Interesting thoughts. The contemporary use of the term “woke” seems to me to have less to do with “being vigilant” (in the sense of “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”) and more to do with “having awakened from false consciousness” in a pseudo-Marxian or quasi-religious sense (the left-wing equivalent of being red-pilled on the right). The more “neutral” term “social justice” makes it explicit: there is a rejection of liberal notions of procedural justice in favour of a different (in my view incoherent) approach to politics. Whatever the etymology of the word “woke”, I think overidentification of the phenomenon with Black Americans is unhelpful – the same dynamics can be seen among feminists and queer rights activists: once legal equality was achieved, activists focused their energy on driving social change in ways that often turned out to be counterproductive.
Thanks! I don't disagree with your concern here, and in fact I thought of myself as settling premises that could support a fuller argument for your main suggestion here that '“woke” seems to me to have less to do with “being vigilant” (in the sense of “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”) and more to do with “having awakened from false consciousness” in a pseudo-Marxian or quasi-religious sense.' I didn't engage with that claim directly and I'm not quite ready to, but I think it poses an important argument to settle in time.
Specifically, I see my letter as giving reasons why what you've called an "unhelpful overidentification" would prevail despite its intellectual flaws: it was instrumentally helpful for different political goals than "think and describe what's happening clearly" to the opponents of Social Justice on both left and right. I intentionally left a lot of detail out of my description, for instance what exactly "felt like a usurpation" about the new Social Justice uses of woke. One of those details was the specters of Marxism and pseudo-Marxism.
I'm a little surprised by this "grammatically grating" thing.
"Woke" is a legitimate past-tense verb ("he woke me"), and it common to freely regard past-tense verbs as adjectives, so I don't see why "woke" should be grating in any American dialect. "I am woke" should be like "I am pleased" or "I am insulted" or "I am surprised": in the state of having been X.
I contend that people don't find the word grating for grammatical reasons but instead that what they find grating is the chutzpah of someone claiming to be awakened, enlightened. If I claim to be enlightened, that's a bit grating (unless you buy it). Isn't that really what's happening here?
Thanks for the comment! Always happy to clarify weird-seeming premises respectfully.
In American English, "I am awake" has been the standard expression rather than "I am woke" even if "I am surprised" is normal. "Woke" wasn't far off standard grammar, which is why it was viable dialect, but it definitely was dialect. "Stay awake" and "stay surprised" would have been usual English, but not "stay woke." Irregular verbs may be annoying or weird to rational language modelers, but speakers get attached to their irregular verbs. I think the attachment is about creative solidarity personally, about how people maintain capacities to resist reduction of their societies to machine-like descriptions.
I would agree that today people find the word grating for the chutzpah reasons more often than the grammatical reasons, but I wasn't making any claims about the relative prevalence. I think both happen, both have happened, the patterns of their prevalence are socially heterogeneous, and that both the classes of reasons and their heterogeneities have been mechanistically important in the processes of social change. So I wouldn't agree there is "one or the other" "really happening here," because I think what's happening is crucially a mixture of both.
Does that clarify my intent and make my premises seem less surprising?
I agree that there's no reason it should be binary over the set of English speakers, but I also doubt it's binary in any given English speaker. I expect that for a person P who dislikes "woke," there is something like a number between 0 and 1 (or a point on the n-simplex) for how much that's because they dislike the grammar and how much it's because they dislike the chutzpah or the tribe of woke. I don't expect such a person to be able to report that number faithfully, and I'd be surprised if they loved the woke tribe, felt like the leaders of the woke tribe really were more enlightened or awake, but somehow thought these leaders had picked a grating word. I bet there's correlation, and the refusal to allow the coinage of a new, grammatically-fine irregular verb is more about the social implications than the word itself.
Absolutely. I tried to speak around these issues precisely in my letter by using indefinite causal language, but I didn't explicate it. The tough-to-analyze ways all these little correlations and variations add up weren't close enough to my main topic to include explicitly, but they're always on my mind when I write "Solidarity N" letters or make phase transition analogies, and I'd like to be doing a better job of explicating them in public. It's just going to take some time, practice, and groundwork. Nice description here.
“To wake,” “to awake”: two overlapping and (consequently )at times confusing verbs, one transitive, the other intransitive once upon a time and place, now merging in meaning and application. But yes, here a statement of a state of being.
One of the best examinations of the history of “woke” I’ve seen in a long time, and you integrated it well with other modern memetic shifts. Incredibly well done, thank you.
