The challenge of 'woke thinking'

EULOGIA MERLE

In a similar way to the MeToo movement that shook up the male hegemonic order just over two years ago, the Black Lives Matter movement has more recently shaken up the white hegemony. The story begins again in the United States, but its echoes reach the entire Western world. There is a part of society that celebrates this global awakening to ethnic or racial discrimination, one more within the range of discriminations that lead to unequal opportunities and, in this way, socioeconomic inequality. The word used by both related and detractors to define this movement is, precisely,

awake. The Oxford dictionary admitted this word among its neologisms in 2017, defining it in its second meaning as "alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice", although the term was used in this sense already in the 1940s. The look

more Recent tends to be intersectional: it understands that discrimination based on skin color, ethnic origin, social class, sex, sexuality or place of birth overlaps and reinforces each other.

For its critics, we are facing a progressive ideology that has lost its universalist essence, indulging in secondary or alien causes - first feminism and now anti-racism - that only sow discord and polarize society. Within Europe, the rejection of this new-breed progressivism is especially strong in France, where a controversy develops around what is known as Islamo-leftism, a pejorative term used by the extreme right and that has been recovered by the Government of Macron. With the brutal murder of high school professor Samuel Paty at the hands of a young jihadist as a background, the Minister of Universities and Research, Frédérique Vidal,It generated a huge stir last February by denouncing left-wing Islam that "gangrene society as a whole and to which the university is not impervious," while announcing an internal investigation to discern between academic research and militancy.

Previously, the Minister of Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, had argued that “we must fight against an intellectual matrix that comes from American universities and intersectional theses that seek to essentialize communities and identities, in the antipodes of our republican model that postulates equality between human beings, regardless of their characteristics of origin, sex, or religion ”. He added: "It is the breeding ground for a fragmentation of our society and a vision of the world that converges with the interests of Islamists."

In the eye of the hurricane are postcolonial theories, but, in general, any intersectional approach to inequality. The angry reaction to Vidal's statements by a good number of academics, the conference of rectors and the CNRS itself (National Center for Scientific Research, equivalent to the CSIC) did not take long. Some denounced a government that seeks to restrict academic freedom in the name of that same academic freedom. Others spoke of the need for the Macron government to agitate a culture war to distract public opinion from the deplorable situation of university students during the pandemic and, incidentally, compete in the electoral fishing ground of the extreme right.Still others found it ridiculous to give so much power to a small number of researchers engaged in deconstructing the French colonial past and its current legacy. In any case, some voices on the left denounce, the damage has already been done: before public opinion, a complicity, if not a causal chain, has been established between academic research on colonial processes, anti-racist activism, Islamic fundamentalism and, finally, jihadist terrorism. An old and dangerous strategy, they lament, not very different from when governments and parties referred to the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy in the 1930s.between academic research on colonial processes, anti-racist activism, Islamic fundamentalism and, finally, jihadist terrorism. An old and dangerous strategy, they lament, not very different from when governments and parties referred to the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy in the 1930s.between academic research on colonial processes, anti-racist activism, Islamic fundamentalism and, finally, jihadist terrorism. An old and dangerous strategy, they lament, not very different from when governments and parties referred to the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy in the 1930s.

The rejection that postcolonial theory arouses today - and not only on the extreme right - is not a French peculiarity. Neither is the fact that many of those who speak out against it do not seem overly familiar with it. Like gender studies, these are disciplines that have existed for decades in Anglo-Saxon universities and other countries without anyone having worried about it. However, with the rise of the MeToo and BLM movements, their concepts and theories have taken on a vindictive look and a real political content that, visibly, makes them a threat to the established order. It is no coincidence that the reaction to their presence is especially virulent in France, the cradle and bastion of enlightened thought,but it is also the cradle of some of the intellectuals who worked the most to deconstruct it and question its hegemony. Among them, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who with their work contributed to the development of postcolonial and gender studies on the other side of the Atlantic.

In essence, these theoretical approaches maintain that the modern and enlightened thought that continues to order our perception of the world for the most part is molded in the image and likeness of the white man of European origin, this being the yardstick to determine what is universal, scientific or objective and, therefore, authorized and of value; and what is not, or is less so. The effectiveness that many of us recognize in this way of analyzing reality, and that we see frequently confirmed by our own experiences, does not mean that, like any system of thought, it is not exempt from contradictions and that, once outside the circles Academics, in the arena of political activism, the

gaze

lends itself to dogmatic reductionisms and intransigent attitudes.

In this sense, it is mandatory to keep open the great debate about what makes us universal and at the same time unique as individuals, but also the most practical one about how to organize our coexistence so that

we all have the same opportunities to develop and fully participate in life. public life in all its manifestations. In the case at hand, many intellectuals and the French state itself would do well to take advantage of the

as an opportunity to once again place oneself at the forefront of political ideas.

Instead of shielding itself in staunch resistance to recognizing that, despite even the best of intentions, racism and sexism are part of the Republic - that they are not confined to a handful of racist and sexist individuals, but are treated, as in so many other places, of a structural problem with historical roots, why not take up the challenge of rethinking the republican subject and the notion of universality in the light of the revolutions of the present?

Olivia Muñoz-Rojas

has a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics.

oliviamunozrojasblog.com