, and that’s obviously correct.
Huemer also characterizes wokeism as being bigoted in reverse, blaming white people for the problems of black people and other minorities. Here’s how he defends this characterization:
Huemer seems to be implying that white people aren’t to blame for the problems suffered by black people as a group, which is absolutely preposterous. There are black people alive today who experienced segregation first hand, and it wasn’t other black people who made those laws, though certainly there might have been some willing co-conspirators. We’ve already seen that prejudice is still common among white people today, even if not all of them. And yes, not all of the problems of black people are caused by white people, but certainly many of them are.
Now, in addition to considering Huemer’s antisemitism analogy, suppose that somebody claims most of the childhood measles cases in the United States are caused by parents who don’t vaccinate their kids. They wouldn’t be committing some grave evil by admitting a prejudice against a group, in fact, they would be saying something obviously correct and socially useful to point out. It might be a little insensitive if you say it in front of a parent whose child caught measles, especially if that parent did vaccinate their kid. But that probably won’t happen. Here we can see that if a belief about a group is true, you can express it without saying something morally wrong.
If the things antisemites believed about Jewish people were literally true, antisemitism would be correct. Some of these beliefs are so deranged that, if they were true, of course antisemitism would be correct. Who wouldn’t be an antisemite if every Jewish person alive today secretly had claws, a beak, and wings, was part of a secret society that controls global affairs, and a religious organization that killed Jesus? The problem with antisemitism isn’t just that it’s mean; the problem is that it’s insane and made up. The idea that white people instituted slavery, Jim Crow laws, and that even some white people alive today opposed the end of segregation in 1964, is just true.3 You can certainly say these things in a way that might sound mean, but I don’t think we should judge wokeism by its rudest defenders.
“Most people in America belonging to groups commonly thought to receive discrimination do, indeed, receive discrimination, at least sometimes. That discrimination is based on judgments made about them based on their group membership, not direct experience with that individual, and that’s wrong. Given the number of people potentially harmed, this is a very important problem. We should confront these problems by having people spend a little bit of time at work in DEI training, learning, for example, about how they might unintentionally harm a coworker they care about with a racist statement, and about how misgendering someone can cause them great pain.”
At the very least, I think you should consider this a highly plausible paragraph.
I can’t find the article now, but I had read another author describing wokeism in a way that was much less favorable and, I think, more accurate to what makes it unique. As an example of a woke belief they named “deference to minorities”, which is essentially this guy:
One of American University’s AU Experience courses featured this belief as a kind of social expectation they initially seemed to be imposing on us. They weren’t. But this can also be treated separately as a kind of ad hominem epistemic standard for which statements about social justice issues are true. If you aren’t the one facing discrimination, this standard says, you can’t really understand it. This is a much harder belief to defend, and one I’m hiding my viscerally ugly reaction toward. It seems downright evil to me but I don’t want to talk about it that way. I think Huemer could have afforded to cast wokeism in a more negative light by including beliefs like this one, rather than providing a list of ideas that are mostly correct. But he did, so for now, wokeism is obviously correct about most things.
https://jackonomics.substack.com/p/wokeism-is-obviously-correct-about (Archive)
Let’s look at each of these ideas.
Are many forms of prejudice still common?
Everyone seeking to answer this question should start with a high prior in its favor. If you’re on the left, you feel it in your bones. If you’re on the right, you probably think prejudice is perfectly justified much of the time, so you should expect there to be lots of it! Don’t you know in your heart that black people are dumber on average and commit more crimes? Shouldn’t you expect a Muslim to be more likely to be a terrorist than a white person? What about gay people, doesn’t it make sense to assume they’re more likely to carry AIDS?It’s not like we don’t have evidence for this.
- Black names get fewer callbacks, at least sometimes. Attempted replications have failed and succeeded. (Also, if you think this isn’t real, do you still believe black people are hired less frequently because they’re usually less competent? If so, why wouldn’t employers use that information in the hiring process?)
- You can simply ask black people if people are racist to them and they’ll say yes. Need more detail? Read a book.
