The Problem With Wokeness Is That It Helped Elites and Did Nothing for the Poor

Wokeness wasn't just a political problem for Democrats. It also was an abject failure on its own terms.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

In June of 2020, Amazon.com posted a Black Lives Matter across the homepage of its massive commercial website. It was hardly the only company doing so — everyone from Amazon to Nintendo took to their public relations channels to remind us that Black Lives Matter.

Founder Jeff Bezos was so proud of the company’s stance that when an irate customer objected to the firm taking a political stance on the issue, he posted the email on Instagram for everyone to read. He also posted his response, which decried the “disproportionate risk that Black people face in our law enforcement and justice system.” He informed the customer, named Marcy, that he wanted her to know that he supported “this movement that we see happening all around us, and my stance won’t change.”

It was a remarkable act from one of the world’s richest men. I can’t recall another instance of a billionaire posting a rando’s email to him to publicly shame them while expounding on his own virtues.

But Bezos, who has always been a savvy operator, understood something about the summer of 2020. It was the apex of what we now refer to as wokeness — this constellation of culturally progressive ideas that proclaimed that all of society is conspiring against minorities and that we have to be willing to curb normal standards of liberalism to positively discriminate towards certain oppressed groups in order to correct these injustices.

While all that sounds perfectly rational on paper, in practice it ended up largely being a disaster for the very people it was intended to help.

Universities that dropped testing requirements actually ended up hurting the underprivileged. Massive de-policing after 2020 led to skyrocketing murders of young black men as crime went undeterred. Maoist self-criticism and witch hunts in progressive-leaning organizations — from newspapers to nonprofits to universities — did nothing to harm the right but crippled many left-wing organizations when the country needed them most. A comedian-turned-U.S. Senator who helped pass a law to empower sexual assault victims was railroaded out of office for mildly inappropriate behavior he could have easily just apologized for.

And where were we left after the decade of wokeness that seized the country from 2014 through 2024? Donald Trump is once again in office. His administration has banned virtually all refugees from America except for white South Africans who benefitted from Apartheid. We have maybe the most racist government since Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson’s administrations. A decade’s worth of fiery protests and progressive McCarthyism resulted in nothing more than empowering some of the worst elements of the far-right.

So it should be no surprise that Bezos, the supposedly proud antiracist, showed up at Trump’s inauguration, swinging a million dollars around to fund the event. There is really no contradiction between Bezos embracing wokeness at the height of progressive America’s cultural revolution in 2020 and then embracing Trump and purging the Washington Post of anyone who opposes America’s stunning levels of economic inequality.

That’s because wokeness never challenged America’s elites. It wasn’t co-opted by Amazon and Bezos, it never challenged them in any meaningful way in the first place.

Photo by Christian Lue on Unsplash

A few years before America’s woke era kicked off with the protests in Ferguson, Missouri, I was covering protests at Occupy Wall Street. I had never seen anything like it in my life. Americans from all walks of life were coming together to say that Wall Street had too much power and that prosperity is out of reach of too many people.

At the Occupy encampment in Washington, D.C., I even found a protest sign that had been made based on an article hat I myself had written:

A much younger me.

But Occupy soon descended into the privilege call outs and sectarian tendencies that came to dominate the progressive left over the next decade. If you were white, you needed to cede ground to someone who was black. If you were gay, you should really get your own space to speak rather than being drowned out by someone who is straight. And don’t get me started on all the white men who supported Bernie Sanders. The nerve!

Increasingly, the progressive space in America turned into a carbon copy of the Lebanese political system; no longer were we the 99 percent. We were different shades and colors who can never overlap. How can you possibly say that a white working class person has the same interests as a black working class person. Has the former ever been called the N-word? As Bezos told us in the post written above, his white son doesn’t have to worry about being choked by a police officer (that’s not entirely true, but maybe the fact that Bezos is a billionaire is more important than the fact that he’s white?).

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells us that woke 1.0 was crazy — riffing off a New York City councilman who said the same — she’s not wrong. But it was more than a temporary delirium that gripped America’s progressive class. It was an exercise in self-destruction that did nothing to threaten the power of America’s elites while doing everything to put its poor and underprivileged even more at risk.