How can we protect free speech in professional environments
Can employees resist woke indoctrination in their workplace without being penalised? A series of legal rulings in Britain suggests the answer now is “yes”. This could upend the entire edifice of compulsory critical theory-based diversity training, a hallmark of what Doug Stokes terms the “grievance-industrial complex”.
The concept of wokeness seems to sit at the heart of the present turbulence in our social, working and political lives. Even invoking the word “woke” is prone to induce strong, visceral reactions in those who have an interest in the ongoing culture war. We define it as the sacralisation of historically disadvantaged race, gender and sexual minority groups. From this, it follows that anything that can be interpreted as offending a hypothetically sensitive member of such a group, or opposing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies designed to assist such groups, is an offence against the sacred — punishable by cancellation. Woke reinforces a left-wing ideology of cultural socialism, which demands equal results for identity groups as well as the need to protect them from even micro-emotional harms.
Disagreeing publicly with the core precepts of cultural socialism can leave you facing social opprobrium and risking the loss of your employment. It is the third rail of our society, but the beliefs with which it is associated are deeply held and touch upon perhaps the most profound aspects of that society and human existence more generally. Most who oppose woke do so from the standpoint of cultural liberalism, elevating equal treatment, due process, free speech, conscience rights, and the pursuit of objective truth above equal outcomes and emotional safety. Cultural conservatives largely overlap with this position, but they tend to emphasise the importance of national and majority ethnic identities and symbols alongside traditional conceptions of the gender binary, family or forms of language.
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Eric Kaufmann is professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute. James Murray is Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham.
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