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Night at the Woke Museum
For all of six picoseconds, I considered a career in public history. It’s my great fortune that fate instead sent me into the regulatory-industrial complex, where I can (for now) generate paperwork free of the taint of left-wing cultural politics. I know the world of public history reasonably well. I spent time in graduate school studying American architecture — a subject joined at the hip to public history.
One summer, I even interned at the institution formerly known as the Ohio Historical Society. (It is now known, officially, as the “Ohio History Connection,” a pointless and obfuscating name I prefer not to use.) Like all state historical societies, the Ohio Historical Society has a blog. Nobody reads this blog, save for the archivists and interns who write the posts (and one or two of their teacher friends), but that’s hardly relevant since the site still gives us a peek into the minds of the second-tier intelligentsia who staff such institutions. Their astroturfing reveals what matters to them — what they find interesting and inspiring. It tells us, in short, where the action is.
And where is the action, you ask? Everyone these days knows the answer: in wokeness! OHS blog offerings from this spring include a multi-part series on “LGBTQ+ history” (complete with helpful tips for parents interested in introducing “allyship” to their children), pieces about “self-care” and “trauma,” explainers about climate change, paeans to Kamala Harris, cheerleading for women in STEM, and more. The blog’s “education” category quite literally consists of nothing but wokeness. No other subject is worth teaching, I guess.
The Ohio Historical Society also hosts genealogy workshops — semi-public lectures intended to help confused family historians navigate the dusty world of state archives. One upcoming workshop — titled “Where My Single Folk?” — will teach amateur genealogists to “create more inclusive family tree[s]” by “research[ing] unmarried, never married, widowed, [and] adventurous relatives.” (So boring, those nuclear families.) Another “cover[s] the direct and indirect ways genealogical and historical spaces have and have not been equitable,” while another equips researchers to see “clues in the genealogical record that may raise a ‘rainbow flag'” and sends them off “to find ancestors that may have been Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender or Queer.” (Great Uncle Bob did always have gaudy taste in clothing. We’re on to him!)
Anyhow, you get the idea. I could cite other examples in other cities and states — like the Chicago History Museum, which is mainly interested, at the moment, in driving away its white visitors. It’s much the same everywhere: an unending chant of “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion!” echoing through the stacks. Small-town and rural historical societies fare a little better than larger urban museums, but only because of their overwhelmingly elderly patrons — Baby Boomers (and older) bitten by the history bug around the time of the Bicentennial. As these people die off, the neon-haired move in.
It’s not surprising that large and relatively well-funded history museums should prostrate themselves before the idol of wokeness. They are, after all, filled with the credentialed, the brainy, and the do-gooding. But then, they’ve always been filled with such people. It was always the public-spirited and the nosy — the Karens of their day — who bothered to stand on the street corners with their picket signs, or who packed the museums in their reenactor’s garb. If anything, wokeness is just public-spiritedness transmogrified. The energy once channeled into the creation of our institutions has to go somewhere, now that the institutions are created. Western civilization is a walking corpse. If not for wokeness, it’d be a motionless one.
Just before wokeness burst onto the scene, the buzzword floating around American schools was “relevance.” “Like, how could Shakespeare possibly be relevant to me? It’s, like, 2014,” said every teenage girl in the land. This void — the void of irrelevance — is precisely what wokeness fills. Critical theory is one way of bringing the past into the present, and one way of answering the question, “Why should I care?” In a world marked by disaffection and atomization and aimless drifting, and a world in which everything worth doing has been done, it’s the only kind of history available to us.
I don’t mean to defend critical theory. I’d much rather defund it. But I think it’s a bit of a distraction from the real problem — a problem western civilization would face whether or not Michel Foucault or Nikole Hannah-Jones had been born. That problem is Douthatian decadence: a “feeling that the future [is] not what was promised, that the frontiers have all been closed, and that the paths forward lead only to the grave.”
So, what is to be done? Nothing. Nothing at all.
Published in Culture
Conservatives were too busy poo-pooing teaching or encouraging our own kids in pursuing excellence in liberal arts degrees that we ostensibly abandoned these institutions to people who seriously need conservative boundaries on their excessively free spirits.
This is depressing. My only hope is in the knowledge that there are trends in historical studies, and this obsessive focus on identity groups will eventually pass.
You’re probably right about no one reading the OHS blog. There is hope in that fact as well. A competing institution, if it could be funded, could blow that away if it came to the issue with a different philosophy, a different focus. I don’t mean to suggest one that is obviously a response to wokism, that would be almost as bad, but just an alternative that brings in on other aspects of history. No institution dedicated to history can just ignore or deliberately downplay racism and discrimination, but it distorts history to focus only on that. Maybe an institution like that already exists, and just needs attention.