- “Since the 1960s, social scientists, fair housing agencies, and the federal government have conducted hundreds of in-person and correspondence housing audits. Researchers use these covert experiments to make strong causal claims about difficult-to-detect behavior, such as racial, gender, and other types of discrimination. These studies have consistently uncovered discrimination in multiple stages and contexts of the housing exchange process.”
- Black customers are often on the receiving end of racial discrimination in restaurants.
- Black riders face higher rates of cancellation from Uber and Lyft drivers.
- Evidence for discrimination against gay men in the rental market.
- More on the same subject: gay men are less likely to receive a response to rental inquiries.
I want to say the rationalist thing about police brutality, which is “It’s rare and probably isn’t more likely if you control for behavior”, but we’ve checked already. They’re more likely to experience violence from police officers during any particular interaction, even if you control for behavior. Part of this paper suggests police aren’t more likely to use lethal force against black people, but people got angry about that finding and I don’t need to defend it anyway.
How frequent is police brutality? I’d say that depends on what you count as frequent. 228 black people were shot to death by police in 2018, while around 6.5 million of them had any contact with police at all. Under the (incorrect) assumption that each of them had just one contact, a black person’s odds of getting shot by police each year are around 0.0035%. For comparison, in 2023 an American’s odds of dying from a physical accident were about 0.0665%, 19 times as large. A black man’s odds of dying from police violence are about 1 in 1,000 over his lifetime. The lifetime odds of a violent incident of any kind are surely much higher.
Maybe not all of this evidence is good. But it seems doubtful that all of these are false positives, and it’s especially doubtful that every one of the many surveys checking whether minorities report being discriminated against is wrong because they’re all delusional or something. One funny result you can find is that most people in almost every racial group will tell you their group is being discriminated against while the rest are usually more skeptical:
But this might be explained by the fact that every racial group other than white people is more likely to affiliate with the Democratic Party. As for whether people report discrimination against them, personally, 75% of black people report having experienced discrimination or unfair treatment for their race, with most saying “from time to time”, 42% of women report having faced discrimination on the job, and while trans people are harder to survey, one in four transgender adults report having been physically attacked because of their gender identity. “All of these people are just making it up because of Woke” is much more of a conspiracy theory than “They’re telling the truth”. And even if just a tenth of the supposed discrimination occurring were real, that probably would still provide enough evidence to clear the very low bar of “prejudice is common.”
But, aha, you might say—didn’t Huemer say unjust prejudice? Maybe prejudice is common, but unjust prejudice is not.
Let me start by saying that I think the correct take here is very uncommon and practically everyone is wrong. You usually get “Discrimination is common but it’s actually fine because merit matters! It might be offensive, but it’s true!” or “Discrimination is common and bad because group differences are fake!” Both of these takes suck. The first one sucks because it’s callous and the second one sucks because it denies reality. Discrimination is common, and group differences are real. But if you aren’t a heartless and rotten person, you should be willing to sacrifice at least a little bit (in terms of economic efficiency, safety, and other good things) to reduce discrimination.
Fairness is a good most people care about. There are some efficiency gains from racial discrimination, since you can at times infer productivity from race using statistics. (Just to give you an example, here’s a paper literally titled “Racial/Ethnic Differences in Non-work at Work” that finds what the title says.) But most people would probably be willing to sacrifice a small percentage of the country’s productivity to make sure this happens less frequently. Fairness is a public good—you can’t exclude people from its benefits and it’s non-rivalrous—so the government has a natural place in protecting people from discrimination. If you think we should more explicitly measure whether this is something people care about, don’t worry, we already do that by having elections. You know, those elections where saying “black people deserve their inferior position” is (rightly) poisonous. (Why do you think Republicans always run on “merit matters” instead of talking about how they think white people are the ubermenschen?)
I don’t expect every bit of evidence I’ve provided to be final or without contention. But I do expect that anyone who’s done a comprehensive review of this area will find at least some ways in which prejudice is still here.
Is this one of, if not the, most important problems in the world?
Eh, probably not. Professor Brian Caplan of George Mason University talks a lot about trillion dollar ideas, and insofar as their not being implemented is a problem, they easily outweigh the problems associated with discrimination. Worldwide open borders could nearly double living standards around the globe.
