That’s why social media shares the right articles and memes.īut wokeness, we learn, wasn’t just a political backlash to Donald Trump, as people often assume, but a deeper, class-based change that completely remade US news media even before Trump arrived. That’s why the standing-room crowd at the right events. It’s about displaying your knowingness, about status, rather than truth. What woke media is doing to its consumers, as Ungar-Sargon says (in the context of a perceptive analysis of Vox here), is to assure its young, affluent and educated audiences that “they are among the ranks of the correct, the informed, rather than one of the stupids”. I have talked about one of them in an earlier column, but what is of even greater interest for students of media is Bad News: How Woke Media is Undermining Democracy by Batya Ungar-Sargon.īad News offers a deep critique of the causes of US journalism’s (and The New York Times in particular, of course) growing disconnect from reality over the past few years, and its effects. But what is the cause?Īt least two new books have done an outstanding job of answering this question. Wokeism is only the symptom, the product, the consumer high. And this is not like the shallow Right-wing “Franklin School” theories (it’s “Frankfurt School,” of course, but there was an “RW” book which misspelled it so, hence the dig), but coming from those who work within the bastions of wokeism at that, and have seen enough to call it out. But the good news is that there is also an intelligent discourse about the structural causes of wokeism rising in America. We all have our stories of woke-inquisitions (or just viral psy-ops) like “Racist Tom” or “Hindutva Ram” these days. He has all the Indian American creds, Ivy Leagues, IITs, volunteer work, and everything else going too but, somehow, in that glittering evening of posh culture and having arrived, he failed on the most important count of all. It turns out that these random dinner-table neighbours for a couple of hours at a concert felt so compelled to pick on Ram’s name because they just had to tell him all about the new anti-Muslim law that Prime Minister Narendra Modi passed called CAA that was going to put 200 million Muslims in camps, and of course, don’t you know, the BBC, NYT, NPR all said so: “Jai Shri Ram” was now an Islamophobic war cry back there.Īgain… poor Ram. Then, Ram (making WTF Eyebrows in turn, presumably), asks them what they mean by “Ram” is an “interesting name” and “these days.” I can picture poor Ram looking puzzled, and taking the bait. “Ram…” the fellow says slowly (Eureka-exclaiming-eyebrows rising, I imagine), “now that’s a very interesting name … these days … isn’t it?” What happened next is incredible (but I’m in academia and am not surprised). Between the ghazals, a nice Indian couple at his table got talking and asked him his name.
My friend Ram, who lives in the Bay Area, went to a classy dinner concert. The next story is from early 2020, a month before the pandemic hit.
What a strange new world.īut before I return to the shiny Netflix-polished world of Vir Das (and his patriotic “befitting reply” critics), I must share one more anecdote from the world of Indian-American Model Minority Wokeness.Īlso read: Why Vir Das' standup special I Come From Two Indias deserves to be criticised - not for being offensive, but for being obvious Mercs in the parking lot, woke-cliches in the theater hall.
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