People watch a debate between California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis during a watch party at Manny’s Thursday in San Francisco.
In a USA Today-Ipsos poll conducted this past spring, 56% of Americans associated the term “woke” with being informed about social injustices rather than political correctness. At first glance, this would suggest that most Americans have a positive view of being woke. Several recent headlines on the matter concur: ‘GOP’s ‘anti-woke’ campaigns have voters hitting snooze; Defeating ‘Woke’ Policies Isn’t a Priority for GOP Voters.
Deeper interrogation here, though, makes us question to what extent Americans actually consider being informed about social injustices — racism, sexism, classism, etc. — to be a good and necessary thing. Exhibit A: Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
On Thursday night, DeSantis took the stage in Georgia to debate Gov. Gavin Newsom of California for reasons that probably still aren’t legible to fans of either politician. It was a vacuous affair, moderated by Fox News host and grifter Sean Hannity, which provided more soundbites than clarity into the roots of the debaters’ grievances with one another, most of which centered around a hazy woke/anti-woke binary.
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Yet as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) instructor for the past 15 years who now does these trainings at UC Berkeley, seeing the War on Woke play out on such a high-profile stage was instructive, and a bit nauseating.
Over the years, I’ve watched the term wokeness gradually morph into DeSantis’ tired catch-all for virtually anything that disrupts conventional understandings of the dominant social order. Still, though ambiguous, wokeness has become an undeniably strong political buzzword that captures America’s torturous mystification on the root of its ceaseless inequities and cultural conflicts.
Whether you love it, can’t stomach it, or merely tolerate the “War on Woke,” one thing’s very clear — it’s not going anywhere.
The movement and its main jester, DeSantis, currently have the wind at their backs — even if DeSantis didn’t “own” Newsom, his apparent primary objective, in his fruitless debate on Thursday.
UC Berkeley, an institution synonymous with everything DeSantis and the contemporary right deem problematic about DEI — and they’re far from wrong with that critique — has been the nucleus and sanctuary of American wokeness dating back to its students’ pioneering of the anti-Vietnam War protests in the 1960s. Capturing today’s zeitgeist, Berkeley continues to find itself in the political crosshairs. De Santis encouraged those who wanted to study gender dynamics and the like to ‘Go to Berkeley.’ They just might.
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As I observe the arguments made by those like DeSantis that universities like Berkeley are incubating socialists and pushing anti-American DEI trainings that induce more resentment and bias rather than temper it, I begin to wonder — have any of these people actually taken a DEI training?
Our training participants are neither dyed-in-the-wool Marxists nor seething conservatives forced to cross the political spectrum. The overwhelming majority of those taking these trainings are earnest and looking to be exposed to new ways of improving their engagements with people from different cultural backgrounds. No woke litmus test is applied before or afterward, and no brow-beating or shaming is done for participants’ awareness or readiness for action.
Based on the online reactions, what Thursday’s debate made clear to me is that a sizable portion of the American public likely have no idea what DEI programming like ours — where we talk about strategies for improving self-awareness, inquisitiveness, respect, and patience, and outline the business case for diversity — actually does. Anti-woke critics instead retreat to the sense that the trainings like ours are forced — they very rarely ever are — and that it’s some kind of abridgment of their rights to have to endure one. Few such criticisms surround the other trainings on sexual harassment, client confidentiality, etc., that most employees in the corporate and education world have long had to attend.
It’s the War on Woke that is forcing America to look at its prejudices and hypocrisies on the brightest setting. Modern DEI programming is indeed mostly performative and largely ineffective in changing biased attitudes and behaviors and bolstering representation. Consider one particularly apt headline read regarding the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action ruling: “Colleges decry Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, but most have terrible track records on diversity.”
And then take for instance UC Berkeley. Said University Chancellor Carol Christ: “A university should reflect that diversity, and prepare its students for that reality.”
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It’s a nice thought. But less than a quarter of Berkeley’s undergraduate students and only 15% of its graduate students come from an underrepresented group. Underrepresented minorities at Berkeley also graduate at substantially lower rates. And only around 10% of its 1,500 odd faculty are underrepresented. These imbalances are not new or aberrations — they are very much the legacy and standard at Berkeley and most other academic institutions.
This smokescreen certainly isn’t just limited to academia. The average growth for minority representation on Fortune 500 boards since 2004 is less than 0.5% annually, and 40% minority representation, a modest goal, won’t be reached until 2074. Among the corporations that consistently underperforms in this space is Disney, which DeSantis spent the better part of 2022 trying to tar-and-feather for opposing his so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, with little to show for his efforts. The problem is corporations like Disney actually have pretty abysmal records in terms of representation: 73% of Disney executives are white while just 6% are Black and 6.3% are Hispanic. So, despite the outrage and fearmongering, DEI — and extensions like affirmative action — haven’t done and won’t do nearly as much as detractors would have you believe.
So, who exactly benefits from DEI programs?
Neither DeSantis nor Newsom could muster up a truthful answer to this question during Thursday’s much-ballyhooed sideshow. Like the hysteria over wokeness, the reveal is always anticlimactic.
Jerel Ezell is an assistant professor in Community Health Sciences at the University of California Berkeley. He is the director of the Center for Cultural Humility and a Fulbright Scholar.
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