Woke Hypocrisies

A smattering

Hypocrisy One:

• You are not allowed to play a character if you don’t belong to the demographic group that the character belongs to, e.g. gay, trans, or Native American.

• You are allowed, however, to demand that the world recognizes you as the very thing that you are not, if you so choose (e.g., a man dressed as a woman must be recognized as a woman¹).

• Conclusion: Theatre has become reality. Reality has become theatre.

Hypocrisy Two:

• You may not pretend to be a race that you are not (by, for instance, putting on blackface). If you encourage such behavior, you are racist².

• You must celebrate those who pretend to be the sex that they are not (by, for instance, wearing (non-blackface) makeup and heels and adopting crass stereotypes of femininity). If you discourage such behavior, you are a TERF³.

• Conclusion: Sex, which is real and binary, is no longer considered so. Race, on the other hand, is real to the extent that it accurately reflects ancestry⁴, but is inherently a much fuzzier concept, because…well, because of sex. Every successful human mating produces a child whose genome is comprised of half of his mother’s genes, and half his father’s. Because there is no asexual reproduction in humans, there is no “purity” of race or lineage. Everyone is an admixture. And yet despite the obviously far more fuzzy nature of race than sex, race is treated as if the borders around it are clear and unchanging, while the borders around sex are treated as if they don’t exist. We are being told, effectively, that reality is in the eye of the beholder.

The drag queen known as Daytona Bitch, dressed up as Miss Cleo, a kitschy telephone psychic from the late ‘90s, complete with black face paint. Photo and quotation are from The Toronto Star, June 2013.

Daytona Bitch was fired from being a “Pride drag queen” for being in blackface.

“The whole concept of blackface being an art form or being entertainment, to me it doesn’t make sense at all that anyone would think that’s okay,” said Alphonso King, who performs drag under the name Jade Elektra.

Hypocrisy Three:

• You may not adopt the foods, hairstyles, language, or other cultural artifacts of any culture that is not your own.

• We, the woke, get to define what our culture is, what your culture is, when we are measuring from, and what does and doesn’t count. Eating a burrito is okay no matter who you are, but having a business that makes burritos is not, unless you are demonstrably Latino. English speakers can use words like alcohol and chocolate no matter who they are (despite those words coming originally from the Arabic and Nahuatl, respectively), but homie and bodega are apparently off the table if you’re white⁵.

• Conclusion: While there are certainly ways to use the cultures of others in disrespectful or damaging ways, claiming that cultural exchange is inherently appropriative is to fundamentally misunderstand what it is to be human. So much of our modern diet, language, sport, music, clothing, ritual (on and on and on and on) exist because of borrowing from the traditions and wisdom of our ancestors.

That’s just a few hypocrisies embedded in the woke ideology. In the comments (for paying subscribers only), please add any more hypocrisies that you see. Let’s build the library.

1. There are all too many examples of this that I could link to here, but if you want a deep dive on the current it “girl,” check out Dylan Mulvaney’s TikTok feed; I linked to some videos that particularly struck me in last week’s Natural Selections.

2. As I have said elsewhere, I see blackface as a kind of phenotypic mockery, almost if not entirely always derisive, and most definitely in poor taste.

3. As has been often said at this point: TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) was intended to be an insult, a slur, but many of us now proudly claim it.

4. Another hypocrisy buried in this one is that some would police the borders around who can claim to be of a particular race, while simultaneously claiming that race is entirely a social construct. Sorry—you can’t have it both ways. (And in this case, you really shouldn’t have it either way.)

5. To be fair, this list of words that white people should apparently never use, which includes not only homie and bodega, but also cousin and yams (really), is on a famously insane site called The Root. I went for some very low-hanging fruit here.

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