The Beginnings of Wokeness
About a month before the release of his new book, The Origins of Woke, Richard Hanania’s secret past as a hard-right, pseudonymous writer for overtly racist publications was exposed by the Huffington Post. Hanania copped to it right away and condemned his former views, commenting on why he abandoned them. But it would seem the damage was done. It was obviously a targeted attempt to torpedo his book, and the story couldn’t be more perfectly suited in the age of cancel culture to sink a project criticizing over-zealous civil rights law. Moreover, Hanania’s “very online” persona has him regularly trampling over the decent lines of civil conversation, so some may not be so willing to give the book the benefit of the doubt.
In such situations, it is difficult to separate the person (past and present) from the arguments—and the principle underlying cancel culture is that you shouldn’t even try. So it is at least somewhat surprising that Hanania hasn’t entirely been shut down. Could it be a sign that the impulse to cancel is losing some of its appeal, and that we can judge ideas and arguments on their own merits? Even if they come from a shrill provocateur?
Let’s hope so, because The Origins of Woke is essential reading for anyone interested in diagnosing the contemporary left. Unlike most other popular works on the “woke” phenomenon (and perhaps in contrast to Hanania’s online discourse), it offers at least as much light as heat. Many “solutions” on offer from anti-woke crusaders amount to little more than playing the same old partisan game—just harder. But Hanania’s diagnosis points to targeted reforms that may, in the longer term, change the background conditions of that partisan contest that effectively keep the thumb on woke’s side of the scale.
The crux of Hanania’s explanation is that what we refer to as “woke” is neither a spontaneous cultural phenomenon, nor a cultural revolution planned out by activists, nor a matter of class dynamics a-la neo-Burnhamite “managerial class” explanations. Rather, it is the cultural outgrowth of a legal apparatus created mostly by bureaucrats and courts in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
The most important elements of this legal structure were built up in response to vagueness in the text of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbade “discrimination” on the basis of certain characteristics, but was not specific about what exactly discrimination was or how the rule was to be monitored and enforced. To answer these questions, procedures and measures were developed that (mostly inadvertently) required government agencies, employers, universities, and government contractors to be obsessive about various identity characteristics.
The most well-known such policy is affirmative action, which requires an ill-defined set of practices and preferences meant to encourage the hiring (or, in education, admission) of non-whites, but which must coexist with the official legal requirement that one not hire on the basis of race. Perhaps more important than affirmative action, however, is the “disparate impact” standard that has been used to determine when discrimination is taking place. By this standard, any policy (including facially neutral, job-focused hiring criteria) that results in a disparity between different groups of protected classes can potentially be cited as evidence of discrimination. The problem is that just about everything has some sort of “disparate impact,” leaving bureaucrats and courts the flexibility to decide when a certain case is problematic, and leaving employers largely in the dark about the actual legal status of their actions.
A third legal concept worth mentioning is the notion of a “hostile work environment” that allows employers to be held legally responsible for the actions of employees, without ever precisely defining what constitutes such liability. In order to protect themselves, institutions are incentivized to broadly signal their own virtue by instituting a set of “best practices” and workplace trainings (“See—this is a welcoming environment!”), while also enforcing rigid employee conduct and speech rules that forbid anything that could possibly offend anyone. Sound familiar?
This legal order, Hanania emphasizes, is often contradictory and retains a high degree of vagueness, which keeps those subject to it unsure of their position and always a heartbeat away from an investigation or lawsuit. On several occasions, Hanania notes that a direct racial quota system would be less intrusive and impinge less on the freedom of employers, employees, and students. Under such a system, an employer could simply meet the requisite percentage, and then continue to run his business as usual. But in order to avoid the quota approach, the current system requires that he rethink just about every aspect of the business in terms of race, gender, and other identity questions.
Hanania’s interpretation offers something much more concrete and plausible than the captivating narratives that seem to dominate online right-wing discourse: that they hate you, and they have conquered America.
Hanania argues, on the contrary, that no one planned out and executed woke. Many of the institutions he speaks of were the product of compromise or even just plain accident, and rarely were they the hoped-for ideal of activists or critical theorists. The theorists and activists are there, of course, churning out their quasi-Marxist explanations for the world in terms of oppression and marginalization. But they are not directing affairs. Rather, they tend to be as reactive and opportunistic as everyone else—adjusting to meet the demand created by an incentive structure that (mostly unintentionally) gave them a purpose.