If you want to show prejudice is one of the most important problems in the world, you should show anti-immigration sentiment is driven by racism, which is not as easy as it looks. One study using over 18,000 interviews in eleven countries found that people didn’t seem to oppose someone immigrating to a country more frequently when their race was different, though they did tend to oppose Muslim immigration.
To make quicker work of this topic, let me speak very briefly about the “woke” views I don’t agree with or don’t think are an actual part of wokeism.
“Biology plays essentially no role in explaining group differences in behavior, psychology, or cognition, particularly for the groups referred to in point (1).” If you want one really clear example, reproductive behavior is one: men are much more likely to engage in short-term mating behavior across the globe because they don’t get pregnant, so it’s not as costly. I would’ve used the fact that men commit most homicides everywhere on Earth, but there are apparently people who contest whether this is biological or not, and I want an easy win.
“Group differences in social outcomes (crime rates, socioeconomic status, drug use, educational attainment, etc.) are mainly or entirely due to the prejudice mentioned in (1).” Sorry, but I’m woker than you can possibly imagine, and I don’t believe this. Neither does Professor Orisanmi Burton, who taught the section of Race and Racism I was in at the most liberal university in the US, American University. Real fans of Woke believe that these group differences are driven by institutions, not prejudice. Ori, as he prefers to be called, would often complain about people who think that everything would get better if people simply stopped being racist. So I consider this idea that group differences in social outcomes are driven by prejudice too un-woke to be argued against. (Huemer does mention that this is another common woke view later in the essay.)
Everyone should announce their pronouns prominently. This is definitely associated with wokeism, but it seems to be relatively infrequent. Obama and Biden don’t have their pronouns in their Twitter/X biographies, while Harris does. Ori doesn’t. Even the King of Woke, Ibram X. Kendi, does not have his pronouns in his Instagram biography. The total frequency among all accounts in the US appears to be about 5%. As an “active” belief about what people should do, this doesn’t seem to really exist. The social pressure just isn’t there.
“Cancel culture: Because of this, offensive social or political views should be silenced, and the people with such views should be harmed in their personal lives, e.g., by losing their jobs.” This is equivalent to fining someone thousands of dollars for being an asshole, so I don’t think it’s right. If I suggested implementing a law that does that, even some of the most woke among us would call me crazy.
Are trans women literally women, just as much as cis women?
I’m going to preface this next part by saying two things. First, 99% of people involved with talking about this question annoy me. It’s as if people are addicted to talking past each other and getting angry. Second, if you are incapable of watching for signals to detach yourself from the argument and think rationally, you will likely read what I’m about to say and get mad for no reason.
Trans women who have penises are, IN A SENSE, biologically male. Yes, trans women experience biological changes when they transition and even have some differences in biology before transitioning (for an obvious example, the brain is a part of your biology!) But if you take cells from a random trans woman and look inside, voila, you’ll find XY chromosomes the vast majority of the time. If your idea of “biologically male” is defined such that this makes you a biological male, obviously this is true. Even people who believe trans women are women will, if you force them to stop and think, eventually admit that IN A SENSE trans women are biological males.
So many people involved with these conversations are convinced that deep in their hearts, their opponents really agree with the definition they’re using, so they just have to yell “You’ll NEVER be a woman” and eventually they’ll fold. Alternatively, you can yammer about how trans women are literally biological women on some weird technicality no layman would agree to.
There is one thing and one thing only that people are really arguing about: should we treat trans women like women in contexts we care about, or should we not? The most common form of treatment is the pronouns used to refer to a trans woman. On one hand, I can completely understand where people are coming from when they refuse to do this: when I believe deep down inside that something isn’t true, it’s really, really hard for me to pretend I believe it when I don’t. If you pointed me to a very overweight woman and said “She’s so beautiful, isn’t she?” and really meant it, I would (1) freeze up and stammer because I love and care about people and I don’t want to be mean and (2) ultimately refuse to agree except without appending a dozen provisos. If all you can see is a man when you see a trans woman, and you always use “he” rather than “she”, I pretty much get why.
