From Latin to Latinx

Why colleges teach "woke" beliefs: it inaugurates its adherents into the new ruling class.

These posters summed up Elizabeth Warren’s core base.

There is a common belief in conservative circles that American colleges and universities, particularly highly-selective “elite” colleges, are breeding grounds for “woke indoctrination” and “leftist brainwashing”.

That is the wrong framing for the right idea.

Yes, American college campuses are more socially liberal than the world outside them. This has been true since the rise of the academy, and this has been true pretty much everywhere in the world.

American colleges aren’t really about learning new ideas and expanding one’s horizons, especially if one is not taking a career path in the hard sciences. American academia has long been a place where young white men from upper-class families came to be “cultured”. For much of American history, that meant studying European classics and philosophy. A college-educated man proved his cultured status by reciting Shakespeare passages, quoting Greek philosophers, memorizing Latin phrases, and developing a quixotic lexicon impenetrable to the unwashed masses. This way, he would be able to display the mannerisms that marked him as one of an elite class of people, ready and capable of ruling the country.

Displaying a knowledge of “high society” tastes was just one part of being one of the elite. The elite also had to be different from the lowly commoners via their ideas. In a classic example of intellectual snobbishness, American intellectuals in the late 1800s and early 1900s overwhelmingly supported a theory known as eugenics.

What is eugenics? Even the word alone looks difficult and elite and out-of-reach to lowly proles. During America’s Progressive Era— yes, it was literally called the Progressive Era— a group of highly-educated intellectuals had an idea on how to improve the human condition. Their idea was that some groups of people were inferior to others, and by limiting the ability of lesser peoples to reproduce, the gene pool, and thus humanity, could be improved.

Prominent white eugenicists like Sir Francis Galton, Henry Goddard, and Madison Grant advocated for the superiority of Anglo and Nordic peoples, who tended to be more educated, over Southern Europeans, who were more likely to be working class. Galton, perhaps the most prominent intellectual of his time, wrote

There are three stages to be passed through before eugenics can be widely practiced. First, it must be made familiar as an academic question, until its exact importance has been understood and accepted as a fact. Secondly, it must be recognized as a subject the practical development of which is in near prospect, and requires serious consideration. Thirdly, it must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for eugenics cooperates with the workings of nature by ensuring that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races.

Galton charted the promotion of eugenics as a process meant to be developed in academia, taken seriously as a sure thing to come, and introduced to the masses like a new religion, a religion that gave enormous power to highly-educated intellectuals like himself. Sound familiar?

Like white eugenicists and their desire to build a better white race, black intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois and Thomas Wyatt Turner expressed their desire for a better black race by means of eugenics. DuBois himself said “only fit blacks should procreate to eradicate the race’s heritage of moral iniquity”, and that educated blacks and whites should intermarry. DuBois claimed that only the top-educated ten percent of black men were capable of leading the other ninety percent, arguing

The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst.

From the very first it has been the educated and intelligent of the Negro people that have led and elevated the mass, and the sole obstacles that nullified and retarded their efforts were slavery and race prejudice; for what is slavery but the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullification of the work of natural internal leadership? Negro leadership therefore sought from the first to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make way for natural selection and the survival of the fittest.

How then shall the leaders of a struggling people be trained and the hands of the risen few strengthened? There can be but one answer: The best and most capable of their youth must be schooled in the colleges and universities of the land. We will not quarrel as to just what the university of the Negro should teach or how it should teach it— I willingly admit that each soul and each race-soul needs its own peculiar curriculum. But this is true: A university is a human invention for the transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation, through the training of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.

The one vision that linked both black and white eugenicists was the fact that they saw themselves as an elite educated class that thought they knew best how to treat the lesser classes, and that what they did was “progressive”. A main component of who they thought superior and who they thought inferior was literacy levels— a metric that the educated class had plenty of but the working class did not.

