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Because they are true believers? Wokeness is simply what you get when you take antiracism and antisexism seriously. You can get away with 90s colorblindness and gender neutrality right up until you notice the huge disparities in outcome that result from equality of opportunity, and then what? Shrug and say "well, shucks, I guess the racists and sexists were right, but I stuck to my principles and treated everyone like an individual, so even though I got an outcome that is 90% similar to what the bigots would have gotten with discriminatory policies that is still a moral victory?"? Only a few autistic libertarians are OK with that. Everyone else starts looking for a way out, whether looking for ever earlier, ever smaller environmental causes ("no, it's not that blacks are less intelligent than whites, it's that complimenting their mothers for being articulate while they are still in the womb causes irreparable trauma that shows up as disparate test scores by first grade"), or sticking their head in the sand and shutting the fuck up while neurotically telling people to go away every time the subject comes up until genetic engineering makes everyone equal (Scott Alexander).
If women are equal to men, if blacks are equal to whites, then every gap must be the result of evil white males oppressing minorities in ever subtler ways, and ever more extreme measures are justified to combat this. Wokeness is simply the elimination of unprincipled exceptions. If you believe the moral message that every school and TV show has been putting out since the 1960s, you believe that the woke are more holy than you, morally superior to you, and are at worst a little misguided and overzealous. Certainly nothing like the racists and sexists, who are pure evil.
There's a coherent anti-racism that doesn't lead to evil-white-menism.
Through some non-genetic differences (endowment of resources, geography, simple good luck), some civilizations significantly surpassed others. This led to things like colonialism and slavery initially, because historically pretty much everyone is happy to use violence to improve their own position.
Eventually, white Americans abolished slavery. But whites and blacks still had different endowments, and that affects their descendents. And, more importantly, slavery left deep scars on black culture, breaking up families and opposing education. Later on, government programs (intentionally or not) exacerbated the toxic parts of that culture, and that's how we get to the sorry state of the present.
This isn't even a particularly out there take, and it was fairly widespread in the 90s (and lives on to this day, albeit not in the halls of government, media, and academia). The issue is that this argument/analysis doesn't suggest any plausible political program--"we are going to end welfare dependency, invest in policing minority areas to protect them from crime, and encourage stable family formation" has approximately zero takers, for whatever reason.
This is the boomercon take, is it not?
Yeah, though it's a bit broader. Lots of black people who have a couple years under their belt also hold it (with the ending welfare dependency part being the most likely exception). The issue is that, although lots of people hold this view or adjacent ones, no one actually votes based on it.
I just saw this poll about attitudes among Oakland voters: https://www.oaklandchamber.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2025PollResults.pdf
Some interesting bits: it's black voters who most strongly want stronger police presence (78%), with white people (60%) being much more split. And, maybe a bit more surprisingly, black voters also want more tax cuts for businesses (88%) than white people.
It's important to not let the media define black people by elevating only those ones who most flatter white progressive views.
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