Equalitarianism & Its Consequences
by Bo Winegard, Aporia:
The fundamental error of wokeism: the belief that all demographic groups have roughly equal socially valued traits and, therefore, that all outcome disparities are caused by cultural forces…
In the past five years, an ideology often called wokeism has spread rapidly, from college campuses to corporate bureaucracies to the editorial pages of elite newspapers. Because wokeism does not have an official text or sanctioned dogmas, its precise doctrines are indefinite. Some have argued that this creedal indeterminacy demonstrates that wokeism is an invention of its enemies, an absurd caricature, an ideological effigy created to be torched. But the essence of wokeism is clear enough.
It presents a Manichean vision of the world in which racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, and motley other bigots persecute and oppress minorities while protecting their own place at the top of a hierarchy of privilege, creating vast disparities in income, incarceration, police shootings, and other victimizations. This ugly reality of injustice and exploitation is concealed like a corpse beneath a blanket of exalted rhetoric about freedom, meritocracy, and color blindness. Thus, the morally enlightened person must resist the beguiling distortions and hypocrisies of liberalism while striving to dismantle the oppressive status quo they disguise.
Some contend that this apocalyptic ideology has proliferated because of the decline of religious belief, the mind filling its spiritual void with the quixotic quest for racial and sexual equality. This is a plausible conjecture, one which merits serious scholarship. But in this essay, I am interested in the underlying premises of wokeism, not in the causes of its swift spread through our institutions. Primarily, I am interested in the fundamental error of wokeism, an error more often assumed than articulated, namely, the belief that all demographic groups (e.g., races, sexes, religious groups) have roughly equal socially valued traits and, therefore, that all outcome disparities are caused by cultural forces, perhaps especially by discrimination.
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