Woke has revived 19th-century racial thinking

There once was a time when it was fashionable in intellectual circles, and mandatory in the humanities, to speak of race as a ‘social construct’. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, we were told that the Victorians were misguided in dividing humanity into spurious racial categories, groupings that merely reflected a racist and colonial outlook. Acolytes of postmodernism blamed modernity itself, with its eagerness to rationalise and classify all things into categories, regardless of the categories’ philosophical or empirical legitimacy.

Fast forward 30 years and the progressive consensus has reverted entirely to the status quo ante. We are now exhorted to think of racial categories as essential and concrete entities. Once again, the colour of your skin is deemed to determine your character and moral worth.

This reversal has been most evident in the growing tendency to capitalise ‘Black’. This mere orthographic tic is telling, in that it compels us to think of black people as a monolithic whole, or quasi-national category. And now, a leading academic publishing house in the UK is mandating that ‘Black’ should be adopted as standard in its publications.

According to the Telegraph, Edinburgh University Press, as part of its new guide on ‘inclusive’ language, has started instructing its authors to capitalise ‘Black’ because it refers to ‘a distinct cultural group and a shared sense of identity and community’. Rules for referring to ‘Black’ people are repeated several times in the guide, which emphasises the need to ‘acknowledge’ the existence of a black cultural grouping. At the same time, the guide maintains, the same should not apply when referring to white people. Authors have been instructed thus: ‘Please do not capitalise “white” due to associated political connotations.’

This double standard is of course wholly consistent with identitarian thinking. Wokery has always conceived of black people as one rigid, fossilised aggregate. Black people, it argues, are inextricably linked by the common experience of oppression, and consequently bestowed with collective victimhood. On the other hand, anything pertaining to ‘white’ is unworthy of such an endowment. ‘Whiteness’, in the woke mind and lexicon, is less a determiner of identity, and more a mark of original sin. In either case, skin pigmentation is now assumed to define who you are.

How did we reach this state of affairs? How have the politics of race gone so spectacularly backwards that we have arrived at a position that would be understood by the most unhinged racists of the 19th century?

It’s partly to do with the politics of grievance and victimhood, on which the whole edifice of woke was erected back in the 1990s. Yet even back then, there was an undercurrent of liberation and experimentation that pervaded the humanities. This spirit was epitomised by black feminist author Gloria Jean Watkins, aka bell hooks, whose insistence on not capitalising her nom de plume was a deliberate statement. It was intended to convey the idea that names or identities should never define us, and that what we did with our lives was more important than who we merely happened to be.

The quest for liberation was soon eclipsed by a desire to have one’s victimhood recognised. The narrative of suffering and exploitation became all-encompassing. A historical morality tale of good vs evil developed, based on race. Politics as a whole also became a story of oppressor vs oppressed, leaving little room for nuance.

This reductive way of thinking has become so entrenched that we forgot the obvious, everyday truth that people can’t always be classified neatly as ‘black’ and ‘white’. Race really is on a spectrum, evidenced in the offspring of mixed-race couples. It goes without saying, too, that the all-encompassing term ‘Black’ is a categorical nonsense when considering that a working-class, Afro-Caribbean black woman from south London and a male belonging to the wealthy, elite class in Nigeria have little in common except their skin colour.

As Tomiwa Owolade argued in his 2023 book, This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter, the fundamental problem with woke when it comes to race is the belief that the experience of black people worldwide can be subsumed under this behemothic category of ‘Black’. Wokery, as conceived and developed in America, makes little sense when transplanted into British society, with its vastly different experience of racial politics.

But woke has never been a sensitive or cerebral movement, being more an example of social contagion. It was from the outset an ideology, and ideologies only grow more ossified with time. This explains our giant leap backwards when it comes to race. The gradual shift from ‘black’ at the end of the last century, often in those doubting inverted commas, to ‘Black’ today signifies a shift from the open liberal thinking of yesterday to a creed that cleaves to crude simplicities. Alas, once more, the news from Edinburgh University Press suggests that woke is far from over.