Almost all of us are likely familiar with calls on the political and religious right to oppose “wokeness” or to be “anti-woke.” We all have a sense that this is a dog whistle. But what, exactly, does it represent? Where has this way of thinking about society, religion, and politics come from? In this episode, Dan explores these issues, decoding appeals to “anti-wokeness” to highlight the Christian nationalist vision of society embodied within them.
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series of the podcast Straight White American Jesus, My name is Dan Miller, Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
As always, excited and really looking forward to being with all of you who listen.
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As always, just a caveat that I just don't get to respond to as many emails as I would like to, but I do read them.
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I want to dive right in today to a topic.
This is one of those that's probably familiar to most listeners, but its appropriation within conservative and political religious discourse is kind of new.
It's becoming increasingly familiar, but it's a little bit new.
And I think that that novelty is worth noting.
And it also is one of these things that I do hear from, say, students sometimes in this case.
Or from people who email me who, excuse me, who asked me just what exactly is going on with this language.
And this is specifically the language of anti-wokeness or opposing wokeness or being opposed to woke ideology or any number of things in sort of that orbit.
I say it's a topic that's probably familiar to most people.
Most people, if you've listened to conservative politicians, if you've listened to conservative spokespeople, maybe if you've been in particular sermons, you have heard opposition to being woke.
Certainly if you follow the politics in Florida and the rhetorical choices being made about the way of describing legislation in Florida in recent weeks and months, you'll be familiar with this.
I figure a little bit of background is useful.
So the term woke, to be woke, initially arose within primarily African American social circles and it communicated the idea of being aware of, of being awake to, issues of racial and social justice.
So it's straightforwardly referred to the sense of opening your eyes to something, being awake to, being aware of patterns of systemic and structural injustice and inequality and racism.
And it represented then a call to oppose those things.
It represented a call to inclusion.
It represented a call to anti-racism and so on.
And I first encountered the term among African-American students in my classes.
And it was in the context of the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which itself, of course, emerged as a challenge to police brutality, to Inequalities in various dimensions of policing among communities of color versus white communities.
The extrajudicial executions of unarmed black men by police and so forth.
And it struck me as I was sort of putting this together that I recall that also arising for students in the context broadly of the Me Too movement, but specifically in what was going on at the time with claims of sexual assault against Bill Cosby and especially, you know, in response to some of the defenses of Cosby that were coming out.
So being woke referred initially again to this, this language that arises within primarily the African American community and communities of color bleeds its way into, I think, the language of advocates and allies of those communities and of equality and anti-racism and so forth.
So the question is, you know, what, what happened?
Why typically, if we hear the term woke now, is that not where we're hearing it from?
And is that not what it represents?
So what happened?
Well, wokeness is now evoked almost solely within a particular kind of white discourse.
And it's evoked in its negative form, which is to say, with the idea of being anti-woke or of opposing wokeness.
And this theme of opposing wokeness or being anti-woke or anti-wokeness, it has been so widely deployed And so successfully appealed to by religious and social conservatives, which is to say by Christian nationalists.
We're going to come back to that.
It has been so widely and successfully deployed by Christian nationalists that they have essentially colonized any appeal to being woke.
It's a discourse that if you hear the word woke, You are almost certainly hearing from a Christian nationalist at this point.
You're not hearing from, typically, an activist arguing for police reform.
You are not dealing with an activist trying to awaken us to structures of racial inequality.
You're in the presence of Christian nationalism.
Being woke has shifted from being a cry for inclusion and progressive social change To being an epithet that is leveled against those who are considered a threat to authentic American Christianity.
You're hearing from Christian nationalists who will say that those who advocate such things as quote unquote, wokeness, they're not real Americans.
They oppose American values.
They're a problem to America.
They are a threat and so forth.
So when you hear the language, when we hear the language of opposing wokeness or opposing a woke ideology or being anti-woke, It's code for Christian nationalism.
We are hearing a Christian nationalist code.
So that's sort of the first step.
If we're going to talk about anti-wokeness and sort of decoding it, that's the first step.
And it's pretty simple.
And lots of people know this.
Again, the people I hear from, you know, they may not have heard the phrase, the concept of being woke from within communities of color.