This is a really wonderful piece, even if I do feel a little (justifiably) indicted for my at-times lazy use of "woke", lol. The Nietzsche quote in the first part is really...uhh, the ink it would be printed with is worth more than its weight in gold.
I do agree that the historical and cultural connotations of a term deserve more salience in our discussions; eg, I always felt that "Obamacare" was an unnecessarily tendentious term for something that was indeed worked out during Obama's presidency but had the fingerprints of a zillion different interest groups on it. We could well have had "Clintoncare" if Hillary had had her way during Bill's presidency. Universal healthcare doesn't have to be viewed through the lens of "Dems and socialized medicine", as the term makes rather inevitable; it obviously isn't elsewhere in the world.
Likewise with "woke", I agree that the associated history of Black experience should be appreciated. But -- somewhat along the lines of what Mary Jane Eyre says -- I do think you're being a bit too gracious in steelmanning current proponents' usage of the term. While the right has turned it into an epithet and are now in the habit of disingenuously hurling it at all manners of things they dislike, I think the left is similarly undiscriminating in its use of it today. Erykah Badu, a contemporary godmother of the term (via her 2008 song "Master Teacher"), has stated that it has effectively been appropriated by the right for denigration, but her own definition (evoking wakefulness and self-awareness) is a lot less militant than that popular on the left (because the militancy is specifically related to the Black experience, and not meant for the virtue-signalling of progressive white people). (This is the best single article I can find currently: https://www.okayplayer.com/the-origin-of-woke-how-erykah-badu-and-georgia-anne-muldrow-sparked-the-stay-woke-era/451522)
I do readily concede that my use of "woke" and similar is quite like asking for an "abuse of notation" to be excused by and among those with similar perspectives and backgrounds. And I'm certainly wary of shorthands for speaking becoming shorthands for thinking. But often I limit myself to very narrow contexts, and expect to be generally understood (I usually am), and move on. I do have a response of sorts to your "pest ecology" post btw; it actually became its own gargantuan post, and I touch on my nihilism there.
Thanks! And please don't feel indicted; I'm really not the Effort Inquisition.
I don't think I'm steelmanning the Social Justice use of "woke" in this way: Erykah Badu is one of the Black vigilance tradition keepers who I credit with showing that the mid-Awokening Social Justice use of "woke" was vulnerable in this way that the right then took as an opening for weaponizing it. So that was definitely part of the story I was telling.
Speaking as a someone who has worked with physicists' path integrals and the renormalization group, I'll probably never be able to criticize anyone for abuse of notation. If notation had rights against abuse, all my old colleagues and I would be on a prison island somewhere awaiting execution. Context and indexicality are always key, and if you're getting understood and not annoying anybody too much in the process of being understood, it's fair use. There are different standards for journal publication than whiteboard work, and every so often someone needs to go through and re-rationalize the common notation in a field, but generally I'm not against these "lazinesses." I like to talk about the patterns and tradeoffs in terms of "logos and lethos" from this older letter "Visible and Forgotten Order," https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/visible-and-forgotten-order
Sometimes cultural and historical connotations deserve more attention and sometimes they're distractions. I try to prioritize bringing them out specifically where deliberations seem particularly broken, like "woke," or like I try to open library code specifically where I keep encountering bugs in programs I write using the library. (Health care is a topic where the deliberations do seem very broken, and it's a huge one. Might be something I get into in Arc 3; we'll see.)
Related to thought 2: The word "noticing" is fairly synonymous with "woke" or vigilant, and it's apparently a neo-nazi tag on social media, implying "noticing jewish influence."
Absolutely. These metaphors are all over the place. My experience was that in 2015–2017 antisemites were very fond of using "woke" for "are you woke on the Jewish Question" sort of provocations. Muddying the water by suggesting "woke" was "conspiracy theory just as bad as their own." Sort of incoherent politically, but that's what they do!
Personally, I am a big fan of cliches. One cannot always be awakening from slumber! Slumber is good; standing now on the precipice of baby #2, I will soon be looking back on it with deep yearning.
At that time I will be grateful for the unthinking dogmas by which I feed and clothe myself, and also drive my car without getting anyone killed.
Congrats on the kids! Hope all goes well with #2. I am just adapting to having #1 myself, and yes – sleep becomes incredibly precious, doesn't it. I wasn't speaking lightly about sleep in my conclusion!
