The nation’s vehement rejection of identity politics made me recalibrate my own views about woke ideology.
It took me a moment to register the sound of scattered hissing at the Tocqueville Conversations—a two-day “taboo-free discussion” among public intellectuals about the crisis of Western democracies. More than 100 of us had gathered in a large tent set up beneath the window of Alexis de Tocqueville’s study, on the grounds of the 16th-century Château de Tocqueville, in coastal Normandy. I couldn’t remember hearing an audience react like this in such a forum.
The democratic crisis that the conference sought to address has many facets: the rise of the authoritarian right, metastasizing economic inequality, the pressures of climate change, and more. But the conference, held in September 2021, had mostly narrowed its focus to the American social-justice ideology that’s commonly referred to as “wokeness.” The person being hissed at that afternoon was Rokhaya Diallo, a French West African journalist, social-justice activist, and media personality in her mid-40s. (In America, she writes for The Washington Post.) Besides me, she was one of just a handful of nonwhite speakers and, to my knowledge, the sole practicing Muslim.
For many of us who had come to exchange ideas, the venue felt significant. The château, with its ivy-covered walls and swan-filled pond, lies far away from the intricacies of multicultural life in modern democracies. But Tocqueville was, of course, one of the world’s keenest interpreters of the American experiment. His classic two-volume text, Democracy in America, published in 1835 and 1840, explored the paradoxical nature of a vibrant new multiethnic society, founded on the principles of liberty and equality but compromised from the start by African slave labor and the theft of Indigenous land. Its author, while finding much to admire, remained skeptical that such powerful divisions could ever be transcended, because unlike in Europe, social rank was written into the physical features of the nation’s inhabitants.
Many who claim social justice as their ultimate goal insist that America has done little to challenge Tocqueville’s grim appraisal. In their view, some of the country’s cherished ideals—individualism, freedom of speech, even the Protestant work ethic—are in fact obstacles to equity, illusions spun by those who have power in order to keep it and hold the marginalized in their place. The woke left’s approach to addressing historical oppression—namely, prioritizing race and other categories of identity in a wide variety of political and institutional decisions—has stirred anxieties in the United States. But the concerns expressed at the Tocqueville estate were less about what this phenomenon means for America than what it might mean for France. As the saying goes, when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold.
The French have long prided themselves on having a system of government that doesn’t recognize racial or ethnic designations. The idea is to uphold a universal vision of what it means to be French, independent of race, ethnicity, and religion. Even keeping official statistics on race has, since the Holocaust, been impermissible. Recently, however, and to the alarm of many in the traditional French commentariat, American-style identity politics has piqued the interest of a new and more diverse generation.
And so I’d come to witness an extraordinary exchange—one that would not happen in the U.S. mainstream. Over the course of the conference, speakers had repeatedly debated whether what the French have termed le wokisme is a serious concern. A majority of the panelists and audience members, myself included, had answered more or less in the affirmative. Political organization around identity rather than ideology is one of the best predictors of civil strife and even civil war, according to an analysis of violent conflicts by the political scientist Barbara F. Walter. By pitting groups against one another in a zero-sum power struggle—and sorting them on a scale of virtue based on privilege and oppression—wokeness can’t help but elevate race and ethnicity to an extent that expands prejudice rather than reducing it, in the process fueling or, at minimum, providing cover for a violent and dangerous majoritarian reaction. That, at least, was the prevailing sense of the group.
As the last panel, “Media and Universities: In Need of Reform and Reassessment?,” got under way, Diallo took the opportunity to argue the opposite position. Onstage with her were a political scientist and two philosophy professors, one of whom was the moderator, Perrine Simon-Nahum. Diallo is a well-known and polarizing figure in France, a telegenic proponent of identity politics with a large social-media following. She draws parallels between the French and American criminal-justice systems (one of her documentaries is called From Paris to Ferguson), making the case that institutional racism afflicts her nation just as it does the U.S., most notably in discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing. Her views would hardly be considered extreme in America, but here she is seen in some quarters as a genuinely subversive agent.
Simon-Nahum opened the conversation with the question “How can we shape citizens in a democracy?” And what role should educational institutions and the media play? Were woke forces in universities and media striving to delegitimize elites, she continued, and to undermine the institutions of knowledge production? Were they “building a new totalitarianism of thought?” The woke ideal of disseminating knowledge “on an egalitarian platform,” she suggested, was neither possible nor even desirable.
“The circulation of knowledge is also the circulation of experiences,” Diallo responded. “Some minority experiences may be more visible” now thanks to social media. That poses a much-needed challenge to traditional “elite” knowledge production, which, she said, had “filtered out” certain perspectives in the past. This claim was indisputable. A few weeks after this conference, Emmanuel Macron would become the first French president to participate in commemorations of the 1961 massacre of Algerian protesters by police in Paris. Most French people I know had never encountered this event either in school or in traditional media.
The woke “have discovered new epistemologies,” Jean-François Braunstein, a philosophy professor at Panthéon-Sorbonne University, nonetheless retorted—theories of knowledge that validate feelings over facts. He called Diallo’s position “a staunch attack against science and against truth.” He appeared to want to expand the conversation’s scope beyond racial identity to encompass the dissolution of the gender binary, which was not a subject Diallo had been addressing. Simon-Nahum demurred but suggested that the larger disagreement about “the conception of knowledge” was still worrying; it justified fears that the French discourse was becoming Americanized.
Diallo replied that most people in attendance were likely “privileged,” and as such, disproportionately fearful of the “emergence of minority speech [from] people who indeed didn’t have access to certain clubs … and are questioning things that were considered” unquestionable.
“Of course we cannot experience what others experience,” Simon-Nahum responded, with seeming irritation—no longer moderating but fully entering the debate. And yet, we can understand it: “It’s called empathy,” she said, before sharply taking issue with Diallo’s point about privilege.
It was around that time, with Diallo isolated from the rest of the panel, that I started to notice the hissing, coming from the audience when she spoke. As the moderator refused to concede even the theoretical possibility that any knowledge can be derived from identity, I noticed Diallo’s expression growing distant. Simon-Nahum pressed on, referring to Diallo’s appeal to lived experience as not only misguided but a kind of “domination.” “This intellectual war that’s being waged is a threat to democracy,” she said. “I feel threatened … first and foremost [as] a citizen.”
Braunstein chimed in to say that Diallo’s argument reminded him of a quote by the extravagantly racist writer and Nazi collaborator Charles Maurras: “A Jew can never understand [Jean] Racine, because he’s not French!” (When Diallo objected, Braunstein said that he was not comparing her to Maurras.)……….