This Sunday was the fifth anniversary of the death of George Floyd, a terrible event that supercharged an identity-obsessed cultural revolution that had been raging since the early 2010s. Floyd was quickly embraced as this new religion’s first martyr. Publicity for last Friday’s “Day of Remembrance” at the Minneapolis City Hall featured an image of Floyd crowned with a halo and strewn with flowers. One wonders how the mother of a small child who was held at gunpoint by Floyd in 2007, while five of his accomplices raided her home, feels about that halo.
Floyd’s criminal past does not mitigate the tragedy of his death; it is always lamentable when human life is prematurely and needlessly cut short. Yet the fact that he was so rapidly canonised tells us a great deal about the religiosity of the woke movement. A piece for The Guardian in 2020 surveyed the various depictions of Floyd by street artists, from his bewinged and behaloed image on a wall in Houston, Texas to a mural in Naples which portrayed him as weeping blood “like a saint pictured in a southern Italian church”.
Some of the viral footage from this period was even more explicitly ecclesiastical in nature. In one video, white people were seen kneeling to their black neighbours to beg forgiveness on behalf of all their race. In another, white crowds had raised their arms in supplication, repeating the chant: “I will use my voice in the most uplifting way possible and do everything in my power to educate my community.” We had already seen Greta Thunberg fulfilling a role similar to the child saints of medieval Christendom, and were later to witness the astonishing spectacle of a protestant congregation at a church in Dallas being led in a liturgical prayer before a muster of drag queens to “celebrate this divine diversity”.
All of which is to say that the rapid ascendency of woke can be partly explained as a kind of pseudo-religious hysteria. The killing of Floyd had galvanised the movement, but its decline was swift and inevitable. A poll by The Economist has found that support for woke causes began to grow in 2015, peaked in 2021, and has been steadily falling ever since. With vaguely utopian goals in mind, activists had taken a wrecking ball to society, and it is only now that the dust is settling that we find ourselves struggling with the question of how so much sound and fury could end up signifying so little.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and riots of 2020, and the subsequent mainstreaming of nebulous notions of “systemic racism”, had the unintended effect of heightening racial tensions rather than weakening them. Children in America were suddenly being taught that “all white people play a part in perpetuating systemic racism”, and parents were being encouraged to become “white traitors” and support “white abolition”. Mountebanks such as Robin DiAngelo — a supposed expert in “Whiteness Studies” — were being paid thousands of dollars by major corporations to berate their employees and instruct them to “try to be less white”. In hindsight, it is remarkable that so many were gulled into believing that any of this was progressive.
Worse still, Critical Race Theory (CRT) was being imported into the UK, in spite of the fact that its analytical framework made little sense when applied to any historical context other than the US. Protesters in London were crying “Hands up, don’t shoot” at police officers with imaginary firearms. The American School in London — the most expensive day school in the UK – organised after-school activities in which children were separated by race. Brighton Council introduced an “anti-racist schools strategy” informed by the tenets of American CRT.
Above all, the years of racial identity politics that followed Floyd’s death have served to nourish what was once a dying white identitarian movement. It should surprise precisely no one that when those in power continually insist that human beings should be perceived first and foremost through their group identity, this might provide succour to race essentialists who have always thought in such terms. The phrase “woke right” might be hotly contested, but there can be little doubt that identity-obsessed authoritarians exist across the political spectrum, and that the excesses of the woke movement have rehabilitated racialised thinking to the benefit of some very sinister groups.
“Above all, the years of racial identity politics that followed Floyd’s death have served to nourish what was once a dying white identitarian movement.”
In particular, we are seeing the rise of Right-wing conspiratorial thinking that wallows in victimhood and perceives white people to be an oppressed class. The tactics of the woke are being replicated explicitly on the Right. In the midst of the BLM protests of 2020, the Associated Press stated that its style guide would be amended so that “black” was capitalised and “white” was not, a convention that was quickly followed by other outlets. Now, the identical strategy is being embraced by figures on the Right. “Different identity groups will always strive to protect and promote their own interests,” writes Andrew Torba, CEO of Right-wing social media platform Gab. “This is common sense and White people are starting to wake up to this reality and realize that if they don’t advocate for themselves no one else will.”
Similarly, the view that Western society is unregenerable was once the cornerstone of woke thinking, but has now taken hold among what some call the “Very Online Right”. The “degeneracy” of contemporary western culture is taken by some as evidence that it might have been preferable had the allies lost the Second World War. Neo-Nazi discourse is flourishing in the online space, particularly on X, and memes that praise Hitler are becoming more frequent. Kanye West recently posted an image of Hitler along with a goat emoji (“GOAT” means “Greatest of All Time”).
This narrative has been nourished by academics on both sides of the culture war debate, “problematising” the history of the Second World War, and specifically taking aim at Winston Churchill. Many will recall the academic event at the University of Cambridge in 2021 in which a panel of Left-wing activist academics sought to frame Churchill as an irredeemable racist. One panellist, Kehinde Andrews, branded him the “perfect embodiment of white supremacy” who helmed an empire that was “far worse than the Nazis”. Over the past year, many Right-wing culture warriors have made identical or similar claims. Most notoriously, podcaster Darryl Cooper appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show to denounce Churchill as the “chief villain” of the Second World War.
That one form of authoritarian grievance-rooted identity politics might birth another, albeit from an opposing political tribe, should not have been all that tricky to anticipate. The notion of colour-blindness advocated by the likes of Martin Luther King was once widely agreed to be the ideal, meaning that identitarians from the Left and the Right found it difficult to gain traction. The culture war has destabilised this consensus. For many on both sides of the political spectrum, racial identity is now their lodestar.
As for BLM, many of its key figures failed spectacularly in their self-appointed roles as champions of their communities. Having raised approximately $90 million in the aftermath of Floyd’s death, only a third actually went to charitable bodies. By May 2023, the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation was facing bankruptcy. One of its co-founders, Patrisse Cullors, was found to have spent $3.2 million on luxury homes, although she claimed these were private funds. Its tax filing of May 2022 revealed expenditure on luxury properties to the tune of $12 million, with significant sums paid to Cullors’s relatives for security services.
Moreover, the legacy of BLM has been anything but positive for people it purported to represent. The defunding of police has meant that crime in black areas has soared, black businesses were looted and destroyed, and black victims of murder were mourned only when the perpetrators were white. As the Equiano Project — a forum for debate about race and politics — has pointed out, radical politics was prioritised over the material challenges facing black communities: “Instead of focusing on crime, education, or work, BLM UK pushed anti-capitalism and identity-based ideology.”
In short, the BLM movement has been a disaster for race relations. Quite apart from the myriad failings of the movement, the push for social justice through authoritarian means — censorship, intimidation and public shaming — was always guaranteed to generate resentment from those who would eventually learn to mimic their tactics. We may quibble with the term “woke right”, but the phenomenon it describes is becoming impossible to ignore, particularly when one considers the new emboldened form of white nationalism and pro-fascist messaging on social media. It is regrettable those who sought to redress racism in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd might have created the conditions within which it can flourish.
