Despite years of rhetoric, turns out people like being woke

Polls show people are increasingly identifying with being 'woke', seeing it as synonymous as being tuned into social issues. But will the media change its tune?

There’s so much going on in the war on woke that it’s difficult to keep up for those hard-working frontline reporters at Sky and the News Corp mastheads: just this past week, it’s been the Voice (of course), Australian swimwear company Seafolly, and Monash University’s MBA program.

No wonder, leading anti-woke warrior and Brexiteer Nigel Farage warned the US Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) last week that Australia “has now become one of the wokest places on earth”. (Not all of Australia, he clarified to Sky’s Paul Murray — just Sydney and Melbourne.)

Joke’s on them: despite all the years of hard work by the right-wing commentariat here and in the US, most people think being woke is a good thing.

According to an Ipsos poll out of the US last week, most Americans (56%) believe the word holds its original meaning: “to be informed, educated on and aware of social injustices”. Just 39% reckon it means what the right-wing commentariat wants it to mean: “to be overly politically correct and to police other’s words”.

It won’t interrupt the “woke this, woke that” ranting on Australia’s conservative media ecosystem: the Macquarie radio network by day, Sky News after dark, and the News Corp masthead opinion pages every time in between.

The poll comes as the commentariat is trying to pivot the war to a new front: measures to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. It’s a subset of the “woke capital” attack started by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat back in 2018. The right’s been toying with diversity policies ever since — Andrew Bolt used the meme to attack the ABC’s programming diversity guidelines last August.

Now, suddenly, it’s everywhere.

Just as the right embraced “woke” as a cowardly concealing of what it was really on about, now they’re hiding behind the acronym of DEI: “diversity, equity, and inclusion”.

On Fox this week, DEI was the reason for the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank. It was “a woke Biden bank”, declared the eponymous host of Jesse Watters Primetime: “They were holding seminars on lesbian visibility day and national pride month.” The horror!

Just this week, anti-woke leader, Florida governor and leading Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential elections, Ron DeSantis, bragged about hosting a roundtable “exposing the diversity, equity and inclusion scam in higher education”.

It came as a University of North Florida poll shows that even most Floridians aren’t that keen on DeSantis’ war on woke: about half strongly oppose legislation “that would prohibit Florida public colleges and universities from supporting campus activities or programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, and critical race theory.” Another 12% “somewhat oppose”.

Day by day, Australia’s conservative commentariat is following in the footsteps of its US allies. When it discovered the Monash MBA program was encouraging students to recognise their own privilege — “Shamed for having white skin” — it gave the university a right woking over.

There’s plenty of reason to criticise diversity, equity and inclusion policies as so much corporate box-ticking. As Crikey reported this week, even Sky News parent company News Corp has one. But the right commentariat has deeper worries: that organisations might actually take them seriously!

The pivoting to attack diversity and inclusion makes it increasingly clear that the culture war is about making deadly sins out of kindness, empathy and simple humanity. And the polls show most people don’t like the skirmish.

But unpopular or not, the war on woke is too valuable to let go: for Fox and News Corp, it’s about hanging on to the grumpy-old-man demographic, to touch the buttons of racism, misogyny and homophobia without the stumble of the obvious. For conservative politicians, it’s about mobilising their base among party activists.

Too many in traditional media have been happy to play along. They’ve been using the scraps out of the woke moral panic as fodder in their own battles.

“We are in the midst of a profound renegotiation of speech norms and of who gets to define them,” as historian Thomas Zimmer wrote in his Substack Democracy Americana last week. This makes the traditional gatekeepers — people like, um, journalists — deeply uncomfortable and, in their discomfort, too eager to draw fodder from the right’s culture wars to feed their own battles.

It’s not the first time we’ve been here. Back in the 1970s, The Sydney Morning Herald fought a decade-long rear-guard action against the use of “Ms”. The masthead waited a quarter of a century to apologise for its handling of the first Mardi Gras demonstration in 1978. And it was the 1990s before First Nations voices were widely recognised as newsworthy in their own right.

Each time history has run over the top of the media’s resistance. Looks like it’s already happening in today’s most over-heated battlefronts.