The working classes of any race, as one can imagine, did not like being called inferior by the mixed-race coalition of intellectuals that sneered at them with disdain from their ivory towers. But the intellectual class had much of the political power back then, as they do now, and eugenics programs were inscribed into law. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized forced sterilization in the landmark case Buck v. Bell. Sterilization became mandatory for groups of people labeled as “feeble-minded” and genetically inferior.

As journalist Adam Cohen writes,

[F]eebleminded was really the craze in American eugenics. There was this idea that we were being drowned in a tide of feeblemindedness, that basically unintelligent people were taking over, reproducing more quickly than the intelligent people. But it was also a very malleable term that was used to define large categories of people that, again, were disliked by someone who was in the decision-making position. So women who were thought to be overly interested in sex - licentious - sometimes deemed feebleminded. It was a broad category. And it was very hard to prove at one of these feeblemindedness hearings that you were not feebleminded.

American eugenics spread to Europe, where it was embraced wholeheartedly by Adolf Hitler. Hitler’s love of eugenics led to the attempted exterminations of many peoples he thought inferior, such as Jews, Poles, LGBT people, and the physically and mentally disabled. After World War II, the association with Hitler made American intellectuals drop the idea, but not before mandatory sterilization ravaged working-class communities nationwide.

Today, there is still an intellectual class who believe themselves superior to everyone else. They believe they are superior because they have a college education and other people don’t. They believe that their college education has enlightened them to theories that are simply too complex for the masses to understand, theories that prove their moral superiority. They have developed an ideology that rewards the values taught in the academy. In order to join the ranks of this elite class, one must swallow all the ideologies taught at college.

Today, American colleges have gone from male-only to about 60% women, a number that is sure to rise. People of all races can now attend college. The humanities have shifted from classical European education to a new ideology. This ideology has many names. Conservatives call it wokeness. Wesley Yang calls it successor ideology. John McWhorter calls them The Elect. They call themselves social justice activists or progressives, much like the intellectuals of the Progressive Age.

Many adherents of this ideology end up part of the professional-managerial class. For those not in the know about the PMC (it was coined in the 1970s and has gained popularity relatively recently), it is a term used to describe a certain group of people, usually white-collar professionals and managers, that earn a wage not by selling their bodies or by accruing capital, but by selling professional skills. They have generally adopted a common set of values that mark their superiority.

The more elite the college one went to, the more extreme beliefs one has to hold in order to distinguish themselves from the less-elite college graduates. The more “radical” the belief, the higher the status of the person that claims to hold that belief. In the PMC status signaling games, the bottom-tier law school grad who suggests reforming prisons loses out to the T14 prison abolitionist.

Wesley Yang discusses this group in depth:

[P]rogressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated—and white. They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree. And while 12 percent of the overall sample in the study is African-American, only 3 percent of progressive activists are. With the exception of the small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.

These “progressive activists” are who conservatives are thinking about when they talk about “woke indoctrination”.

Alex Perez offers a more biting description of members of this class:

The new Democratic Woman is very white. You will know her by her plethora of psychological afflictions and affected neuroses; depressingly, these mark her high status. She wept and wailed and cursed the treacherous white man when Hillary lost in 2016. She donned a pussy hat and #Resisted. Becky from Oberlin lives in Brooklyn and carries around a New Yorker tote filled to the brim with grievances and prescription meds. She has nothing in common with Blanca from Miami, who works as a waitress at a joint frequented by construction workers and maximizes her tips by wearing skimpy outfits.

No surprise, then, that a young, working-class Latina would be completely alienated by the bland snobbery and desexualized femininity favored by the Democratic Party. Its epitomes, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, are shrill and cold. They are obsessed with the rhetoric of breaking balls and shattering glass ceilings, and this appeals to white women who were educated at elite colleges and who, at best, tolerate men and masculinity.

A still scene of the main characters of HBO’s Girls, which takes place in transplant Brooklyn. The show’s creator, Lena Dunham, did in fact go to Oberlin.