The balance of sleep and wakefulness is where the most important action is, imo. I'm grateful for those unthinking regularities, too. I wrote one letter about a distinctive word I use for them, "lethos," here, which you may find interesting: https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/visible-and-forgotten-order
A superb piece of work. I’ll be rereading it carefully—especially since yesterday I wrote a kind of response note to Katherine Dee’s post on the Manosphere.
If ‘woke’ names a tradition of vigilance inseparable from a specific historical and linguistic body, what happens when the term becomes untranslatable? Does that vigilance survive as practice, or does it harden into a boundary marker that merely performs solidarity rather than enacts it?
In a language like Japanese, where ‘woke’ collapses into a pejorative like 意識高い系 (‘highly conscientious’ type), is this simply a failure of translation?
I’m truly grateful for this post; I’ll be returning to it again and again.
Generally I am skeptical that things are ever truly untranslatable, since translation always implies alteration to me. What I try to do is be careful about tracing exactly what changes, what is separable and not, and why; you may be interested in what I wrote in “The Tissues of Tradition” contrasting the meat of a tradition and the shell of a tradition, for instance. A tradition may survive as a shell of itself or as a mutation of itself, and the question “is that survival at all” really depends on the particular personal or communal stakes one cares about when making the judgment.
In the Japanese case, I don’t think it’s as much a failure of translation as rather a natural act of cultural boundary-setting in the course of translation: there are many comparable cases where English- and French-speaking intellectuals make sure to translate one another pejoratively! That kind of habit can come at the cost of mutual understanding between mutually foreign cultures, but just like sometimes an individual artist or scientist may shortsightedly feel a need to be unfair to peers and forerunners to maintain their own creative initiative, national cultures do the same to each other as well (and so do classes and subcultures within each nation).
Thank you again for your generous and nuanced reply. Your framing of translation as inherently transformative, and the “meat versus shell” distinction for traditions, has me rethinking what survives—or mutates—when concepts like wokecross linguistic and cultural boundaries.
In the Japanese context, where woke often collapses into 意識高い系 (‘highly conscientious’ type), your insight helps me see this less as a “failure” of translation than as a form of cultural boundary-setting, a natural process of adaptation that inevitably alters both meaning and social function.
This somehow resonates strongly with my reflections in the note I wrote in response to Katherine Dee’s post on the Manosphere (here (https://substack.com/@vstokyo/note/c-203324554?r=nsotk&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action)), where I focused on examples suited to Western readability—but now I see there’s a much richer terrain to explore. This includes Japanese-language media and subcultures, political theories, and phenomena such as incel versus otaku communities and hikikomori, which have spilled over into other developed countries, and how vigilance, performativity, and solidarity manifest differently across these contexts.
Your observations have inspired me to consider a dedicated post tracing how historically- and socially-rooted concepts survive, mutate, or harden into boundary markers across cultures. I’ll be returning to your essay repeatedly as I work through this, and it has already reshaped the questions I’m asking.
Great piece! A lot of this history is new to me — I don't think I encountered the term "woke" in the wild until it was being used as a pejorative label. It's given me a lot to think about, and one thought in particular I'm curious to hear your take on: Put bluntly, if "woke" includes moietic elements of a Black American vigilance tradition, could its assimilation into predominantly white liberal activist spaces be part of the explanation of some of the most excessive and destructive spirals of cancel culture? Just like when a species enters a new environment with different ecological pressures, it can enter a very different relationship to its environment than it had previously held, it seems like when a cultural practice passes group boundaries, it may also start to express new potentials. I often think of cancel culture in terms of purity practices, but it's quite compelling to consider it in terms of an imbalanced vigilance — vigilance that is very appropriate when turned outward in the fight against systemic racism (that is, when whites are part of the outgroup), but much less well-calibrated when turned inward (that is, when used by whites on themselves).
Ah, I meant to get back to this earlier! Thank you for the comment, and I do think this is an apt suggestion.
Another part of the pathology of the transfer of the tradition is that while a form of the general spirit of vigilance was transferred, most of the underlying inspiring information was not – the oral histories of oppression shared in person or in informal discussion were always a richer grounding for the African American vigilance traditions than the books and summaries that became available to most of the white audiences.
Something similar seems to have happened to the left's white preterite traditions of folk singing and folk vigilance back in the 60s and 70s, when many of the New Left took the now-recorded, now-mass-reproduced songs of the old folk left but without maintaining the old grounding personal stories that used to be told around them.