They heard it when they heard Ron DeSantis or somebody decrying a woke curriculum in the schools.
Or when they heard some parent somewhere saying the teaching about gender identities and sexuality to elementary school students is part of a woke ideology.
That's where they heard it.
So a lot of us, I think, know that it's a part of conservative discourse at this point.
That piece of the decoding is pretty easy.
We know that when we hear about anti-wokeness, we're hearing a dog whistle.
We are hearing a message that is coded by Christian nationalists for other Christian nationalists and those who are sympathetic to their ideology.
But here's where the real decoding work comes in, and this is true of any so-called dog whistle.
It's always worth remembering where that metaphor comes from.
Like, what is a dog whistle?
It's a whistle that works at a frequency that most of us can't hear, and only those with a special kind of hearing—dogs and other animals, I suppose—can hear it.
And that's how a dog whistle works.
It's a phrase that may be unclear, or in some cases it may seem innocuous, but to those who are trained to hear it, it communicates a lot more.
And that's what we have to get at.
Well, let's start with the idea of anti-racism.
talk about so-called dog whistles.
What does that dog whistle signify?
What does it communicate?
We know, I say that it signifies a kind of Christian nationalist identity, but how?
Well, let's start with the idea of anti-racism.
If one element of being woke in its original formulation was to be anti-racist, to oppose racism, then being anti-woke is just straightforwardly to be anti-anti-racist, which is exactly what it means, right?
Everybody knows how double negatives work.
It means to be racist.
And some people will say, well, Dan, that's extreme.
Not everybody who opposes anti-racism is racist.
And my response is going to be, yeah, I'm sorry, but they are.
And here's why I say that.
To oppose opposition to racism is at the very least to allow racism to go unchecked.
It is to say that that opposition is unnecessary and by implication that racism isn't present, which means the forms of racism that are present go unchecked.
That's best case.
Worst case scenario, it's used to actively promote a white supremacist agenda.
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And where do we see this now?
We see this in right-wing efforts all over the country to forbid teaching about the significance of racism in American history, to prohibit having serious discussions or hard discussions or posing difficult questions about the significance of, say, slavery in the formation of American national identity and so forth.
We see it in efforts to prohibit You know, anti-marginalization efforts or so-called DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion efforts on, say, college campuses and other places, or to prohibit businesses from teaching, you know, having diversity training programs and different kinds of things like this.
We see this everywhere in our country right now.
Being anti-woke is a code for supporting and privileging social, legal, and institutional practices and policies that favor white people to the active detriment of people of color.
That's what it's a dog whistle of.
That is part of the content of it.
It's in the code when somebody refers to being anti-woke or opposing wokeness.
But it goes beyond just racial equality.
While the original reference of woke focused strongly on issues related to racism, it obviously reached more broadly than that, right?
And the calls to be anti-woke are broader than that too.
So if you're anti-woke, you are also opposed, for example, to LGBTQ equality.
You oppose, again, non-discrimination policies.
Remember a few years ago when you had states, red states, so-called red states with conservative political majorities, and you would have progressive cities in those states who would pass laws saying that in their municipality you could not discriminate against somebody on the basis of, say, gender identity or sexual orientation.
What happened?
The state came in and said, nope, you're not allowed to do that.
It prohibited Non-discrimination policies.
Again, I'm sorry folks.
If you prohibit non-discrimination, you are allowing discrimination.
It's really really straightforward.
It's not complicated.
How else does this play out?
You target families of trans and gender non-conforming youth with threats of child abuse allegations, right?
And that's part of what happens with this whole notion that the whole idea of offering gender-affirming care for children and youth is somehow part of a broad woke ideology or a woke conspiracy.
So you target the families of those kids.
You target those kids and make sure that they're not allowed to say something about the pronouns they want or that schools are required to tell parents when they use different pronouns at school than they might at home or a different name.
You prohibit gender affirming care for trans and gender non-conforming youth and you target care providers as well.
You prohibit trans women from participating on sports teams and so forth.
This is what it is.
All of this is what goes on when somebody refers to being anti-woke.