The concept of “diversity” is one prime example. The idea has been at the center of left-leaning social ideas for years and has come almost to encapsulate the entire “woke” agenda. Yet, as Hanania notes, almost nobody talked about “diversity” at all until the Supreme Court stumbled backwards into a “diversity” justification for affirmative action in University of California v. Bakke. Only one justice endorsed the idea (others rejecting racial preferences altogether or else justifying them in the name of rectifying historical injustices), but because Lewis Powell was the swing justice, his opinion holding that a diverse student body was the only valid justification for racial preferences (a position rejected by the extreme left), “diversity” has been the name of the game ever since. The “D” in the great “DEI” triumvirate is little more than a “post-hoc justification for a political compromise.”
And there are many other examples to be found—including the way our current racial classifications were formed, and almost all of the expansive Title IX provisions, which have their origin in an ill-fated attempt to sink the whole Civil Rights Act by including sex as a protected category.
Hanania’s explanation could warn readers off of learning the wrong lessons from woke. If you think that a radical fringe minority somehow managed to utterly recreate America by politicizing institutions and consciously wielding coercive power in a well-orchestrated revolution, it is easy to conclude that conservatives should do the same—embrace the politicization of everything, and embrace the overgrown and coercive state in an attempt to create the America we want. But Hanania’s view would caution against that, seeing as he does that much of what we deplore are unplanned and unintended consequences of a government acting zealously with good intentions.
Hanania does not undertake much critical consideration of the Civil Rights Act itself, focusing instead on the various expansions that have come in the decades since—mostly through courts and administrative agencies. This choice is reasonable, and he certainly wants to stress that his objection is not with race-neutral treatment. But he leaves some important questions unexplored.
I would hold that there are two ways one could view the Civil Rights Act positively: One, as an unfortunately necessary exception to the general rule of associational freedom. In this view, it was the systematic exclusion of blacks from general society that necessitated a new legal recourse, though ideally, social life would be ordered according to the free choices of individuals and groups.
An alternative view, however, seems to predominate—that of the Civil Rights Act as the glorious fulfillment of our highest aspirations. Under this view, the Civil Rights Act, in mandating certain behaviors, is doing what government should always do, regardless of circumstance—requiring just and equitable social conditions and personal choices by law. In this view, even if Jim Crow had never existed, and discrimination had only ever been a “here and there” phenomenon, we still would have needed the Civil Rights Act.
Hanania touches on this distinction occasionally, clearly favoring the more limited understanding. But he doesn’t directly wrestle with the fact that he is in a distinct minority—that the law has shifted the way many people think about basic social and economic interactions, making them instinctively supportive of an endless expansion of protected classes. Or perhaps many were already inclined to think of laws like the Civil Rights Act in these terms. That might explain why so many judges and bureaucrats opted for the expansive, society-transforming interpretations of the law, rather than applying it more narrowly, and more in line with what voters thought they were getting.
Hanania also tends to suggest that the problem is almost exclusively with bureaucrats and courts. If only decisions were back in the hands of legislatures, these problems would haven’t happened. There’s definitely something to this, and legislation is always preferable to administrative diktat when it comes to transformative regulation. He may, however, be overlooking how fickle and manipulatable national opinion can be on such questions, and the extent to which the dynamics of mass democracy—partisan messaging and national coalition building—may also be playing a large role.
Finally, he does not quite explain the quasi-religious element of wokeness that has been captured by Joshua Mitchell and others. The dots, however, are there to be connected. People have long found a sort of spiritual fulfillment in modern politics—in devotion to the nation, for instance. The sort of legal structure Hanania describes—and the political rhetoric that backs it—may merely be shifting the content of that political faith.
Based on his online presence, Hanania does not strike me as a reliable source of levelheaded takes on the world around us. But Origins of Woke establishes what should be the dominant paradigm for understanding the dynamics of today’s left-wing politics, even if it does not thoroughly explore every avenue it opens up for consideration. The serious reader might even regret that Hanania opted to frame the book in terms of “woke”—which is often thought of as a specific, recent phenomenon. In tracing out its origins, Hanania has his finger on more than just the “crazies” of the last five years. As he observed, “woke” has been encoded in law long before anyone used that word. And the framework that he lays out goes a long way in explaining the broader trends of left-wing thinking and activism.
John G. Grove is the managing editor of Law & Liberty.