Interesting thoughts. The contemporary use of the term “woke” seems to me to have less to do with “being vigilant” (in the sense of “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”) and more to do with “having awakened from false consciousness” in a pseudo-Marxian or quasi-religious sense (the left-wing equivalent of being red-pilled on the right). The more “neutral” term “social justice” makes it explicit: there is a rejection of liberal notions of procedural justice in favour of a different (in my view incoherent) approach to politics. Whatever the etymology of the word “woke”, I think overidentification of the phenomenon with Black Americans is unhelpful – the same dynamics can be seen among feminists and queer rights activists: once legal equality was achieved, activists focused their energy on driving social change in ways that often turned out to be counterproductive.
Thanks! I don't disagree with your concern here, and in fact I thought of myself as settling premises that could support a fuller argument for your main suggestion here that '“woke” seems to me to have less to do with “being vigilant” (in the sense of “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”) and more to do with “having awakened from false consciousness” in a pseudo-Marxian or quasi-religious sense.' I didn't engage with that claim directly and I'm not quite ready to, but I think it poses an important argument to settle in time.
Specifically, I see my letter as giving reasons why what you've called an "unhelpful overidentification" would prevail despite its intellectual flaws: it was instrumentally helpful for different political goals than "think and describe what's happening clearly" to the opponents of Social Justice on both left and right. I intentionally left a lot of detail out of my description, for instance what exactly "felt like a usurpation" about the new Social Justice uses of woke. One of those details was the specters of Marxism and pseudo-Marxism.
I'm a little surprised by this "grammatically grating" thing.
"Woke" is a legitimate past-tense verb ("he woke me"), and it common to freely regard past-tense verbs as adjectives, so I don't see why "woke" should be grating in any American dialect. "I am woke" should be like "I am pleased" or "I am insulted" or "I am surprised": in the state of having been X.
I contend that people don't find the word grating for grammatical reasons but instead that what they find grating is the chutzpah of someone claiming to be awakened, enlightened. If I claim to be enlightened, that's a bit grating (unless you buy it). Isn't that really what's happening here?
Thanks for the comment! Always happy to clarify weird-seeming premises respectfully.
In American English, "I am awake" has been the standard expression rather than "I am woke" even if "I am surprised" is normal. "Woke" wasn't far off standard grammar, which is why it was viable dialect, but it definitely was dialect. "Stay awake" and "stay surprised" would have been usual English, but not "stay woke." Irregular verbs may be annoying or weird to rational language modelers, but speakers get attached to their irregular verbs. I think the attachment is about creative solidarity personally, about how people maintain capacities to resist reduction of their societies to machine-like descriptions.
I would agree that today people find the word grating for the chutzpah reasons more often than the grammatical reasons, but I wasn't making any claims about the relative prevalence. I think both happen, both have happened, the patterns of their prevalence are socially heterogeneous, and that both the classes of reasons and their heterogeneities have been mechanistically important in the processes of social change. So I wouldn't agree there is "one or the other" "really happening here," because I think what's happening is crucially a mixture of both.
Does that clarify my intent and make my premises seem less surprising?
I agree that there's no reason it should be binary over the set of English speakers, but I also doubt it's binary in any given English speaker. I expect that for a person P who dislikes "woke," there is something like a number between 0 and 1 (or a point on the n-simplex) for how much that's because they dislike the grammar and how much it's because they dislike the chutzpah or the tribe of woke. I don't expect such a person to be able to report that number faithfully, and I'd be surprised if they loved the woke tribe, felt like the leaders of the woke tribe really were more enlightened or awake, but somehow thought these leaders had picked a grating word. I bet there's correlation, and the refusal to allow the coinage of a new, grammatically-fine irregular verb is more about the social implications than the word itself.
Absolutely. I tried to speak around these issues precisely in my letter by using indefinite causal language, but I didn't explicate it. The tough-to-analyze ways all these little correlations and variations add up weren't close enough to my main topic to include explicitly, but they're always on my mind when I write "Solidarity N" letters or make phase transition analogies, and I'd like to be doing a better job of explicating them in public. It's just going to take some time, practice, and groundwork. Nice description here.
“To wake,” “to awake”: two overlapping and (consequently )at times confusing verbs, one transitive, the other intransitive once upon a time and place, now merging in meaning and application. But yes, here a statement of a state of being.
One of the best examinations of the history of “woke” I’ve seen in a long time, and you integrated it well with other modern memetic shifts. Incredibly well done, thank you.
Thank you!
