Racism, the Woke Evil: More Important than Good

An explanation for human suffering and the apparent randomness of existence is among the most important tasks that every faith must tackle. Wokeism calls its answer "racism."

The American Spirit Essays #25

(Previous: The Woke Soul)

Evil Matters

This essay continues our consideration of the ways in which Wokeism meets the spiritual needs of its flock without admitting that it’s the least bit spiritual.  This essay considers perhaps the most important concept of all: evil. 

As disturbing as it might be to think that evil is more important than good, it would be foolhardy to pretend that it isn’t.  It’s both easy and common for people to take good things for granted.  It’s even easier among those blessed to live in abundance, for whom basic necessities are rarely if ever threatened.  It’s far tougher to let go of injustice or unfairness.  It's impossible to miss that bad things happen to good people, that the decent and worthy suffer while the cruel and violent prevail, that death strikes callously, that disasters arrive indiscriminately.  These occurrences have all brought deep and abiding pain—and confusion—to every person who has ever lived.  The Woke are no exception.

The need to grapple with evil and injustice is so deeply ingrained in the human psyche that even the utopians, Marxists, and Critical Theorists retained it.  Though their writings dispensed with God, ethics, and goodness, they had little choice but to retain evil.  In their frameworks, evil persists as a consequence of an unjust, exploitation-based status quo.  The leveling and transcendence of that status quo will, of necessity, usher humanity into the utopian era.

Of course, these anti-spiritualists could hardly admit that they were preserving this quintessentially spiritual concept.  They had to cloak it in social, economic, or political terms.  For Marx, “the bourgeoise,” or capitalists, were always to blame.  Were it not for their rapacious exploitation of labor, justice would have prevailed long ago.  Critical Theory made it even easier.  If all of history is a struggle between an oppressor class and an oppressed class, the source of evil is self-evident: Oppression.  Who were the oppressors?  Easier still: Anyone who ever emerged victorious from a struggle and got to impose a solution on the defeated oppressed.

In contemporary Wokeism, the sociological term that has replaced “evil” is “racism.”  “Racism” in the Woke lexicon is very different from “racism” in standard pre-Woke English.  Until quite recently, everyone understood “racism” as the belief that innate racial differences divide humanity into distinct categories, that different rules, standards, expectations, and responsibilities apply to each category, that judgment of an individual is contingent on the group to which he belongs, and that the actions of an individual reflect upon his group.  In other words, racism was a set of attitudes, often enshrined in law and practice, that could be overcome.