My parents immigrated to America when I four years old, and I grew up in Brooklyn. Working-class immigrant BIPOC Brooklyn, not the professional-managerial-class white transplant Brooklyn of HBO’s Girls. The Brooklyn of bodegas and subway rides, not the Brooklyn of Whole Foods and L Train Vintage. This is not the Brooklyn of Lana Del Rey’s “Brooklyn Baby”. None of the working class Latinos here would would ever say Latinx. “Becky from Oberlin” does not show up in my neighborhood. Becky from Oberlin does love advocating for minorities (on social media) while living in the whitest, most gentrified parts of Brooklyn, away from those poor, immigrant, working class Black bodies and Latinxs and AAPI folx.

My neighborhood. It’s mostly Latino and Asian immigrants. It’s a working class immigrant enclave and many folks are undocumented. I can go days without seeing a white person.

And how do these people talk? Nicholas Clairmont explains:

Who does the woke playing field actually advantage? As a barrier to entry that is manufactured in universities, mediated by elite institutions and bureaucracies, and is intentionally complex and constantly changing, wokese is a tool that is most easily wielded by the credentialed elite—which suggests that the allegedly vulnerable cohorts in whose name this language is allegedly spoken are actually being used by others as rhetorical camouflage.

In reality, wokeness is a bourgeois sop to self-dealing millionaires. Why? Because those who already have the most resources and power are best positioned to game whatever new system comes about by throwing up obstacles that take training and money to navigate or overcome effectively. In fact, for them, the more obstacles in the course of advancement in any given field, the better. Working people with only a little bit of brainspace in their lives leftover from just making it all work can’t expend nearly as much energy figuring out how to navigate the mazes presented by fast-changing social norms and bureaucratic rituals. Having to learn and then constantly relearn a whole new language just to get along in college or navigate a workplace is an intolerable burden, which sifts them out.

The question at hand in an age where wokeness—i.e., the demand to speak wokese—dominates the institutions where you can go to rise in your social class in America is a much more practical question than whether it is morally just or unjust to create a system which advantages contemporary members of historically marginalized communities if it is possible to, or whether sins are committed by groups and are in fact heritable. Those are philosophical abstractions. It is the same question that would be raised if a school required its applicants to know Latin, as the good colleges once did.

So, in the end, the question raised by wokeness is a simple one: Doesn’t it actually just favor rich people?

Because I live in Brooklyn, work in journalism, went to private school and a reasonably fancy college, and am friends primarily with workers in the “information economy,” I can speak fluent wokese. I usually don’t speak it, but I can. I don’t like it, I think it sounds bad, and I choose to use English instead most of the time. But I know perfectly well how to sound if I want to go be a consultant or if I need to go to grad school or if I am in an interview for really any job that pays upward of six figures and is based in a city.

Wokese is not a distinct language after all. It is a fashion in English-speaking culture that has the opposite of its claimed effect. Rather than empowering the marginalized, it condescends to them and entrenches the privileges of the already advantaged. It is a new face of the oldest con in the meritocratic capitalist handbook—namely, favoring the lucky and the powerful and the privileged while claiming to be crusading for justice.

Like Clairmont, I live in Brooklyn and was educated at a liberal arts college that inured me to the language of the new elite, a major culture shock from my public school roots. I had gone from an urban high school where 48% of students are economically challenged to a leafy suburban college full of entitled rich kids that totally thought they were going to save the world through slam poetry.

What I gained from college was a great deal of white hipster cultural capital. I can walk into Becky from Oberlin’s version of Brooklyn with my Doc Martens, my psychiatric prescriptions, my opinion on whatever the newest A24 movie is, my knowledge of Arcade Fire (oh wait, one of the guys has some dubious allegations against him, as per the course for an indie musician) Big Thief’s discography, my litany of doctor-diagnosed and self-diagnosed mental issues and neuroses, and not miss a beat in conversation. But more importantly, college taught me the lexicon and mannerisms needed to get ahead in the professional world.