This is a really wonderful piece, even if I do feel a little (justifiably) indicted for my at-times lazy use of "woke", lol. The Nietzsche quote in the first part is really...uhh, the ink it would be printed with is worth more than its weight in gold.
I do agree that the historical and cultural connotations of a term deserve more salience in our discussions; eg, I always felt that "Obamacare" was an unnecessarily tendentious term for something that was indeed worked out during Obama's presidency but had the fingerprints of a zillion different interest groups on it. We could well have had "Clintoncare" if Hillary had had her way during Bill's presidency. Universal healthcare doesn't have to be viewed through the lens of "Dems and socialized medicine", as the term makes rather inevitable; it obviously isn't elsewhere in the world.
Likewise with "woke", I agree that the associated history of Black experience should be appreciated. But -- somewhat along the lines of what Mary Jane Eyre says -- I do think you're being a bit too gracious in steelmanning current proponents' usage of the term. While the right has turned it into an epithet and are now in the habit of disingenuously hurling it at all manners of things they dislike, I think the left is similarly undiscriminating in its use of it today. Erykah Badu, a contemporary godmother of the term (via her 2008 song "Master Teacher"), has stated that it has effectively been appropriated by the right for denigration, but her own definition (evoking wakefulness and self-awareness) is a lot less militant than that popular on the left (because the militancy is specifically related to the Black experience, and not meant for the virtue-signalling of progressive white people). (This is the best single article I can find currently: https://www.okayplayer.com/the-origin-of-woke-how-erykah-badu-and-georgia-anne-muldrow-sparked-the-stay-woke-era/451522)
I do readily concede that my use of "woke" and similar is quite like asking for an "abuse of notation" to be excused by and among those with similar perspectives and backgrounds. And I'm certainly wary of shorthands for speaking becoming shorthands for thinking. But often I limit myself to very narrow contexts, and expect to be generally understood (I usually am), and move on. I do have a response of sorts to your "pest ecology" post btw; it actually became its own gargantuan post, and I touch on my nihilism there.
Thanks! And please don't feel indicted; I'm really not the Effort Inquisition.
I don't think I'm steelmanning the Social Justice use of "woke" in this way: Erykah Badu is one of the Black vigilance tradition keepers who I credit with showing that the mid-Awokening Social Justice use of "woke" was vulnerable in this way that the right then took as an opening for weaponizing it. So that was definitely part of the story I was telling.
Speaking as a someone who has worked with physicists' path integrals and the renormalization group, I'll probably never be able to criticize anyone for abuse of notation. If notation had rights against abuse, all my old colleagues and I would be on a prison island somewhere awaiting execution. Context and indexicality are always key, and if you're getting understood and not annoying anybody too much in the process of being understood, it's fair use. There are different standards for journal publication than whiteboard work, and every so often someone needs to go through and re-rationalize the common notation in a field, but generally I'm not against these "lazinesses." I like to talk about the patterns and tradeoffs in terms of "logos and lethos" from this older letter "Visible and Forgotten Order," https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/visible-and-forgotten-order
Sometimes cultural and historical connotations deserve more attention and sometimes they're distractions. I try to prioritize bringing them out specifically where deliberations seem particularly broken, like "woke," or like I try to open library code specifically where I keep encountering bugs in programs I write using the library. (Health care is a topic where the deliberations do seem very broken, and it's a huge one. Might be something I get into in Arc 3; we'll see.)
Related to thought 2: The word "noticing" is fairly synonymous with "woke" or vigilant, and it's apparently a neo-nazi tag on social media, implying "noticing jewish influence."
Absolutely. These metaphors are all over the place. My experience was that in 2015–2017 antisemites were very fond of using "woke" for "are you woke on the Jewish Question" sort of provocations. Muddying the water by suggesting "woke" was "conspiracy theory just as bad as their own." Sort of incoherent politically, but that's what they do!
Personally, I am a big fan of cliches. One cannot always be awakening from slumber! Slumber is good; standing now on the precipice of baby #2, I will soon be looking back on it with deep yearning.
At that time I will be grateful for the unthinking dogmas by which I feed and clothe myself, and also drive my car without getting anyone killed.
Congrats on the kids! Hope all goes well with #2. I am just adapting to having #1 myself, and yes – sleep becomes incredibly precious, doesn't it. I wasn't speaking lightly about sleep in my conclusion!
