‘Woke’ or balance? It depends on where you stand
We all have a role to play if we are to achieve justice in our divided societies, writes John Tobin, and it starts with respect and inclusion.
I was sitting in my local café when the man beside me started up a conversation. “Safe here, is it? Is your suburb safe?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Lucky,” he said, “cos they’re coming from everywhere. You know who I mean – they’re coming.”
I had a suspicion about who he meant and his next comment left no doubt: “I went into a café the other day in [a middle-class suburb in Melbourne] and they were all white. I said to them, ‘I’ll shout you all coffee’.”
He beamed: “Nice suburb you have here, nice suburb”, and then he left.
A middle-aged white man I had never met before had no hesitation in sharing his racial prejudices with me. Why? I guess it was because I too am a middle-aged white man sitting in a middle-class suburb. And why was he so fearful and racist? That is becoming a more urgent question as views like his are becoming increasingly common.
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The world’s champion of this take on diversity is the 47th President of the United States. In his inaugural address, Donald Trump proclaimed: “This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”
This was quickly followed by a raft of executive orders designed to scrap diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Multinational corporations have scrambled to align themselves with this new world vision – Amazon, Meta, Walmart and Ford, to name a few.
Trans athletes are being banned from sports, books about differences like having red hair and freckles are being pulled from libraries, and antisemitism continues to rise in ways that would have seemed unfathomable a few years ago.
How did we get to this point, and what can we do?
For Martha Minnow, a law Professor from Harvard, the answer is clear – we all have an obligation to “work against injustice”. But she quickly adds: “Don’t demonise your enemies.”
These aims aren’t always easy to reconcile.
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As she warns, “narratives of resentment” and righteous opposition to injustice can sometimes overtake understandings of common humanity. In other words, there is a risk that we can go too far in our responses to injustice and alienate those we are trying to persuade.
For Minnow, the secret ingredients of her recipe for justice are respect and inclusion – not just for some people, but for everyone, all the time, including the guy in the cafe.
This sounds like the vision offered under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which recognises “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all (and not just some) members of the human family”.
The 47th US President might well agree. But for him, equality means equal treatment. This is formal equality, and it fails to recognise that not everyone starts the race of life with the same opportunities and abilities.
Substantive equality means we need to address all the unnecessary and unfair barriers in front of people because of their race, disability, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age – and the list goes on.
Harvard University gets this. Oxford University gets this. Both have adopted comprehensive strategies that are designed to promote equality, diversity and inclusion – where everyone belongs. So does Melbourne University, where I work.
Can these ideas really be dismissed as too “woke”? They seem pretty balanced to me.
An Inclusiveness Index prepared by researchers at Berkeley University has Australia ranked at 18th of 152 countries – not too bad. But our cousins across the Tasman in New Zealand lead the way and are ranked top of the table.
So it’s clear that we still have some way to go. Given the comments from my mate in the local café, it might take some time before we get there.
Minnow would argue that we all have a role to play if we are to achieve justice in our divided societies. It’s also clear that we can’t simply judge others who don’t share our world view. We need to listen to them – hard as that might sometimes be – because research suggests that careful listening can actually reduce racism and prejudice.
So if I bump into my mate again at the local café, rather than judge him, maybe I should shout him a coffee, ask him some questions and then … listen carefully. It wouldn’t be the first time that a good coffee started a conversation that was worth having.
Professor John Tobin holds the Francine V McNiff Chair in International Human Rights Law in the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne.
