(Dobbs) Some Are Too Woke, Some Are Not Enough

Woke works both ways.

There’s a fairly new word at the top of the culture wars right now. The word is “woke.”

But as much as it’s thrown around these days, what does the word actually mean? Well, three dictionaries essentially define it the same way. Colliers says being woke means being “aware of social and political unfairness.” Merriam Webster says, “Aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues.” The definition at dictionary.com is, “Having or marked by an active awareness of systemic injustices and prejudices.” “Woke” was even a candidate for the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year in 2016.

So I’ll admit it. A piece of me is “woke.” Not as much as some, but more than many others.

I abhor any discrimination, for example, against citizens who are gay or trans (or anyone else who call themselves LGBTQ). They are people. Not everyone’s comfortable with the conventional expectations for their gender. Who am I to tell them they should be? It doesn’t matter if I’m straight and have always identified as “he,” I don’t live in their skin. So while people and institutions are attacked these days for being “woke,” if the definition comes down to “open-minded,” consider me woke. 

On the other hand, using plural pronouns for individuals who feel gender-neutral— like “they,” “them,” and “their,” even when we’re just referring to a single person— takes it too far for me. As I wrote here a year-and-a-half ago, there are other ways to handle it than to adulterate the English language (like, use the person’s name). I guess I’m just not woke enough.

Likewise, a current controversy in a few parts of the country is about the use of the word “squaw.” Among some Native Americans today, it is pejorative, no better than the “C” word. But erasing it from my vocabulary will take some doing because from my experience it wasn’t always a dirty word. In the 1970s when I covered the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee (and there’s another word, Indian, that went out of fashion), the men referred to the women as squaws and the women referred to themselves as squaws. But that was then, this is now. That’s why the California site of the 1960 Winter Olympics, long called Squaw Valley, has been renamed Palisades Tahoe. 

I learned to ski there, my brain has called it Squaw Valley for more than six decades, but I’m trying to handle the change. Not because I want to be woke, but because I want to be respectful.

Likewise, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names officially came up with a new name for a popular mountain pass here in Colorado, long known as Squaw Pass. It’s now Mestaa’ėhehe Mountain. The website of Rocky Mountain PBS went all-in for political correctness when it wrote up the story this way: "What was once Sq**w Mountain is now known as Mestaa’ėhehe Mountain.” It’s a mouthful and it might take me longer than it took to convert to Palisades Tahoe. But because I see no reason to provoke people for whom the old name is offensive— as long as I can learn to even pronounce it— I’ll try. Not because I want to be woke, but because I want to be respectful.

But there’s good woke and there’s bad woke. Which brings me to a form of wokeness that we don’t necessarily see in our daily lives, but if we read books, it affects us.

A friend of mine is a best-selling author, Richard North Patterson. He has written 22 novels, all thrillers. Sixteen of them have made the New York Times best-seller list. Suspense is a mainstay of his writing.

But novel #23, called “Trial,” this year ran into trouble. Not because it wasn’t up to the standards readers have come to expect from Patterson. To the contrary, the book review website Goodreads calls it “a richly woven story” and praises it as “a totally engrossing, thought-provoking, and ripped-from-the-headlines book.”

No, “Trial” ran into trouble because Patterson did not, as he puts it, “stay in my lane.” In his own summation in The Wall Street Journal, the novel is about “the televised trial of an 18-year-old Black voting rights worker, stemming from the fatal shooting of a white sheriff’s deputy during a late-night traffic stop in rural Georgia.” It tells the story through the eyes of three major characters, two of them black. It dives into issues like voter suppression, police abuse, and the challenges for black defendants in court.

And that, as he wrote in the Journal, became a red flag for publishers because of “a new phenomenon in publishing: the belief that white authors should not attempt to write from the perspective of nonwhite characters or about societal problems that affect minorities.”

Nineteen major publishers— including some from his own past who for years had profited from his work— turned “Trial” down. One said she only wanted to hear from “marginalized voices.” Another wrote that the book, and Patterson, were “too liberal for white people and too white for Black people.” Remember, these are publishers, whose very role in our lives should be to expand our boundaries, not restrict them. None, by the way, called the book racially insensitive or inaccurate— Patterson is a journalist and had done his homework. He traveled to southwest Georgia and interviewed black citizens who shared their struggles to secure voting rights and equal justice.

So what was the drawback? It was that only people personally subject to discrimination could be safely trusted to depict it. By that measure, the white author Dee Brown never would have written the definitive story of the 1890 massacre of Native Americans called “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.” Surely John Howard Griffen, a white author who actually darkened his skin to write about the Jim Crow South, never would have produced the groundbreaking novel “Black Like Me.”

The editor of The New York Times Book Review, Pamela Paul, has written that publishing is becoming “a fraught process with questions over who can write what, who should blurb and who can edit. Books that would once have been green-lit are now passed over; sensitivity readers are employed on a regular basis; self-censorship is rampant.”

In other words, too woke. 

It seems to me, it should be the other way around. The whole point of publishing is to bring readers experiences they wouldn’t otherwise have themselves, to expand the reach of their lives so that they might better understand the lives of others. What’s wrong with authors doing the very same thing? 

Patterson did finally find an independent publisher for “Trial,” which comes out in a month. 

As he recently wrote in his own space here on Substack, “People now have a chance to begin reading Trial for themselves, and to make their own judgment on whether I've succeeded in writing a human and compelling story about lives different than my own.”

For my money, if publishers don't become the arbiters of who-ought-to-write-for-us, and if politicians don’t become the arbiters of who-ought-to-be-acceptable-to-us, our lives are better for it. Whether we are woke or not.

Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.