Why socialist Susan Neiman says 'woke-ism' is not leftist

 

'Woke demands that nations and peoples face up to their criminal histories. In the process it often concludes that all history is criminal,' author and philosopher Susan Neiman writes in her book, Left is Not Woke. (James Starrt / Polity Books)

Ideas

Why socialist Susan Neiman says 'woke-ism' is not leftist

'If you don't base solidarity on deep principles that you share, it's not real solidarity,' says author

CBC Radio · Posted: Apr 12, 2023 2:38 PM EDT | Last Updated: August 21, 2023

Left Is Not Woke: Susan Neiman

*Originally published on April 12, 2023.

 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/susan-neiman-left-is-not-woke-1.6799887

 

Woke: a small word with heft.

 

The term, first associated with the left to exemplify support and awareness of racial and social injustice, has since become a pejorative, weaponized by the right.

 

A self-described lifelong leftist and socialist, Susan Neiman may seem an unlikely critic of "woke-ism." But she argues the tenets of the woke have become antithetical to the traditional values of the left.

 

"I am unwilling to cede the word 'left' or accept the binary suggestion that those who aren't woke must be reactionary. A left-wing critique of those who seem to share the same values might seem to be an instance of narcissism. But it's not small differences that separate me from those who are woke," Neiman writes in her book, Left Is Not Woke.

 

She adds that the discourse around "woke-ism" is confusing. It evokes emotions that all progressive people share, such as empathy for those who are marginalized and indignation for the oppressed, but those emotions are "derailed by a range of theoretical assumptions that ultimately undermine them."

 

Neiman is a moral philosopher and director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. She joined IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed onstage at the Toronto Public Library as part of the Provocations Ideas Festival.

 

This is an excerpt from their conversation.

 

Some listening to your critique of woke might accuse you of being anti-woke. Of being hostile to progressive values, to listening to voices that have been marginalized throughout history. What's your response to that?

 

Well, some of those people are even friends of mine. I had at least two friends who said: 'My God, Susan, I agree with your argument but don't use the word "woke" in the title. Come up with something else. Otherwise, you sound like Ron DeSantis or Rishi Sunak or whatever.'

 

But you did use the word.

 

I did. I thought about it for a long time. I agonized about it. But it still seems to me that woke picks something out that we all recognize and that needs to be examined, even if it looks like it's putting you in bad company.

 

Even if you don't know that this is somebody who has been very much on the side of righting historical wrongs and standing with people who've been marginalized, I think I make it clear that I'm not Ron DeSantis.

 

What would you say to someone who belongs to a group that has been historically marginalized, who would say that universalism is a luxury they can't afford?

 

I would say that, first of all, tribalism is a luxury they can't afford because all marginalized peoples or people who have been oppressed in the past need deep solidarity with other people.

 

And I say somewhere in the book, I'm not an ally. I don't want to be an ally. Allies are based on interests. The United States and the Soviet Union were allies for a short period of time when they had a common interest in defeating Nazi Germany. And as soon as that was over, they became enemies. We don't need to go into whose fault that was. There were lots of people at fault. But what that example shows is that if you don't base solidarity on deep principles that you share, it's not real solidarity.

 

So that someone who claims their marginalization is worse than everybody else's is reckoning themselves out of the game. And I should say this will sound like a tangent, but it's really not. One of the things that this book was influenced by is the fact that for two years in Berlin, I've been very active in the media and in the political world arguing for a Universalist conception of Judaism.

 

I am Jewish and [live] in Germany, which has focused on its crimes against the Jewish people. What that has seemed to mean is we learned that we were perpetrators. We learned that the Jews were our victims, and we learned that we did the worst thing to them that could ever be done to anyone. And if, on the contrary, people say, as other left-wing Jewish friends of mine and I have said: 'Wait a second, we don't want to be seen as the victims who are worse than any other victim. And as a matter of fact, we want to focus on crimes that the state of Israel is committing against the people who it's occupied for 56 years,' we're called antisemitic.

 

And so it's quite funny, of course, to be Jewish and be called antisemitic in the German press. But that experience very much strengthened my own sense that insisting on one's own marginalization or one's own victimhood as a people is not only in principle false, but it's politically and pragmatically really a dead end.

 

Where do you see the excesses of what you would call 'woke-ism' most pronounced?

 

Ah, where not? Every place I go, I hear another story. Look, critical books are not being published, critical plays are not being presented. Or if they're presented, they're being rewritten in certain ways.

 

The idea of cultural appropriation, that cultural products belong to a member of a particular tribe, strikes me as against the concept of culture itself. That's one kind of problem.

 

Another kind of problem can be seen in — and I'm not current on what exact issues are going on in Canada, so I don't know how this is being dealt with here — in the U.S. we've had for the last three or four years a discussion about monuments.

 

I'm extremely glad that people have taken down monuments to Confederate generals.

 

Every southern town in the United States is built around a square, and every square has a statue of Johnny Reb. I'm happy for them to go into museums. There's an interesting museum in Berlin where they sort of put all the bad statues and they've taken them off pedestals so that people can climb on them and do things with them. You know, I think that would be a great thing to do.

 

But what we've also had in the United States is people asking to take down statues of Abraham Lincoln. I get quite angry about that. Now, did Abraham Lincoln say things that we today would consider racist? Sure. Okay.

 

What I don't understand is why we can't see that as an instance of progress. Why can't we be glad that we have made progress in 160 some years since Abraham Lincoln was assassinated? But if we made progress, we made it on the back of people like Abraham Lincoln, who gave his life for civil rights for African-Americans.

 

Why do you think the people concerned have not been able to do that? I mean, there are historical wrongs that people believe need to be righted and that perhaps taking statues down is part of the process.

 

I think some statues should be taken down. What disturbs me is the way that it's often done without serious thought or nuance. You know, my hope when the wave of statue overturning began was that this would be an occasion for a serious community discussion.

 

And it should go community by community where people would, first of all, talk about what should be taken down — and even more importantly, talk about who should replace the people who have been taken down. Because that's an important question.

 

And you talk about that in your book. I was going to ask you if you had a magic wand, who would you put up a statue for?

 

Paul Robeson is one of my heroes, somebody whose statue I'd be happy to see all over the place.

 

American singer, actor, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson arrived in London, now Heathrow Airport, on July 11, 1958. In 1950, Robeson's passport was revoked due to his political activities but it was reinstated eight years later after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the State could not deny citizens the right to travel because of their political beliefs or affiliations. (A. W. Cox/Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images )

I think it's nice if there could be community-based statues. I quote Bryan Stevenson, who's also one of my heroes, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama, an anti-death penalty program, and perhaps most importantly, founder of what's called the National Lynching Memorial.

 

I interviewed him for my last book. And one of the things he said to me really stuck.

 

He said there were white people in the South who worked against slavery and you don't know their names. And there were white people who protested lynching and you don't know their names. And if we remembered their names, we could build an alternative history of the South. We could build a history, a narrative devoted to people who actually were brave and courageous and went against convention and stood up for the right thing.

 

So who's 'woke,' what does it mean and how is it being used in Canadian politics?

There are plenty of unnamed people. I would say those people, whether they're famous or not, are in every community. And my guess is that almost every community had them who embodied the ideals that we would like our communities to uphold.

 

*Q&A was edited for clarity and length. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly and Annie Bender.