The balance of sleep and wakefulness is where the most important action is, imo. I'm grateful for those unthinking regularities, too. I wrote one letter about a distinctive word I use for them, "lethos," here, which you may find interesting: https://blackthornhedge.substack.com/p/visible-and-forgotten-order
A superb piece of work. I’ll be rereading it carefully—especially since yesterday I wrote a kind of response note to Katherine Dee’s post on the Manosphere.
If ‘woke’ names a tradition of vigilance inseparable from a specific historical and linguistic body, what happens when the term becomes untranslatable? Does that vigilance survive as practice, or does it harden into a boundary marker that merely performs solidarity rather than enacts it?
In a language like Japanese, where ‘woke’ collapses into a pejorative like 意識高い系 (‘highly conscientious’ type), is this simply a failure of translation?
I’m truly grateful for this post; I’ll be returning to it again and again.
Thank you! And good questions.
Generally I am skeptical that things are ever truly untranslatable, since translation always implies alteration to me. What I try to do is be careful about tracing exactly what changes, what is separable and not, and why; you may be interested in what I wrote in “The Tissues of Tradition” contrasting the meat of a tradition and the shell of a tradition, for instance. A tradition may survive as a shell of itself or as a mutation of itself, and the question “is that survival at all” really depends on the particular personal or communal stakes one cares about when making the judgment.
In the Japanese case, I don’t think it’s as much a failure of translation as rather a natural act of cultural boundary-setting in the course of translation: there are many comparable cases where English- and French-speaking intellectuals make sure to translate one another pejoratively! That kind of habit can come at the cost of mutual understanding between mutually foreign cultures, but just like sometimes an individual artist or scientist may shortsightedly feel a need to be unfair to peers and forerunners to maintain their own creative initiative, national cultures do the same to each other as well (and so do classes and subcultures within each nation).
Very glad to have you reading.
Thank you again for your generous and nuanced reply. Your framing of translation as inherently transformative, and the “meat versus shell” distinction for traditions, has me rethinking what survives—or mutates—when concepts like wokecross linguistic and cultural boundaries.
In the Japanese context, where woke often collapses into 意識高い系 (‘highly conscientious’ type), your insight helps me see this less as a “failure” of translation than as a form of cultural boundary-setting, a natural process of adaptation that inevitably alters both meaning and social function.
This somehow resonates strongly with my reflections in the note I wrote in response to Katherine Dee’s post on the Manosphere (here (https://substack.com/@vstokyo/note/c-203324554?r=nsotk&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action)), where I focused on examples suited to Western readability—but now I see there’s a much richer terrain to explore. This includes Japanese-language media and subcultures, political theories, and phenomena such as incel versus otaku communities and hikikomori, which have spilled over into other developed countries, and how vigilance, performativity, and solidarity manifest differently across these contexts.
Your observations have inspired me to consider a dedicated post tracing how historically- and socially-rooted concepts survive, mutate, or harden into boundary markers across cultures. I’ll be returning to your essay repeatedly as I work through this, and it has already reshaped the questions I’m asking.
Great piece! A lot of this history is new to me — I don't think I encountered the term "woke" in the wild until it was being used as a pejorative label. It's given me a lot to think about, and one thought in particular I'm curious to hear your take on: Put bluntly, if "woke" includes moietic elements of a Black American vigilance tradition, could its assimilation into predominantly white liberal activist spaces be part of the explanation of some of the most excessive and destructive spirals of cancel culture? Just like when a species enters a new environment with different ecological pressures, it can enter a very different relationship to its environment than it had previously held, it seems like when a cultural practice passes group boundaries, it may also start to express new potentials. I often think of cancel culture in terms of purity practices, but it's quite compelling to consider it in terms of an imbalanced vigilance — vigilance that is very appropriate when turned outward in the fight against systemic racism (that is, when whites are part of the outgroup), but much less well-calibrated when turned inward (that is, when used by whites on themselves).
Ah, I meant to get back to this earlier! Thank you for the comment, and I do think this is an apt suggestion.
Another part of the pathology of the transfer of the tradition is that while a form of the general spirit of vigilance was transferred, most of the underlying inspiring information was not – the oral histories of oppression shared in person or in informal discussion were always a richer grounding for the African American vigilance traditions than the books and summaries that became available to most of the white audiences.
Something similar seems to have happened to the left's white preterite traditions of folk singing and folk vigilance back in the 60s and 70s, when many of the New Left took the now-recorded, now-mass-reproduced songs of the old folk left but without maintaining the old grounding personal stories that used to be told around them.