Behind the debate on "wokism", the three mutations of racism: biological, cultural, systemic

Published on January 06, 2022 at 6:19 p.m. - Updated on January 09, 2022 at 1:23 p.m.

It is a mysterious neologism which designates an enemy as terrifying as it is elusive: “Wokism”, this movement from the United States, has been arousing fiery crusades for months. For the Minister of Education Jean-Michel Blanquer, this word refers to an obscurantist ideology which, by imposing a thought police worthy of George Orwell, opens the way to totalitarianism. The indictment is undoubtedly exaggerated: wokism is neither a structured ideological corpus nor a homogeneous current of thought, but, more modestly, an attitude consisting in being attentive (“awake”) to the injustices suffered by minorities.

If the expression appears in Afro-American slang in the 1960s, if it is present in 1965, in a speech delivered by Martin Luther King (1929-1968), if it is claimed today by the American movement "Black Lives Matter", it remains largely unknown to the French: according to an IFOP survey carried out in February 2021, 86% of them have never heard of "woke thought" and 94% do not know what it means. . In France, wokism is "a scarecrow more than a social or ideological reality", summarizes the historian Pap Ndiaye, director general of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, the public establishment which includes the National Museum of the History of France. immigration and the Tropical Aquarium of Paris.

Deceptive simplicity

The French controversies on "wokism" may be based on approximations and chimeras, but they have one merit: to demonstrate that the word "racism" does not mean the same thing for everyone. For "woke" activists, the statue of an ardent defender of slavery or the festive "black face" of a white man sign the subtle but real survival of a racial hierarchy inherited from the slave trade and colonization . For their opponents, this scrupulous exercise of anti-racist vigilance leads straight to the tyranny of minorities, even to “reverse racism”.

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If the racism of some resembles the racism of others so little, it is because this word displays a deceptive simplicity – ^and this since its birth, at the end of the 19th century. Popularized in 1892 under the pen of the anti-Semitic pamphleteer Gaston Méry, the term "racism" designates, in the novel Jean Révolte, not a condemnable hierarchy between men, but an enviable "natural fatherland founded on the community of origin", underlines historian Grégoire Kauffmann. For the hero, who “refuses to admit that a Jew or a Negro can become his fellow citizen,” racism is a lofty and respectable form of patriotism.

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