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“Woke” as a shibboleth

“Woke” as a shibboleth

Last updated on: March 26, 2025 at 5:13 pm by Margaret Blair Young

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“Woke” as a shibboleth 2025-03-26T17:13:35-07:00 Margaret Blair Young

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We all learned more than we wanted to about political signals over the past while. Kamala Harris had several, my favorite being: “We’re not going Back.” Trump replayed his “Make America Great Again!” slogan, and obviously, it worked.

Kamala’s slogan suggests that we are a better nation now than we were in the 1950s, when birth control was restricted and racial segregation was a fact of life. Kamala was “woke”–a word which has perhaps exhausted its usefulness. The “woke” among us have an agenda which includes equal rights for all, including LGBT people, and programs to provide for those who have been previously excluded.

By contrast, the MAGA movement seemed to suggest that the “Make Room for Daddy” image of the mother at home, the father in his office, and Black and Latino people in some service position–was something we yearned for.

Of course, the political debate used extremist language, as do my examples above. Kamala’s policies, the MAGA folks said, included aborting full-term babies, so a vote for the Left-Woke was a vote for infantacide. This is a sample of their rhetoric:

“Their massive pro-abortion political arm. . .pushes all-trimester abortions and promotes fearmongering lies that put women and girls at needless risk.” Additionally, far-right folks claimed, the “abortion industry” was the largest thief of taxpayer dollars. LGBT rights were collapsed into the notion that children could go to school as one gender and come home as another.

The “We Aren’t Going Back” slogan of Kamala Harris imagined (at extreme points) a Nazi-esque world which we all had sworn to “Never Again” revisit. The slogan didn’t work, maybe because of the reality of economic issues. People wanted to “go back” to the days where candy bars cost a nickel and a gallon of gas was less than a dollar. Clearly, they saw the morality of the past as an ideal: No pre-marital sex, no drugs, no scamming, no suggestive films and videos, no profane music, no rebellious children.

The view each side had of the other reduced us all to caricatures: baby killers on one side and Nazi prison guards on the other. We mostly went along with the verbal cues, and are still experiencing the division they sowed. Can we come back to something more like the United States?

I honestly don’t know.

I want to try in a way which honors my integrity and my sense of history. More important will be my re-visioning of those on the far right. That number includes my late mother, who begged my sister and me to watch Sean Hannity with her. I found his tone and words offensive and juvenile, but I knew that Mom loved him. I blamed Hannity (et al) for much of my mom’s anxiety before her death, but Mom was still Mom. My sweetest moments during her dying days were recollections of what she had done throughout my life: the plays, concerts, and swim meets she had attended; the editing on my early writing; her concern for my safety. I love my mom. The moments of her watching Fox News and becoming persuaded that Mitt Romney was “disgusting” did not represent her. In fact, they made her into a (you guessed it) caricature.

It has been sweet to enlarge my memory of my mother as she was before politics took her to a place where I would not go. The fact that my siblings and I have deep bonds with each other speaks volumes about our parents.

I promised a right-wing friend that I’d read an article from The Tablet . I kept my promise. I found the article (by David Samuels) intelligent and compelling, though its central claims were far-fetched to me. A brief summary: Samuels suggests that as media has become digital, political figures can market ideas according to algorithems and market analysis. That sounds right. In fact, it sounds predictable, given what we already know about political speech. As George Orwell says in Politics and the English Language

[P]olitical language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.

Once the internet offered global communication in real time, it became a tool to shape opinions and persuade populations–and even to give “disinformation.” Was Russia involved in Trump’s victory? I personally think so, but Putin was not nearly as important a supporter as was Elon Musk. More important still was The Heritage Foundation, the ideological sponsor of the Trump movement, an organization which often attracts those focused on religious freedom and traditional families. I am following the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” now to get a sense of what’s coming.

One friend explained his MAGA positions thus: “The MAGA movement is the great awakening and an attempt at the restoration of our founding intent, the people in charge, not a bureaucratic state.”

I am certain he believes this. I know him to be a good man. However, I do not believe it. For me, the huge thing at risk in this moment is our system of checks and balances. I see the executive branch taking on far more power than the founders ever intended.

Another conservative friend was a missionary in the Congo with my husband and me. He has been generous in helping us in whatever we needed. I respect him, and hope that we might have a conversation about the political issues–untainted by insults or false assumptions. Having lived in the DR-Congo, we have seen the worst things a government can do, and the resulting chaos when a government is corrupt and disorganized–or when people without preparation attempt to resolve gargantuan problems. We became familiar with many people with “Dunning Kruger” syndrome. They were positive that they could solve a complex problem with a simple solution. It did not work out as they had hoped. As my brother says, “For every difficult problem, there is an easy solution–that’s wrong.”

The friends I’ve mentioned might not know about my involvement in race issues. Back in 1998, I was invited to tell Black history with a co-author whom I love. I know what the MAGA movement has done to his sense of safety and autonomy. I could never go along with a political platform which dismissed my co-author’s work and the significance of his life. I never will go along with it.

I have been reclaiming history for much of my life. I try to understand it from all perspectives. That has been painful at times.

In the project I’m doing now–a family history memoir–I have learned that my great great great grandfather, George Washington Wilkins, was a Mormon branch president to Q. Walker Lewis.

Enjoy reading about him. The link is provided.

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