Woke 2 Must Build Institutions
It is easy to critique. It is harder to build.
Wokeness. Intersectionality. Marginalization. It feels like everyone who has followed politics since 2016 has at least heard of those words. These words are some of the most common phrases associated with a certain politics, a politics of relentless critique of our society. But it has been just that—critique. Useful critique, yes. Highly productive critique, yes. And this author finds herself in agreement with the vast majority of this critique, conceptualized in theory, and lived in practice. But as we have seen in the past decade, as we continue to respond to the fascist reaction that has defined the last decade, critique is by no means enough.
The reality is that when we talk about “marginalized people”, we speak of real, quantitatively measurable, empirically testable experiences. We speak of real suffering, real struggle, real pain, simply because we have built a society in which structural violence and systemic marginalization is the norm. When we speak of intersectionality, we speak of how different areas of discrimination overlap and reinforce each other, affecting real life outcomes. Wokeness is fundamentally a theory about how power acts on us, or acts for us, based on who we are.
Make no mistake, there is hard data on this. Statistics on how disabled people are left behind. Data on the gaps between Black and white Americans. Information on the life outcomes of trans people. We know that undocumented workers are systematically exploited, and then demonized, abused and deported, just for being on the wrong side of an artificial binary. We know these systems produce suffering. And I, personally, have lived this suffering, as a Black trans woman in America—because of this, these questions take on a particular urgency for me.
But knowing is not fixing. To reveal is not to reform. …
Continue reading this article by Silvaria Lysandra Zemaitis, “Woke 2 Must Build Institutions,” here: https://www.liberalcurrents.com/woke-2-must-build-institutions/