A movement with safety, dignity and equality at its heart may now be blamed for the rightwing backlash. But within it were principles worth carrying forwards
Every once in a while, the discourse gods send a tablet down to the people, announcing that a previous era is dead and a new age is upon us. Recently, it was the “vibe shift” – a post-pandemic change in culture that encompassed everything from fashion to politics. The vibe shift consolidated with Donald Trump’s second election, a harbinger of the end of fragility and of movements for racial and gender equality – a rejection of the long 2010s with their hashtags and pink pussy hats and women’s marches and protests. The vibe shift has recently been followed by a calling of time on what has come to be known as “Woke 1.0” – a term that represents what is now seen as a culture of hysterical overreach triggered by the momentary breakthrough of movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. “Woke 1 was crazy,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez this month, quoting a New York City councilman. And there we have it, time to walk back some things said and done in the giddy heat of those moments. It was crazy!
This rush to the future away from what some perceive to be an embarrassing past groups together various disparate phenomena. But I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Woke 1.0 (or “peak wokeness” – I wish the gods would use less trivialising ways to refer to roiling social tides, but there we are) was about politics and culture and also about the behaviours and trends it triggered. It was about concrete problems: policing of minority communities, the right of women not to be sexually harassed or violated, the systemic racism and sexism that damaged both. And it was about reforming the cultural structures that created and perpetuated those systems; asking university curricula to expand and diversify intellectual sources, recognising the long shadow of glorified imperial histories, and updating institutions – from the media to the academy – in order to enfranchise change. None of this is “crazy”.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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