This seemingly simple term, this dog whistle, is a dog whistle for not just an abstract ideology, but at this point a wide, far-reaching range of institutional policies and practices and political mechanisms for targeting all kinds of people.
And we could expand the list, okay?
We could spend another 20 minutes here just expanding this and it's like, imagine throwing the proverbial stone into a pond and you get the ripples that spread out.
We could look at the ripple effects of this and the way that this language of being anti-woke can incorporate more and more and more social space to itself and becoming a more and more comprehensive vision of a Christian nationalist Social world.
That's what the aim is.
And so what we find over and over and over basically is when people appeal to anti-wokeness, what they're really doing is seeking to shape What they see is an authentic Christian society, a Christian society that is fundamentally straight, white, and Christian.
And where everybody who doesn't fit into those categories, and we could expand that list as well, but everybody who doesn't fit into those categories is marginalized.
You find the agenda of Christian nationalism in working to ensure that only real Americans, as Christian nationalists would define them, count as American.
That is, where only those Americans could claim to have equal rights or equal protection under the law.
You find, in other words, a code for a highly inequitable society, an intentionally inequitable society that seeks to preserve the privilege of the few, of the straight, white, American, quote-unquote, true Americans, the straight, white Christians.
At the cost of the well-being of everybody else, right?
That vision for America, this deeply felt sense of who and what the real Americans are, of what a real America should be shaped like, that, all of that, is what harbors and lives within appeals to being anti-woke.
So let's sort of tie some of this together, right?
Being anti-woke, when you hear somebody talk this way, it's a code for affirming a straight white Christian fantasy of what authentic America is.
It's a dog whistle that calls all who share that fantasy to action in a way that allows them to affirm it without having to say the quiet parts out loud.
And also in a way, as I'm trying to show in our really brief way that we do in this series, but trying to show how a really complex and broad ranging scope of policies and procedures and institutions are all captured under this short moniker of being anti-woke or opposing wokeness.
It allows those who invoke it to deploy their racism, their homophobia, their transphobia, their misogyny, their xenophobia, their general fear and cultural anxiety about a demographically shifting American society.
It allows them to deploy all of that without having to name them, or without having to be forced to own them.
And with the merging of religious and political identity that is Christian nationalism, It also means that opposing wokeness, or being anti-woke, for millions of Americans, this is experienced not just as good politics, or cultural preservation, or something like that.
It is experienced as a religious obligation.
They understand their Christian faith in such a way that they, as good Christians, are called to be anti-woke, to oppose wokeness, to oppose anti-racism, to oppose anti-discrimination in all of its forms.
What does that mean?
It means that part of their religious faith is to support racism and discrimination.
And for those listening for whom that might sound extreme or crazy or overstated, all I'm going to do is point at most of American religious history when that was a part of the Christian identity of millions of American Christians.
Right?
So for millions of American Christians, all the oppositions harbored within the demand to be anti-woke, they are Christian obligations and they carry divine force.
So for these Americans, to promote anti-racism or LGBTQ plus equality is not just something that disqualifies us from being true Americans, it's something that warrants divine condemnation.
It's a sign of damnation.
It ups the stakes, it ups the ante, and it adds a kind of superlative force and energy to political efforts to impose anti-wokeness on society.
So all of this is what's at work with these invocations of anti-wokeness.
And so the vague sense that again, I think most of us have a vague sense that this is a dog whistle.
Most of us, when our Uncle Ron starts talking about a woke agenda, we kind of got a sense of what he's talking about.
And it's a kind of code, but I think it's important to dig into it and look at for what is it a code?
What is the scope of it?
We begin to see that.
And we need to understand that no matter who the person is that's invoking this, whether they're a politician standing in front of a camera in a national audience, whether it's a pastor, whether it's just someone in our lives, family member, neighbor, our Uncle Ron, whoever it is, this is what is embodied.
This is what lives and is harbored in this invocation of anti-wokeness.
Need to wrap this up.
As always, I would say thank you again for listening.
Thank you for all of you who take the time to listen and to support the podcast.
Again, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
Any other topics you think should be a part of It's In The Code, the series.
Other thoughts that you have about the podcast or anything else, you can always reach me, Daniel Miller Swaj, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
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