Police: Can You Forgive the Wokeists?

Police: Can You Forgive the Wokeists?
By: Peter Marina

The dark specter of “wokeism” is upon us, serving to further divide the American people from developing the solidarity needed to take back control of our country.

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We’ve reached an end stage of modernity where corporate oligarchy has finally secured power and control over our entire society. The American people, largely disenfranchised from the decision-making processes that shape our lives and future, are impotent to impart real material, structural change. Years of media propaganda, culture wars and identity politics further aggravate divisions among the people and prevent any form of class consciousness that can challenge our political and economic elites from arising.

“Wokeists” take their frustrations out on those who can be a helping hand, like police officers, in advancing a better world built on the 1948 U.N. Declaration of Human Rights.

As the last remnants of our democracy vanish, the elite on both sides of the political spectrum collude with their corporate masters to secure endless wealth, profit and power. These clever elites’ preferred strategy to secure endless power is class division — with ever newer and more creative ways to divide us.

Wokeism is their useful and divisive ideology, along with their other ill-conceived concepts like diversity and inclusion (which are almost never truly diverse nor inclusive). Those who refuse to submit to their secular gospel get censored and banished to purgatory.

Many privileged media pundits and woke, liberal, feminist academics (who are usually neither woke, left nor feminist) serve as the tools of corporate oligarchy — “useful idiots” who exacerbate class division.

In what public intellectual Chris Hedges calls “woke imperialism,” identity politics and diversity serve as “gimmicks” mainstream journalists and academics use to further their careers exploiting the suffering of “Black” and “brown” people while doing “boutique activism” that never solves our structural problems and furthers division among the people. As Hedges states:

The militarists, corporatists, oligarchs, politicians, academics and media conglomerates champion identity politics and diversity because it does nothing to address the systemic injustices or the scourge of permanent war that plague the U.S. It is an advertising gimmick, a brand, used to mask mounting social inequality and imperial folly. It busies liberals and the educated with a boutique activism, which is not only ineffectual but exacerbates the divide between the privileged and a working class in deep economic distress. The haves scold the have-nots for their bad manners, racism, linguistic insensitivity and garishness, while ignoring the root causes of their economic distress. The oligarchs could not be happier.

Among the American people, including police officers, we have an “us against them” mentality that is real but misplaced. We’ve learned to resent or distrust our own brothers and sisters based on concepts like race, gender, sexual orientation, sex, ethnicity, documentation status, political affiliation and so forth. While the political and corporate elite pull the strings, wokeists happily play their tune.

Many universities (especially within the humanities and liberal arts), that once stood for debate and critique, now cower to power, evade real debate and refuse to confront the great challenges facing our civilization while they descend into the emptiness of identity politics and cancel culture. According to the great banished scholar Norman Finkelstein, identity politics lacks intellectual substance, and further, prevents class solidarity from emerging that unites people to create real structural change. In his latest book on cancel culture, Finkelstein argues that Barack Obama and his “obedient followers” serve as the quintessential example of identity politics’ final product, that is, standing for nothing except skin color and a hip veneer (and an ingenuine, plastic smile, I might add) while supporting the “corrupt status quo.” This status quo is the support for those political and economic elites that Adam Smith calls the “masters of mankind,” who abandoned the American people.

While identity politics serve as a tool to divide us, our real enemies are those political and economic elites who use these tools to wage class warfare against the American people. They seek endless profit, war, power and domination — whatever the cost.

Working- and middle-class Americans are on the same team. We need to put aside our relatively petty differences and unite under common causes that advance our collective interests.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald explains what became of our mainstream journalists — an explanation that can be further applied to mainstream academics:

They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers: the military-industrial complex, the CIA and FBI, the clandestine security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley monopolies, the corrupted and lying corporate media outlets they serve. So settling on this penny-ante, trivial bullshit — tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing: all in the most anti-intellectual, adolescent and primitive ways — is all they have. It’s all they are. It’s why they have fully earned the contempt and distrust in which the public holds them.

It's unfortunate, and breaks the heart of this romantic liberal arts scholar, but many of my fellow academics have fallen into these sophomoric, churlish acts of “tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing: all in the most anti-intellectual, adolescent and primitive ways.” They do this in the most cowardly fashion behind the backs of their own colleagues, just like they do to the police who protect them. As English philosopher Aldous Huxley stated: “The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation,' the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”

Attacking police and unorthodox scholars have become the delicious moral treats wokeists devour. In their performative, sacramental rituals and chants, they want to force their “wokeist” secular faith on the masses and cast out the demons who challenge their dogma and orthodoxy. But we will not waver until personal belief meets objective reality.

While I’ve personally, as an unconventional scholar and Cuban American, experienced this passive-aggressive, cowardly, “behind your back” bullying and maltreatment, I know that so-called wokeists are not my enemy; indeed, we are on the same side. They are my brothers and sisters, too, in class solidarity. They are our brothers and sisters.

Wokeist liberals, a misnomer, attack real leftist and unorthodox academics, Trump supporters and conservative scholars, as well as their favorite targets today: police officers and conservative Americans. They attack anyone who does not agree with their political orthodoxy, identity politics, anti-intellectual ideology and virtue-signaling.

Police officers, while these wokeists might be annoying, and perhaps worse, they are not our real enemy. They, like many of us, have lost control of their ability to shape the world beyond their cultural milieux and the private orbit of their own lives. They, too, are concerned about an uncertain future where nothing is guaranteed. They, too, fight desperately to hold on to all the fading securities and promises many of us once enjoyed.

I’ve forgiven the wokeists for their unwarranted attacks and baseless accusations. I believe police officers too must forgive and find common ground with the people — including those you police and the wokeists scapegoating you — to develop a sense of solidarity to confront the challenges of an increasingly uncertain world. You can rise above their pettiness and serve as examples of what true solidarity looks like in this age of discontent. With class unity, we can put aside our differences and fight together against our true oppressors to create a world in our collective image.

I’ve been working on the idea of transforming policing from mainly an institution of social control to a human rights organization that protects and serves the American people — all of us. I believe police officers can spread their wings to usher in meaningful change in the world. Just like the best teachers do the hard work of giving the youth life-changing, mind-blowing critical educations that foster new ways of thinking, the best police officers can lift up their communities while keeping people safe and protecting their human rights from those who seek to prevent the enjoyment of these rights.

My message is to forgive and lead through example.

We must rise above identity politics to understand that diversity means nothing when used as a tool against the people. As Hedges states, “Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.” Let’s not fall for the con. Let’s forgive our wokeist brothers and sisters and extend a hand in solidarity to solve structural problems that cause crime, homelessness, addiction, domestic abuse, inequality and exclusion. They might still attack us with their misguided, anti-intellectual views (indeed, they show little desire to reduce the gap between their personal beliefs and objective truth), but eventually, with effort and strong example, they may one day join us in solidarity. Remember, people are verbs, highly fluid, constantly changing and always able to become more. If we lead by example, perhaps they will put down their cancel culture and identity politics, and all the “tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing” and, perhaps, they will become serious adults and join us in doing the business of making the world better for us all. I don’t ask what I’m not willing to do myself. I will join you in solidarity, and for this humble scholar, my belief in you is unwavering. Our promised land is human rights and solidarity is the path.

Police officers, can you forgive and become exemplars of unity? If so, we can end division, and together, unite the people to the promise land.

Dr. Peter Marina is a sociologist and criminologist at the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. Along with his father, (retired) Lieutenant Pedro Marina, he teaches human rights policing to law enforcement professionals throughout the United States. He is author of the Human Rights Policing: Reimagining Law Enforcement in the 21st Century with Routledge Press (2022).