On the other hand, I think you’re being whiny and silly, because I don’t think my own behavior is correct! The right thing to do is to stop being such an autist and go along with social desirability bias because it allows society to function. You should expect people to get mad when you fail to say the polite things you think are false, just as you should expect not to get the job when you truthfully answer “I don’t have that qualification” instead of finding a way to be a weasel and twist the truth. If you can lie for yourself, you can lie for others.
There are other controversial questions like whether trans women should get to use the women’s restroom, and I could spend time on those. But I’m going to stop here and rate this woke belief as mostly true. Regardless of whether you believe trans women are women or if you believe they’re mentally ill men, the socially useful thing to do in 99% of cases is to treat trans women like women. The only reasonable points of controversy are the edge cases like bathrooms. If you believe trans women are women, like me, wonderful. If you instead think trans women are kinda crazy, remember that usually the right thing to do with your schizophrenic friend is to entertain their harmless delusions.
I admit that it’s not so easy to say this is “mostly true” when the point I’m making is that the argument is about the definition. But again, the argument is about the definition because at its core we’re asking how we should treat trans women. That the right way to treat them is by respecting their gender identity is obvious, because misgendering them causes much greater harm than whatever you get out of saying The Truth. Nobody ever cried because people forced them to submit to social desirability bias.
Is it important to be wary of microaggressions?
Huemer gave these as examples:
[…] asking people with an accent where they are from, or claiming that you don’t see race.
I think he’s mischaracterizing microaggressions. If you take the Wokipedia page as any indication:
Alien in own land: When people assume people of color are foreigners.
E.g.: “So where are you really from?” or “Why don’t you have an accent?”
[…]
Refusal to acknowledge intra-ethnic differences: When a speaker ignores intra-ethnic differences and assumes a broad homogeneity over multiple ethnic groups.
E.g.: Descriptions such as “all Asian-Americans look alike”, or assumptions that all members of an ethnic minority speak the same language or have the same cultural values.
These are much worse than the examples Huemer gave, and it should be obvious that there are better ways to treat people. Don’t want your speech to be restricted? You can say the exact same things without being rude at all: “I don’t mean to assume anything, but were you born here or somewhere else?” and “I know they don’t literally all look the same, but I really do have a hard time telling Asian-Americans apart.” I also recall a case described at my university where a teacher was talking about undocumented immigrants and decided to stare directly at the one Hispanic girl in the class. Just don’t do that!
All of these things are obviously bad. You shouldn’t hang yourself from a cross over them and submit to public humiliation, but your mental space isn’t so scarce and valuable that being wary of microaggressions would be a tall order. If it is, you have a skill issue or a bad moral compass.
Should everyone get DEI training?
There are about 683,280 hours in 80 years of life, which is about how long the typical person lives. We are willing to give up tons of these just to watch TV, yell at each other, and masturbate. So should everyone get DEI training? Absolutely.
If schools and employers each mandated one singular hour of listening to someone talk about the importance of being anti-racist, the effect would surely be positive, even if it’s difficult to measure and observe. These sessions function to raise awareness of social problems people might otherwise be ignorant of. Infinite DEI training would be an annoying blight on mankind, but that’s not what we’re talking about doing.
Allow me to provide you an example of where DEI training might have been useful. My mother was once on a work trip involving some white guys and a black woman. The white guys attempted to schedule a meeting (or something like that; the details are fuzzy to me) and all decided on “Let’s meet up at 7:30 AM in this cafe!”
The trouble here is that a black woman’s hair is not a simple thing to deal with. Men meet their social expectations for work by putting on a suit, and women usually only have to do the same, plus makeup. But unless you want black women showing up to work looking like a mess, they need time in the morning to get ready. It was difficult for this particular black woman to speak up and explain that such an early meeting time would be a huge pain.
I don’t believe DEI training necessarily solves these scheduling difficulties, but it has the potential to eliminate certain social frictions like this one and make life easier for minorities. The cost of DEI training is so low that the only real question is “Do we waste company money on paying $1,000 for an expert to come speak about racism?” when the better thing to do is use common sense and pull a slideshow from the internet.
