History of a notion. Few words have so marked our time. The controversy surrounding it is so strong that no more ambivalence is accepted, it is necessary to embrace or reject what it embodies: to recognize the existence of a white privilege or to defend universalism. This word, “Woke”, was however unknown in France until recently. The term comes from the slang of African Americans and laudatory designates a state of awakening and alert in the face of the oppression that weighs on people from ethnic, sexual, religious, etc. minorities.
Woke spread in the early 2010s thanks to the Black Lives Matter movement. Today, it has a completely different use, it serves above all to mock the radical left which, in the name of social justice, would sometimes practice a “Cancel culture” quick to censorship and intimidation. Intersectionality, a concept born in America and which intends to demonstrate how the different forms of exclusion interact, would provide the ideological framework for the woke discourse. As a result, in France as in the United States, freedom of expression would be particularly compromised in the universities, the press and the arts. A controversy that began more than thirty years ago is replayed in this way.
The “ravages” of political correctness
“Although this movement was born out of a laudable wish to sweep away the debris of racism, sexism and hatred, it is replacing old prejudices with new ones”, declared George Bush Sr. in… 1991. President of the United States, he delivered a speech against the ravages of ” politically correct “ in higher education institutions. Nothing has changed, except that we said then ” politically correct “ (or PC) rather than “Woke”.
The term “political correctness” itself has a meandering history. Coming from Leninist vocabulary, it was then used to endorse opinions deemed faithful to the official line. Then, at the end of the 1970s and 1980s, “PC” began to be used by the centrist left to mock the zeal of so-called righteous progressives, often inspired by the “French Theory”, the postmodern philosophy associated with Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze. The whole of the left then reviews its priorities.
The defense of the rights of blacks, women and homosexuals now occupies a greater place. At the time, certain expressions were suddenly banned from campuses. We no longer say “Blacks”, but “African Americans”. American universalism is replaced by multiculturalism. It is no longer appropriate then to say “High School Girls”, But “High School Women” (not “girls”, but rather “women attending high school”), as the American essayist and journalist Paul Berman reminds us, in the introduction to the collective book he edited on the subject “Debating PC The Controversy over political correctness on college campuses” (“The PC under debate, the political correctness controversy at the university”, untranslated, Laurel, 1992). Intellectuals also sought to open the literary canon to include works produced by non-white authors. Others saw in it the pangs of a dangerous cultural relativism. The 1990s are deeply marked by these debates, Philip Roth (1933-2018) draws a magnificent novel, Task (Gallimard, 2002, foreign Medici prize).
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