Becoming Woke

Empathy has become a dirty word in discourse especially with online warriors but it seems to have its origins in the misuse and misunderstanding of another word of trigger: woke. This word is bandied around cyberspace as an insult to anyone who dare defend any group outside the white heteronormative ableist First World experience. God forbid you show the smallest amount of empathy to any otherness fearing you ignite the snarling masses who claim to have become tired of woke culture, political correctness or cancel culture. Apparently their freedom of speech is under threat when of course it’s the very opposite. Wokeness is not just awareness but a tool to understand the intersections of history, culture, identity and many other things that make our world continue to tick.

I have been woke for a very long time though only started using the term to describe myself recently. In 1992, when celebrations of the quincentenary of Columbus’ discovery threatened to become an orgy of self-congratulatory events, indigenous people organised counter-celebrations of survival from genocidal practices meted out by the new invaders. Only four years earlier had Australia subjected its citizens with a Masturbation of a Nation year long celebration of the First Fleet and what they and the descendants achieved. Other than a few tokenistic gestures, the First People were ignored as the Australian people unknowingly contributed to whitewashing of history. I suspect more knew what was happening than let on.

I took up a history subject called Representations of Race at university with its unambiguous title explaining how the Eurocentric- a word I am sure I used dozens of times that year- view of the invaded lands dictated the ways we were taught and how we studied and researched all cultural history. This bias was intrinsically racist and proved problematic for the scholars of the late twentieth century in it atmosphere of post-colonialism. At its most basic definition, Representation of Race shone a very bright light on this racism making us whiteys quite uncomfortable. And it should.

But my journey to wokeness did not end there. The following academic year I studied a subject in the politics department called Politics of Sexual Reform Movements, really just a slightly cryptic substitute for Gay and Lesbian Politics. It was taught by Dr Sheila Jeffreys, a lesbian feminist who covered the rise of sexology, the underground cultures of alternative sexualities in the first half of the last century and the politicisation of these alternate sexualities in the second half. This was a road map for my radicalisation as a Queer man coinciding with that year, 1993, being declared the Year of the Lesbian. As far as I am aware this was one of the first Queer subjects taught at a university. Back then we called this political consciousness raising, a term I believe having its origins in the Women’s Liberation movement some 20 years before.

At the same time, I was enrolled in another subject called Women as Readers and Writers, obviously devoted to feminist literature with an emphasis on Jeanette Winterson who was very much the fashionable writer of the time (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry). I was the only male in this class; I tended to be the only male in many groups past and future- I guess it shows how much I found myself on the periphery of masculinity.

Some may call my arrival to wokeness as a radicalisation at the hands of those disruptive leftist professors. Recently, I was accused on social media of being brainwashed by my university way back in the early 1990s. I quickly checked the accuser’s profile who appeared to be of an age where he would have been a mere child during those days of my radicalisation if he had been born at all. Maybe I was moulded into the politics I carry today but I am not complaining. I don’t see much difference between my politicisation to that of a malleable mind being influenced by Sky News or the Herald Sun. We take onboard a lot of baggage unknowingly. The importance of this is how we understand the origins of our belief systems, how we used this in our dealings with all people and what it reveals about our own character.

I would much rather be woke than some insufferable asshole.