If that’s not enough for you, consider using these DEI training sessions as an opportunity to encourage people to be conscious of microaggressions and how minorities might feel excluded. If you hate the idea of using the term “microaggressions” because it feels too capital-W Woke, simply tell others not to be a dick in subtly racist ways, and provide examples. Companies do these things because they want to enhance productivity through greater cohesion among workers, and those gains are passed to workers in the form of higher wages. Submit to the will of your DEI capitalist overlords if you want a raise.
Businesses and other organizations might decide against doing DEI training sessions, perhaps because company time really is that valuable. I have a hard time imagining a hospital deciding its doctors need to listen to a presentation on being antiracist when they’re already working 80-hour weeks. But “everyone should get DEI training” is not the same as “we should mandate DEI training for everyone” in the same way that “everyone should get chemotherapy if they needed it” is not the same thing as “we should have Medicare for All”. DEI is the goal because respect and brotherhood are awesome, even if we might fail to meet it.
Is it harmful to express offensive views? Is that comparable to violence?
I have important news to share: you do not decide what is and is not offensive and what is and is not harmful. That’s not an abstract truth about the world floating around to be discovered. Other people decide what’s offensive to them, and if you keep saying things they really, really don’t like, they’re going to get really, really angry with you and try to punish you.
I don’t mean to argue that it’s totally fine to protest and block visits to a college campus because you find the speaker’s views to be harmful. Whether a harm is great enough to justify such a move is a separate question where the answer is much harder to find. But “Are offensive views harmful?” is a trivial question: people say those views are harmful to them, so they are.
The comparison to violence is much more iffy. We have to mess with the typical person’s definition of violence a bit to make it fit—most people would probably consider harm to the mind to be something distinct from violence. If you saw a scene in a movie where a father yelled at his wife and children and called them slurs, you’d say he seemed like a violent person, not that he had committed an act of violence. Still, the general sentiment expressed by the full statement is obviously correct—should we not believe black people or gay people or other minorities when they say it hurts when people talk about how they’re dumber or disease-ridden?
What about the equality thesis? Reverse bigotry?
Huemer poses “the Equality Thesis” as the core of wokeism.
I talked with anti-woke philosopher Nathan Cofnas about this. He proposed that the core of wokism [sic] is “the Equality Thesis”, which holds something like: all interesting social, cognitive, psychological, and behavioral differences between groups (I assume we mean here races, sexes, and a few other kinds of groups that social scientists study, not “groups” like “smart people” or “professors”) are due to environment, not biology.
This is a much stronger claim to make. I’m going to cheat a little and pivot to an easier claim to defend, and to do that I’ll tell you a bit about myself, one of many American wokesters.
When I was younger, I was very amenable to the Equality Thesis because it seemed to be necessary to satisfy a certain moral intuition I had: much of what people experience is not deserved, and happens because of their circumstances. Racism and sexism are two such circumstances. You might lose out because people just hate black people, or because they think you can’t be smart since you’re a woman. If I wanted to defend this idea, it would be nice if race and sex didn’t have a direct, causal influence on measures of competence, since that would mean discrimination is unjust and irrational.
I no longer think the Equality Thesis is necessary. We can throw it out. Racism and sexism seem much more environmental than one’s biology, but race and sex are just as much circumstances as the way you’re treated for them. Maybe race and sex do have a direct impact on your competence, and certainly if you’re a woman in a field requiring physical strength, that’s the case. But this is something we should all consider to be bad, regardless. We should feel an obligation towards these people, just as we expect them to feel obligated toward us when we’re unjustly harmed.1
The true core of wokeism is just this guy:
If you sense that justice must be even-handed and shouldn’t show favoritism based on arbitrary features, like other woke people do, you’ll probably believe that the veil of ignorance provides a good starting point for justice. Behind the veil, you don’t know who you’ll be born to, what race you’ll be, or whether you’ll wake up one day and realize you have a very strong preference for being a woman. You can’t decide “When I’m playing Uno, I’ll get fewer cards at the start, and I won’t be obligated to take even a single card from another player.” You would instead know that you might be black, and you might be one of the unlucky black people to get sickle cell disease. Eliminating these differences through social obligations would often be prudent, especially if the social benefits exceed the costs.2
Once other wokesters realize the Equality Thesis is unnecessary, I believe they’ll default to something like what I’m describing here, which is the belief the Equality Thesis itself springs from. People like me are motivated to defend the Equality Thesis by our sense that it’s needed to get people to care about each other. But even without it, the right thing to do is to obligate the typical American to pay $20-$40 a year for PEPFAR to save millions of lives in Africa. That is the core of wokeism, and that’s obviously correct.
