Why wokeness has a valid place in our world

A piece about expectations and awakening to the 'other'

Glenn Loury and Norman Finkelstein make a good point in their video below. Awakeness that leaves us unchanged, unrepentant and avoiding cost is just another strategy to hide in plain sight. 

And while wokeness is getting dirty for valid reason, to awaken is still everything, right? Surely we must all aspire to be awake? Awake to the world around us. Awake to the world in us. Awake to changes and human truths that live in the atomic fiber of moments too fragile to describe. Awake to suffering. To others. To 'the other'. Awake to a new human story that is being created each second online in reaction to historical oppression in a process that is scary, sure, but still a very beautiful testimony to the truth that finally we’ve all been given a little room bit more room breathe.

And so while I don’t want to be ‘woke’ I would say my deepest desire is to snap out of my parochial, white, cis-gender, western-Christian slumber and each morning hear the whispers of a good God who I want to believe desires to craft in me divine acts. I want to wake up to my own desperate need to submit and serve people rather than move them like pawns. But I know from experience that true awakeness comes at a hideous cost…

So there’s a scene in Ted Lasso that’s been worrying me. Sam Osambe (this incredible, kind, woke character) places a piece of tape on Richmond's primary sponsor's logo on his jersey before running out onto the field. The sponsor is connected to oil spills in Nigeria (his home) and it is an incredible moment of bravery and protest. The team follows suite and it becomes a fireball movement of activism. And then the game ends. Everyone runs off the field, high-fives, and celebrates Sam’s bravery. Huh? Then the bad capitalist corporate falls and a new brand (Bantr) slides in to take its place and seconds later everyone goes back to their normal life. Huh???

Literally seconds and smiles. That’s what activism and fighting for equality looked like. And this is how we are preparing our kids to challenge injustice. Seconds and smile without any awakeness of the cost?

Sadly I have found one of the sneakest parts of life is our expectations. What we expect is where almost all our happiness comes from. Read Noah Yuval Harai. If you want a Ferrari and get one-second hand you will be sad. If you want a bike and get one new (or secondhand) you’ll be happy. In real life, Sam Obsame would have been fired. His career would have ended. He would have been sued by the oil company and his awakeness might have cost him everything. If you disagree watch how students post Fees Must Fall feel here.

I recently did a series of videos with a friend, Siya Khumalo, and he made this point well. He is a veteran activist in the LGBTQI+ movement and a single statement he made lodged itself in my brain - “Welcome to activism, where they are no quick wins”. The 'containedness' of the idea is what got me. It fits perfectly together, although at first, I didn’t have a clue what he was trying to say.

Cost. That’s a bankable expectation of life. And what Siya was and is trying to establish when it comes to change or activism. That is what Glen and Norman are talking about in the video above and that is what is also wrong with Ted Lasso’s depiction of activism above.

I am very grateful that increasingly I am comforted by Jesus, although it is a difficult story to believe. Every day as I push deeper into it I find it harder and more offensive to digest. God on a cross to save the human race through hideous suffering seems truly offensive, but its beauty lives in the expectation it sets for us His followers. We are not superheroes. We are servants. We are not conquering corrupt empires with swords, we are giving our lives to create connections. True connection. A connection so pure that it awakens to the humanity of others so acutely that our egos bend to love and we lean into those who before we would have found revolting. The prostitutes and sinners. The gamblers. The tax collectors. The wok kids who offend us. The transexual humans we thought we could never understand. Government agents we believe are thieves and liars… we could go on and on and on. In South Africa, our list seems almost endless.

And let's be honest, we need this love as the human condition hurtles along the razor-fine edge of reinventing itself into a more equitable space for all; or a more violent, polarised world of cultural and economic classism. All of us are on that rollercoaster. Together. Like it or not. Our parents signed us all up for this without asking at the end of some pier where they might have made love and so now we have a choice. Hide? Or manage our expectations well clinging to awakeness in hope that it holds our hands to find a better form of love?

PS. I like Ted Lasso. I think their answers are much, much more right than wrong and it is a monumental moment in television history to see patriarchy, a narrow view of success, and toxic masculinity challenged. And, I think that’s where my worry comes from. Anyone who says come to Jesus so he can take away all your pain and problems is setting an innocent soul up for disappointment and disillusionment. The truth is those of us who choose to follow His Way come to a King to discover a Kingdom with the important caveat to count the cost before we start (spend a bit of time with John Buynan if you disagree). Likewise, if we tell our kids to come to love so it can make their life easier and better we set them up for despair. Yes, love is glorious, and by far the best part about planet Earth. But before all of that, it is at its core a verb. And verbs always cost…