A product of a prestigious prep school and then Harvard University, William Melvin Kelley gained critical acclaim with his first novel- 'A Different Drummer'- published in 1962 when he was 24. Though talented, his subsequent books became increasingly difficult to read. People assumed the guy was either on LSD or else was a Professor of Creative writing publishing punitively post modern texts so as to bamboozle his MFA students into thinking that what they were doing was as prestigious and arcane as Quantum Physics. We only remember him now because he is credited with popularizing the term 'woke'.
What does it mean? Apparently it has something to do with the crackpot Thoreau. To be woke is to be vigilant- if not paranoid- in antagonomia defined as 'the choice to take an eccentric stand in the face of commonly shared assumptions' regarding what is self and what is other. It may also be considered a sort of disorder of the self, a condition of diminished 'ipseity' and dazzlement with 'alterity'. Basically, it allows you to gas on about how everybody else is totally complicit in all sorts of bad shit. Sadly, it isn't directly related to dealing in recreational drugs and thus only reappears during periods when young people are too timid, dispirited, or envious of affluence, to commit to getting wasted wholeheartedly.
Kelley, who married a distinguished artist, appears to have left America- disappointed perhaps with what was happening with the Civil Rights Movement- but did not wholly assimilate to any other culture- including that of a Caribbean Kelley saw as sleepy and stagnant- not woke in any way.
However, his family converted to Judaism after he smoked ganja in Jamaica before eventually returning to New York. By then his books had become unreadable. He wasn't able to get a Welfare check because, as he says, the System favored single mothers in a manner adverse to African American married life. Thus Kelley was one of the few Harvard alumni who experienced real poverty in Reagan's America. Then he got a teaching gig at Sarah Lawrence and was able to re-enter a Black bourgeoisie determined to, in the best approved style, mythologize its Revolutionary moment in a manner precisely calculated to forestall its repetition.
I suppose Kelley's experience of real deprivation inoculated him against crack or a penchant for sexual harassment- the 'snakes' lying in wait for African American activist intellectuals who had been more focused on climbing ladders.
My memory, from College days, is that Kelley was dismissed as 'high-brow'. I imagined he was a Professor at some very tony Private College. Also, I was under the impression that he was light skinned. Back then, there was a theory that a handful of well educated coloreds who could 'pass' had been granted a license by 'the Man' to write silly books- e.g. depicting an American South abandoned by former slaves- for some Machiavellian purpose. But Kelley was actually a literary artist experimenting in the Joycean mode. Apparently, he had had trouble reading- his very progressive Prep school had not indoctrinated him in the 3 Rs- but excelled in song and drama.
The music of dialogue, New York's rich diversity of accents, attracted him. Perhaps his work was intelligible to his peers. Or perhaps nothing is intelligible at all. If there is what Du Bois called Double Consciousness, why should not everything remain perpetually dazzled by the equally dazzled glance of what it gazes upon? Around the time that Kelley became unreadable, Foucault and Deleuze and Derrida and so forth, had divorced phenomenology from what Lewin called Genidentity- i.e. duration or development over time. Everything had been frozen in place. Marxism, in gaining a sophisticated mathematical expression, had become the dual of Cowles Commission stasis. William Lawvere and one or two other voices in the wilderness were, it is true, trying to show how 'adjointness' and category theory and Grothendieck's work and so forth could once again make Hegel intelligible and progressive. But nobody was interested. Kelley, by converting to Judaism- god alone knows what Grothendieck was converting to (unless it was his own dream of god)- seems to have taken a saner course. He went back to teaching and died in 2017. By then, the term 'wokeness' had become a threat to the Enlightenment values which the 'Talented Tenth' had always espoused. Soon enough, Obama was warning against 'wokeness'; a meme was so well established that the film 'Undercover Brother II' depicted an evil plot by 'the Man' to poison the ghetto with hyper-wokeness.
Clearly, given that Obama and his ilk had set their faces against the thing, it was time for the most worthless type of academic philosopher to glom on to wokeness and try to advance their career by it. This was at a time when Higher Education in non-STEM subjects were resiling from the obviously foolish claim that they could do any thing more useful than provide a 'safe space' for snowflakes. The Liberal Arts were a case of 'Special Education'.
Acknowledging this new reality posed no existential threat to the Liberal world view. After all, African American economists and jurists and political scientists were concentrating on painstaking, unglamorous, but very constructive work- e.g compiling Statistical evidence and finding Juristic mechanisms for 'pattern and practice' investigations followed by 'consent decree' based reform. So what if those who didn't study Statistics or Data Science regressed to a level of infantile incontinence? Some Billionaire would hire them to work for some Vanity Foundation.
I suppose, back in 2014, Liberals had some reason to be complacent. Hillary was bound to win, so why not engage in histrionics while Obama, with no drama, continued to pilot the whole Nation towards a more equitable, but also more prosperous, common future? What could go wrong? The answer is that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Trump was the mean girl on Twitter who, nevertheless, woke the great mass of unloved White peeps to their condition as 'deplorables'.
It may be that Kelley's oeuvre wasn't about 'double consciousness'. It was about the need for love across both sides of a horrible history of the heart. Trump, in the view of the philosopher Jason Stanley, was a demagogue- a Fascist dictator in all but name. What had secured Trump's hold on the Republican party? Surely, it was the seeming unconditionality of his love for 'the poorly educated'? But then Clinton too had some such quality as did the 'born again' Dubya. They had a secret and solacing face turned towards the sufferings of Suburbia.