Huemer also characterizes wokeism as being bigoted in reverse, blaming white people for the problems of black people and other minorities. Here’s how he defends this characterization:
Affirmative action is absolutely a form of reverse discrimination, but I want to focus on the preceding paragraphs.
Huemer seems to be implying that white people aren’t to blame for the problems suffered by black people as a group, which is absolutely preposterous. There are black people alive today who experienced segregation first hand, and it wasn’t other black people who made those laws, though certainly there might have been some willing co-conspirators. We’ve already seen that prejudice is still common among white people today, even if not all of them. And yes, not all of the problems of black people are caused by white people, but certainly many of them are.
Now, in addition to considering Huemer’s antisemitism analogy, suppose that somebody claims most of the childhood measles cases in the United States are caused by parents who don’t vaccinate their kids. They wouldn’t be committing some grave evil by admitting a prejudice against a group, in fact, they would be saying something obviously correct and socially useful to point out. It might be a little insensitive if you say it in front of a parent whose child caught measles, especially if that parent did vaccinate their kid. But that probably won’t happen. Here we can see that if a belief about a group is true, you can express it without saying something morally wrong.
If the things antisemites believed about Jewish people were literally true, antisemitism would be correct. Some of these beliefs are so deranged that, if they were true, of course antisemitism would be correct. Who wouldn’t be an antisemite if every Jewish person alive today secretly had claws, a beak, and wings, was part of a secret society that controls global affairs, and a religious organization that killed Jesus? The problem with antisemitism isn’t just that it’s mean; the problem is that it’s insane and made up. The idea that white people instituted slavery, Jim Crow laws, and that even some white people alive today opposed the end of segregation in 1964, is just true.3 You can certainly say these things in a way that might sound mean, but I don’t think we should judge wokeism by its rudest defenders.
Most woke ideas are correct
Maybe I haven’t been as persuasive as I could be. But take a look at this concentrated expression of correct woke ideas I’ve composed, and ask yourself how much you disagree:“Most people in America belonging to groups commonly thought to receive discrimination do, indeed, receive discrimination, at least sometimes. That discrimination is based on judgments made about them based on their group membership, not direct experience with that individual, and that’s wrong. Given the number of people potentially harmed, this is a very important problem. We should confront these problems by having people spend a little bit of time at work in DEI training, learning, for example, about how they might unintentionally harm a coworker they care about with a racist statement, and about how misgendering someone can cause them great pain.”
At the very least, I think you should consider this a highly plausible paragraph.
I can’t find the article now, but I had read another author describing wokeism in a way that was much less favorable and, I think, more accurate to what makes it unique. As an example of a woke belief they named “deference to minorities”, which is essentially this guy:
One of American University’s AU Experience courses featured this belief as a kind of social expectation they initially seemed to be imposing on us. They weren’t. But this can also be treated separately as a kind of ad hominem epistemic standard for which statements about social justice issues are true. If you aren’t the one facing discrimination, this standard says, you can’t really understand it. This is a much harder belief to defend, and one I’m hiding my viscerally ugly reaction toward. It seems downright evil to me but I don’t want to talk about it that way. I think Huemer could have afforded to cast wokeism in a more negative light by including beliefs like this one, rather than providing a list of ideas that are mostly correct. But he did, so for now, wokeism is obviously correct about most things.
https://jackonomics.substack.com/p/wokeism-is-obviously-correct-about (Archive)
this is the best example he could come up with?
