Stoking the fires of ‘wokeness’

When the talk turns to left-wing “woke” ideology on college campuses, I sometimes say I was there at the creation. I basically resigned my first academic job over it. Clearly it was quit or get fired — basically for having the wrong perceived identity and a congenital resistance to moralistic cant.

This was a New England university English department during the ’70s. Things started off uncomfortably, with a flamboyantly gay administrator making a show of telling people he’d hired me as a “hunk.” To object would be “homophobic,” so I kept quiet.

There were many similar embarrassments, such as a colleague at a department function inquiring after my “pretty little wife” in a sneering tone, as if being a Southern girl made her a trivial person unworthy of serious attention. Having been raised in Little Rock, she was also presumed to be racist by definition. People patronized her to her face. Mostly, she kept such incidents to herself for fear I’d do something crazy.

These weren’t ordinary New Englanders, I hasten to add. Only academics. Elsewhere, people asked her questions just to hear her accent. And while she won’t like me bragging on her, Diane was always near the top of any class she enrolled in and earned graduate fellowships despite being seriously cute. We’d been introduced by the dean of the graduate school.

OK, enough. It soon became clear that the personal was indeed the political, as the left-wing jargon of the era had it, and that I was the wrong kind of person. A self-styled “radical” colleague once commiserated that it must be hard for an “aristocratic Southerner” like me to deal with the university’s enlightened racial climate.

I am an Irish Catholic from Elizabeth, New Jersey. But I was also under formal investigation for failing a Black student who’d submitted no term paper and failed to show up for the final exam. I had failed her partly as a means of determining if she was still alive; I never wanted to break a bereaved parent’s heart by awarding a passing grade to somebody who’d died.

I was grudgingly exonerated, but the handwriting was on the wall.

After we moved to Diane’s hometown, I taught more Black students in one semester than during three years in New England. I played pickup basketball in the gym, and half of the school’s varsity team ended up in my class.

But that’s another story. I ultimately decided I’d chosen the wrong profession and got into journalism, where skepticism works better than dogmatism.

So now comes the reaction. Weary of moralizing professors, Republican politicians are promising to use government power to shut them up. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis hopes to establish himself as a white nationalist alternative to Donald Trump by picking fights with teachers and professors at Florida’s public universities about race and gender.

He has openly boasted that under his leadership, “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die.” Recently he banned an Advanced Placement course on African American studies from being taught in the state’s schools because it is “inexplicably contrary to Florida law and significantly lacks educational value.”

Whoever wrote that has no idea what “inexplicably” means.

However, it’s clear that DeSantis thinks it’s legitimate to use government power to muzzle people he disagrees with. He’s a culture warrior of uncommon zeal.

The federal judge who issued an injunction blocking the enforcement of DeSantis’ ballyhooed “Stop WOKE Act” for violating the First and 14th Amendments quoted George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Evidently, DeSantis aspires to win the electoral votes of the same Deep South states that supported George Wallace in 1968, plus Florida.

Nationally, however, it’s a dead-bang loser.

Closer to home, there’s the newly elected Arkansas governor and former Trump administration head prevaricator Sarah Huckabee Sanders. She’s another right-wing politician invoking the word “freedom” to mean that people who disagree with her need to shut up, or else.

Sanders has issued executive orders banning critical race theory from being taught in Arkansas schools, although there’s zero evidence of it happening. She’s promised to rid the state of classes that make students feel guilty for being white.

Some wonder what Sanders has planned for the museum near her alma mater, Little Rock Central High, commemorating the signal event in the state’s history — when President Dwight Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne to stop a white racist mob from preventing nine Black students from enrolling. There’s even a sculpture commemorating the bravery of the Little Rock Nine on the state capitol grounds.

As a Catholic schoolgirl at the time, my wife wasn’t involved in the racist protests. But she has always felt embarrassed about those events, and we sent our sons to Central High.

Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”

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