It could be argued that three 'boomer Presidents'- born in the same year- had, in blind hubris, undermined the economic, military and diplomatic foundations of post-War America's 'exorbitant privilege'-i.e. the 'Seigniorage' it received for securing Freedom.
Clinton had lovingly opened the door for China's rise and Dubya had lovingly ensured that Russia and Pakistan and even Iran should gain from his stupid wars while North Korea- like Iran, explicitly named as his next target- turned into a nuclear power with Pakistani help. Obama may have made mistakes but his instincts were sound enough. At least, he managed to restore American moral legitimacy. Then Trump happened. It may be that because of his unusual skill-set, Trump could have continued to pursue American national interest in an effective manner. His trick was to be nasty to get what he wanted but then to shower everybody with love. Now we have Biden who has no love to give and who waxes lachrymose about his son Beau. The world owes America. If you want to be part of Biden's club you have to pay so America can be great again. This may have also been Trump's proffer. But Trump would say he loved you very much and you were the tops while he was pumping and preparing to dump you. Biden, on the other hand, will scold you about Human Rights while expecting you to fight China by ruining your economy and subsidizing a lawless, tax dodging, type of American tech company.
Biden isn't a boomer. He belongs to the 'silent generation'. It now appears that 'Sleepy Joe' has killed off 'exorbitant privilege'. America is no longer the leader of the free world. It is not the 'defender of last resort' but the first in line for evacuation from any situation which looks a bit dicey. It may be that America already suffers from a sort of 'stagflation' and that it is determined to rebuild its high value adding sectors by decimating the economies of its allies. This is the Marshall Plan in reverse.
The Biden doctrine is that American soldiers mustn't be put in harm's way. He has turned the clock back to a year or two before he was born. If American troops are on your soil, either you defend them or America will instruct you to surrender in such a manner that those troops can be evacuated safely- but slowly and at the Administration's convenience. Of course, if you violate Human Rights in putting down an insurgency, then America will scold you and sanction you and think about regime change.
It is true that Biden later reiterated American Treaty commitments to NATO. But then the fool extended this to Taiwan where America prefers to maintain ambiguity. This mistake was corrected. But others weren't. In April, Biden referred to the President of Afghanistan as Mr. Ghani. In the East, much is read into the use of titles. If Ghani wasn't running Afghanistan, who was? Were the Americans breaking the Doha deal? Biden said in his speech that he was abiding by Trump's commitment to get his troops out by May. But in the very next sentence, he said he would begin pulling them out from May onwards. What signal was he sending? Had the Americans secretly put in a fighting man- not a useless academic- and were they going to replace their war-weary troops with cheap mercenaries from elsewhere in their vast sphere of influence? If Iran could get poor Afghan Shias to fight in Syria, why should America not replace its very expensive troops with savage warriors from yet poorer part of the world?
The answer to these questions is now clear. The Biden doctrine is 'run away'. Allies must not protect themselves because that could be against Human Rights or Nuclear non-proliferation or something of that sort. But Allies must destroy their own economies to harm China. In return, America won't shower you with love. It will scold you. It will weep about this Beau or that Betty who served abroad in the military and then died of cancer or get hit by a bus or something of that sort. The Free World has been getting a free ride from America! Repay us you fucking Human Rights violating bastards!
Sleepy Joe has killed off wokeness. How? American soldiers, not its Ivy League students, are the real snowflakes. American bases, not campuses, must be made safe places. Cancel culture is cool only if it is about canceling treaty obligations or considerations of Great Power status. But the same 'wokeness' can apply domestically. America once ignored the fact that its precious soldiers and policemen sometimes got shot at! That was a clear violation of their Human Rights! Furthermore, some peeps said nasty things about them. That was like totes 'triggering'! Henceforth, soldiers and Federal agents of various types must get 'woke' to their rights. They must refuse to put up with harassment. Getting shot is like getting raped coz like guns are like penises and bullets are like sperm- y'know? So like our boys are getting raped! This must stop! We must put our soldiers and our policemen back into safe spaces where they can braid each other's hair and give each other the courage to deal with the trauma of almost being shot at if ever they had actually ever been sent out on patrol.
How can 'wokeness' and Grievance Studies compete when Biden starts weeping about Beau?
If America's foreign policy was, in Obama's words (from 2014) 'doing stupid shit', America's new status is that of the turd in the punch-bowl. Domestic policy will increasingly mirror Foreign policy. The truth is, Federal support for Civil Rights was motivated by America's need to keep the newly liberated 'dusky' countries on side. Now, Biden's America- running away from foreign entanglements- will not risk its neck for stuff like voting rights or Roe v Wade and so forth. The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court will be a fiasco. It has one or two people on it who, if not 'woke', are nevertheless quoted by the woke. So the thing is ab ovo useless just like the forthcoming Summit for Democracy where the woke were gleefully expecting to chastise all sorts of 'illiberal' leaders who could have been counted as allies till Biden spectacularly, and quite gratuitously, shat the bed.
Perhaps the problem with the 'woke' was their stridency and stupidity. Can a more honey tongued 'wokeness' work on Biden? No. He will immediately begin weeping and babbling about Beau. The message is 'why are you alive when my son is dead!'
Biden is the first and last 'silent generation' President. Gassire, the West African Prince who became a wandering griot, had a lute. It was silent. When his sons died it began to sing. As for Double Consciousness and the wokeness it once entailed, it arose from the plangency of that lute but, as Kelley perhaps chronicled, must subside into darker Blues.
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