To the Editor:
Re “Yes, Woke 1.0 Was Crazy. Now Where’s the Accountability?,” by Bret Stephens (column, Aug. 19):
Mr. Stephens posits that wokeness was bad because there were some excesses in its application. But examples of excess can be found in any policy or thought system.
Woke is nothing other than the quality of being awake to the ways we discriminate against those who are different and to the injustices that follow. It is good and necessary, and we should not have let the right turn it into a negative concept.
Racial preferences also have a negative connotation, but our country has always expressed preferences racially; those who gained advantages did not seem to mind as long as the preferences favored white people and men. Rather than shunning the language and ideas that make us more aware and tolerant, we need to embrace them and work toward a more perfect union.
Karin Kramer Baldwin Petaluma, Calif.
To the Editor:
Was there a period when parts of the progressive left became obsessed with ideological purity and cast out those who transgressed? Absolutely. People were treated shamefully and lost jobs or reputations they didn’t deserve to lose. Progressives should own that.
But I’m tired of wokeness being equated with repression, as if bad ideas and cowardly institutional decisions amounted to modern-day McCarthyism. Bret Stephens’s anecdotes notwithstanding, during the height of Woke 1.0 were more Americans harmed by its excesses than by the racism, sexism and discrimination that progressives were confronting?
Accountability for some who went too far is warranted. But the injustices that prompted the progressive reckoning didn’t disappear when the pendulum swung back. Long before Twitter mobs, marginalized Americans faced discrimination, which was enforced by social customs, the law and often violence. Those forces haven’t vanished.
If Woke 1.0 was the wrong reckoning, what is the right one?
James A. Lepone Mohnton, Pa.
To the Editor:
Whatever term we wish to apply to this decade of insanity, I share Bret Stephens’s shock and disappointment with the lack of accountability or self-reflection from those who participated in this broad cultural movement.
In their widely read article in The Atlantic in 2015, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt put a spotlight on a key turning point in higher education toward safetyism, which then spread much more widely in society and led to many of the abuses that Mr. Stephens pointed out in his column.
The period was marked by an assault on traditional liberal values from the progressive left. Merit was redefined as privilege. Dedication to universal values was patriarchal. Respect for the dignity of the individual was getting in the way of the revolution.
Traditional liberalism values self-reflection, and this has been largely absent when assessing what happened during this period and its costs.
Mark Wolfgram Ottawa
To the Editor:
Woke is nothing but a term appropriated by the right to attribute various sins to the left. Bret Stephens’s column calls for accountability for a cherry-picked set of these sins. But accountability from whom, exactly?
The cancel culture of the Red Scare of the 1950s was orchestrated through state institutions, notably the House Un-American Activities Committee, the F.B.I. and others. In that case, responsibility was clear.
But in the examples that Mr. Stephens cites, responsibility lies with a diffuse set of actors — universities, media enterprises and individuals. If indeed apologies are warranted, it is from these entities, since there is no central organ of wokeness to point to.
Jeremy Bloom Sunnyvale, Calif.
To the Editor:
Bret Stephens is guilty of the kind of excess that he attributes to the “Woke 1.0” movement. He claims that “illiberalism” has “swept so much of the left in recent years” and that “moral certitude and promiscuous demonization — whether it comes from MAGA on the right or wokeness on the left” is “crazy.”
This is false equivalence. To say that extremism of the left is anywhere near that of MAGA on the right is false. He gives what he considers examples of extremism on the left, but the daily vilification from the right is far worse.
The term “woke” should not be an epithet. Being “woke” is not “crazy.” It is an honorable term acknowledging recognition of the gross injustice and discrimination that still pervade society today, added and abetted by MAGA and other believers.
Accountability is needed not for those whose eyes have been opened, but for those who, with eyes firmly shut, actively espouse and acquiesce in discriminatory and misogynistic behavior. There lies the true source of real and long-lasting damage.
Robert H. Palmer New York
To the Editor:
I normally enjoy Bret Stephens’s columns and agree with his warning that moral certainty and indiscriminate demonization are dangerous to a free society.
But for me this column fell short. Courageous journalism and critical thinking are two of our most important guardrails against ideological conformity. Yet Mr. Stephens grouped together very different controversies without full consideration of the context or counterarguments.
His strongest case concerns coercive methods: public shaming, disproportionate punishment, suppression of disagreement and the abandonment of due process. But by labeling all of this “wokeness,” he blurred those abuses together with legitimate efforts to combat racism, discrimination and sexual misconduct.
Mr. Stephens identified an important problem. But I wish he would have more fully defined the problem, the causes, the culprits and the solutions.
Forrest Paddock Houston
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