• The Tocqueville Conversations was a two-day “taboo-free discussion” among public intellectuals about the crisis of Western democracies, with a focus on the American social-justice ideology known as “wokeness.”
• Rokhaya Diallo, a French West African journalist, social-justice activist, and media personality, was one of the few nonwhite speakers and the sole practicing Muslim.
• The French have long prided themselves on having a system of government that doesn’t recognize racial or ethnic designations, but recently American-style identity politics has piqued the interest of a new and more diverse generation.
• During the conference, Diallo argued that minority experiences may be more visible now thanks to social media, which poses a challenge to traditional “elite” knowledge production.
• Diallo was isolated from the rest of the panel and hissed at by the audience, and the moderator refused to concede even the theoretical possibility that any knowledge can be derived from identity.
• The incident caused the author to recalibrate some of his assumptions and appreciate more keenly just how easily anti-wokeness can succumb to a dogmatism as rigid as the one it seeks to oppose.
• In France, the controversy over “le wokisme” is almost always a proxy for a deeper concern about Islam and terror on the European continent, and those seen as permissive of wokeness are presumed to be indulging “islamo-gauchisme.”
• France’s vehement reaction to wokeism is shaped by its complex relationship with America and its own history of homegrown jihad and concerns about domineering Yankee influence.
• The New York Times’ headline following the beheading of Samuel Paty was seen as exonerating his assassin, which was painful for many French people of all ethnicities and religious affiliations.
• Macron and Blanquer, the Minister of National Education, have been consistent and powerful opponents of woke ideology, believing that treating women and minority groups as different and special is antithetical to equality.
• Blanquer’s rigid devotion to the principle of universalism entails a certain blindness to often valid minority concerns.
• Activists and those listening to them have looked to America for a vocabulary to express what is happening in their own country, whether or not that vocabulary fully makes sense.
• In 2010, the U.S. State Department invited French politicians and activists to a leadership program to help them strengthen the voice and representation of ethnic groups that have been excluded from government.
• The French elections last spring showed that an identity-driven illiberalism long active on the right is gaining force on the left, with significant numbers of minority voters feeling ignored and misunderstood.
• The French mainstream is correct to note that wokeness is philosophically incoherent and dangerous, as it subordinates human psychology to sweeping platitudes and self-certain dictates.
• Cancel culture is real in the U.S. and has been toxic to debate and institutional decision making.
• Resistance to wokeism’s more ambitious designs has been widespread and ethnically diverse.
• Suppressing wokeism in France has not gone well either.
• The goal should be to achieve genuine universalism, rather than to eliminate difference.
• The challenge is to channel woke impulses responsibly, while refusing to succumb to the myopia of group identity.
• The French model of universal citizenship is superior in principle, but the American reflex to interpret social life through imperfect notions of identity can still perceive real experiences that otherwise get dismissed.
• The future belongs to the multiethnic society that finds a way to synthesize the French and American models.
Published February 4, 2023
Visit The Atlantic to read Thomas Chatterton Williams’s original post The French Are in a Panic Over <em>le Wokisme</em>