I refuse to accept your conclusion, although I can appreciate your pessimism. I have too much faith in this country and its people to think there is nothing to be done. If that were true, why even write on Ricochet? Why bother? You may not have hope, but I’ll bet you’d like to have hope, even a small glimmer. And my hope will not be crushed by the Woke elite.
I can’t recall when this infiltration began, where our history became so tainted that everything had to be scrubbed and re-engineered to portray something else (like Hilary’s old electronic devices). But it is “all-inclusive”, from gender to race, to climate, and everything in-between. You can feel its insidious influence – because it is signaling the end of the family, of faith in God and His goodness, exampled in Creation. The world being presented now is He made a lot of mistakes, including your sex at birth, and we need to correct it all.
We know from past history what happens when people try to remove God from his throne and sit themselves in it. We are in for it…..
Banning God from public life pushes more people to that conclusion.
So among the Woke, grammar be optional.
Excellent piece, Keph.
This matter of wokeness has been around longer than most people think. I saw the beginnings of it around 1975 when deans and other administrators at universities began to interpret affirmative action as little more than a hunt for women and blacks to hire.
I was on a hiring committee about that time, and we began to search resumes and supporting data for signs of blackness. We actually took the resumes of those we thought were white males and put them into a stack of applicants that we were not going to hire. The poor saps thought they had a shot at a job.
That is, universities became racist, or “woke,” institutions about that time. I wanted no part of it and told the department head that I didn’t want to be on any more hiring committees until they became fair to all applicants.
Any institution that celebrates the 100th anniversary of White Castle gets my vote.
People often say things are hopeless when they are plagued by hope and find it too painful to bear.
It is a black idiomatic formation designed to look hip. Never mind that it links race to out-of-wedlock births.
The only hope I have is kids rebelling from their parents
Completely agree. It was the mid/late 1970’s. That’s when I was a graduate student, and I could see it, too. New professorial hires had strange expertise, or no expertise at all, but began to fill out quotients for (at that time it was women/women’s studies and black/black studies) required diversity measures. I got out of academia shortly thereafter, but Mr/Dr She didn’t retire until 2003, and so I was very cognizant of the evolution of wokeness as it played out at what had hitherto been a rather conservative Catholic University. I suppose, taking the long view, that I should point out that a couple of the wilder hires in the English Department have, over the course of three or four decades, mellowed a bit, and even become quite rational in their views. But the rot continues, and probably at a faster pace than can be ameliorated by such things.
I found this amusing (the format, not the content) when I ran across it the other day, on the Google UK News page. I think it must have been linked to the main UK News page by mistake.
It’s an article from the BBC News Pidgin site.
Having grown up in West Africa, I used to be very good at Pidgin myself. But I never thought of it as a fully-formed language, or thought to list it as one of my spoken languages on a resume. A mistake, it appears. From Wikipedia:
And from the article:
Somehow, it makes a bit of a difference that the people speaking this version of English are engaging with it as a second language, and that makes me inclined to offer them a little more slack than that I give to someone who’s been through twelve grades of a New York public school and who still can’t put a coherent sentence together.
There’s a Hawaiian Creole translation of the Bible called . . . wait for it . . . Da Jesus Book. Here’s the opening of John:
Wow. That would make sense though, since I think Creole people, at least in the Eastern US, had a strong West African component to their background.
Not bad.
Or there is this.
Is ‘pipo’ legit?
As far as how it’s spoken, yes. I thought it was also interesting that in the “Hawaiian Creole” Pidgin Bible quoted in #14, the word is “peopo.” Same word.
Museums are in a tough spot. All that Western art. Basements filled to the ceiling with works that haven’t been rotated out in years. Big airy rooms devoted to Christian tableaus. Their original mission was accumulate the product of Western culture in all its eras and styles, as well as examples of other cultures to provide a sense of the world beyond Europe, to compare and contrast, expand the limits of one’s aesthetic assumptions. Now that’s a celebration of whiteness and a flagrant example of Orientalism, the colonial perspective.
Then: What to see.
Now: How to think.
It is perhaps worth noting that art in the Renaissance was nurtured and promoted when it illustrated the important text, and it was used to demonstrate piety. Art that didn’t illustrate the important text had to be defended against claims of immorality.
The same is true of Soviet Era art.
And more recently American art.