During a literature course my first year of college (no one said “freshman year” due to it being gendered, and thus a patriarchal vestige), the professor talked at length about Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, then assigned us Gender Trouble by Judith Butler. Gender Trouble is an incredibly obtuse book that seemed like it was written to be as confusing as possible, so much that The Onion made fun of it in this classic clip. That’s how the book intended it.

Here’s a passage I randomly picked out from the book:

In this same work, she subscribes to a notion of free or uncathected energy which makes itself known in language through the poetic function. She claims, for instance, that “in the intermingling of drives in language . . . we shall see the economy of poetic language” and that in this economy, “the unitary subject can no longer find his [sic] place.” 2 This poetic function is a rejective or divisive linguistic function which tends to fracture and multiply meanings; it enacts the heterogeneity of drives through the proliferation and destruction of univocal signification. Hence, the urge toward a highly differentiated or plurivocal set of meanings appears as the revenge of drives against the rule of the Symbolic, which, in turn, is predicated upon their repression. Kristeva defines the semiotic as the multiplicity of drives manifest in language. With their insistent energy and heterogeneity, these drives disrupt the signifying function. Thus, in this early work, she defines the semiotic as “the signifying function . . . connected to the modality [of] primary process.” 3

To 99% of Americans, that passage is nothing but word slop. You can literally pull up a PDF of Gender Trouble, go to any page, and have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. Go ahead, try it right now. I’d rather read Finnegan’s Wake than try to read Gender Trouble again.

Learning the language of theorists like Foucault, Butler, Crenshaw, Lorde, and Spivak is the modern equivalent of learning Latin 200 years ago. The inaccessibility is the point. Those who can decipher the sacred texts are inaugurated into the ranks of the elite. Learning Latin is out, learning words like Latinx is in. Pity the poor PMC aspirant who can only clutch their copy of the new pop-CRT book written by Ibram X. Kendi or Robin DiAngelo as they gaze jealously at the elite-college graduate whose knowledge of race comes from directly from the sacred texts of academics like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Richard Delgado.

This ideology doesn’t help the people it claims to. No LGBT preteen but the most precocious has any use for the abstract language of Gender Trouble. Teenage boys raised in environments where inability to prove one’s masculinity could mean death aren’t going to gain anything out of reading bell hooks’ The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Also, note how bell hooks’ name is in all lowercase, as knowing that her name is supposed to be lowercase is another shibboleth of the chattering classes.

What does this all mean? Colleges are teaching students the language, mannerisms, and beliefs needed to become one of the elite. Like one needs to learn Latin to study ancient Classical texts, one needs to learn Latinx to work at an NGO, or in journalism, or any other field that requires a college degree. From my lived experience, many college students will parrot the language in public but turn into Tucker Carlson behind closed doors. You don’t need to believe in it, you just have to know it.

Just like eugenics a century ago, this ideology directly hurts the working class and the less educated. This ideology is leading to a widening chasm between rich and poor. This ideology claims to support marginalized groups, yet in practice it does nothing but enrich a few grifters at the top, as well as those who have managed to climb the ranks of academia.

As colleges accept more students, this has led to elite overproduction. Nowadays, a degree from even an elite college no longer guarantees a well-paying job, especially for those in the humanities. This has led those graduates to double down on this ideology, as they’d have nothing without it. Both the $250,000/yearly BigLaw associate and the $60,000/yearly journalist can speak the same language, but one uses it more than the other to make up for a lack of economic capital, instead choosing the route of feeling morally superior. As the value of a college degree declines in America, more graduates will take the route of moral superiority, desperately holding on to their sinking ship.

So while you can imagine these theories as an indoctrination, realize they are also an inauguration. By receiving this education, students gain the cultural capital needed to be inaugurated as one of the elite. Basically, the same reason kids went to college since college was invented. And isn’t that the point of higher education? It’s called higher education for a reason. Don’t let the lowly proles find out.