That Vivek Chibber “end of wokeness” podcast that was the subject of justified derision last month begins with the NYU sociologist making a snide quip about how “the dark night of fascism has not yet descended,” which has not aged well.
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Neither has Chibber’s critique of “wokeness,” though, which is profoundly unserious, adopting right wing talking points wholesale with no serious analysis of his object of critique. One of the definitions Chibber uses to define Wokeness as a distinct form of what he calls identity politics
is that it is “an ideology, a kind of an intolerance, that identity politics could have had but need not have had. Wokeness is associated with this idea that if you disagree with us, you're not just wrong, but you're evil.” As if the association of one’s opponents with evil was not a defining
element of the US religious Right for the last five decades. He then says that wokeness is characterized by an “illiberal ethos …where we don't just disagree with you, we don't just think you're wrong, but if we think you're wrong, we're going to get rid of you. We're going to take away your job.”
“We're going,” he continues, “to silence you. We're going to force you into some kind of indoctrination routines. So, it's a kind of hyperactive, hypervigilant social justice ethos with a very powerful authoritarian strand.” Perhaps you are wondering what sort of evidence Chibber has for this?
Tellingly, he offers as evidence the protests at Yale against Erika Christakis’s email excusing students wearing racist Halloween costumes on campus, a phenomenon that is both extremely long in the tooth (10 years ago!) and illustrative of Chibber’s racial politics - he sees the Christakises as
Wronged figures, besieged by the woke mob. Notably, he invents several details of the story, suggesting that Christakis was responding to a furor over a Pocohontas costume and not to an email sent by Yale’s Intercultural Affairs Committee asking students to not wear ethnically/racially appropriative
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