“<Wokeness is trouble, wokeness is bad,” US President Donald Trump recently stated in his State of the Union address to Congress.

Wokeness, defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality,” is a trigger word for Donald Trump. His government wants all terms perceived as part of this culture of wokeness, such as “sexuality,” “transsexual,” “non-binary,” “climate crisis,” and “racism” to disappear from US federal documents.

During his election campaign, Trump had already made it very clear: Under his watch, there will only be two genders, male and female. Anything beyond that is superfluous nonsense to him, and sexual diversity in schools, the workplace, and the armed forces should no longer exist.

Trump said he wanted to end the “tyranny” of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, and one of his first executive orders terminated all such programs.

Following the government’s lead, major companies including Amazon, Google, McDonald’s, Meta, Target, and Walmart are also rolling back their DEI programs.

Even universities now need to deal with the issue; the board of the University of Virginia is the latest school to have decided to shut its DEI office.

Donald Trump has also ordered US public schools to stop teaching “critical race theory” (CRT) and other topics dealing with race and sexuality, or else they risk losing their federal funding.

CRT states that US social institutions have built-in racism, which leads to a systemic disadvantage for people of color. Many US states have already banned CRT, on the grounds that it places all white people under the general suspicion of being racist oppressors.

Wokeness has become weaponized in the US, but beyond brash right-wing “anti-woke” attacks, criticism against it is also understandable from a rational, scientific point of view, psychologist and author Esther Bockwyt tells DW. In her book “Woke: Psychology of a Culture War,” she takes a critical look at wokeness, including its negative aspects.

She says that political pushback against wokeness cannot only be explained by the fear of change; unhealthy excesses have also occurred under the guise of wokeness.

As an example, she cites the discussion as to whether people who were assigned male at birth but feel female should be allowed to participate in women’s sports, or in which prisons trans inmates should serve time. In Bockwyt’s view, biological facts collide with an ideology that puts personal identity above everything else.

Bockwyt feels that rejection of extreme wokeness by middle-class society is justified: “Everyone can agree with the idea of being aware of discrimination, but it has really become more radical,” she says. “It tends to divide people rather than bring them together.”

In Germany like in the US, issues perceived as woke include transgender rights, veganism, climate protection, and cancel culture. Anything deemed “woke” provokes anger that is then directed primarily against people who have a leftist or green political stance.

Gender-sensitive language or “gendering” in German has been described by its critics as a “rape of the German language.”

In 2023, books that not only analyze wokeness critically, but also describe it as a “danger to democracy” have become bestsellers in Germany.

For example, in “The New Culture War. How a Woke Left Threatens Science, Culture, and Society” (2023), ethnologist Susanne Schröter describes wokeness as “ideological terror” and a “creeping construction of a new surveillance state.”

Such books work against the “woke left,” and their authors are finding acceptance in large parts of society, especially when the most extreme cases are turned into media controversies.

Trump’s bans will not eliminate something that is now part of society: an increased awareness that we should deal with minorities more sensitively. The culture war on wokeness is bound to remain part of discussions in Western societies for a long time to come.

In this context, Esther Bockwyt calls for a rational approach that “avoids generalizations, in the style: everything that is anti-woke is right-wing and whatever is woke is good. We should try to find a differentiated perspective.”

Source: https://www.dw.com/en/the-culture-war-on-wokeness-from-the-us-to-germany/a-71892359?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf