The Woke Grift, part one

This is part one of a planned series about the relationship between woke politics and the urban (bourgeois) elite. I've recently begun to understand that we are making a mistake when we classify the woke as part of the "left." It’s not: it’s an urban middle-class movement stoking the ressentiment of a populist base.

---

I lived in Seattle for 16 years, from the ages of 23 until 38. I quite adored the place when I moved there, especially because of the ‘gay ghetto’ I lived in after an initial three months of being homeless. That ‘gay ghetto,’ Capitol Hill, was practically a utopia of sexual liberation, fantastic art, punk and anti-capitalist sensibilities, and of course more than enough gay bars to satisfy all my insane lust.

It changed, of course. Slowly at first, then suddenly all at once. The big change occurred just before the 2008-2009 housing crash. Realtors, mortgage brokers, and especially the “alternative” paper, The Stranger, all urged everyone to “grow up,” buy houses, and move out of the gay ghetto.

I remember: there were months when I could not go to a bar without hearing someone mention that he or she’d just bought a house with a mortgage where they didn’t even ask for proof of income. Everyone was flipping houses. I was told repeatedly I was an idiot for not doing so, too.

Then, of course, the crash. People were “underwater,” a situation where their houses were suddenly worth less than the money they owed for them. They couldn’t resell them without losing money, but most of them had only bought the houses in order to sell them a year or two later. So they were fucked.

Those houses did all end up getting bought though, by large property management groups. Lots of them in the gay ghetto were torn down and replaced with apartment buildings. Worse, though, was the condo-conversion scheme: old apartment buildings, usually full of older people or working class families (both white and black families), were suddenly emptied and turned into barely-updated condominiums.

I survived all that, because I was renting a room in a ramshackle house with a dead-beat landlord. He never raised our rent as long as we never complained about the black mold in the walls and the appliances that shorted the electricity for the entire house. It felt like a good deal.

There’s a moment I remember most from that time. A now ex-friend of mine, an early version of the social justice/woke anarchistas there, invited me to a party at her friends’ house. I and my partner at the time went, thinking it would be a great evening and a chance to meet new friends.

It was a housewarming party, so we brought some gifts. I realized with dismay once we arrived that the address was one of those recent condo-conversions, so I wasn’t really going to meet “people like me,” but I tried not to judge.

They, on the other hand, eventually made clear we weren’t welcome there.

The owners were two recent university graduates, “queer women,” in a couple but “don’t call us lesbian that’s outdated.” They’d received the money to buy the condo from their parents and were upset that I asked. They had just put down new bamboo flooring and were upset at the way I walked across it. But they were especially upset that their friend had brought two cis white gay men to their housewarming party.

They made sure we knew this, especially when I had offered a response to something they were all talking about. “We don’t want to hear from white men,” one of them said (she was, incidentally, also white). “You’re always trying to push your testosterone on everyone else.”

We left. We were both startled but also rather relieved. It wasn’t really a fun party.

In the following years, I started seeing more of these sorts of people and less of the old sorts. At the beginning were the days when you could see a black goth tranny stumbling home from the industrial music club on the arm of a old leather daddy and they’d ask you for a light and invite you for a drink. But later, there were the days when trannies couldn’t call themselves “tranny” any more and that big leather daddy needed to stop flaunting his toxic masculinity.

That shift happened in tandem with the arrival of a new urban class that could afford the places the black trannies and old leather daddies got priced out of. This new class had money. They had also read Judith Butler, you see, and started using words like “intersectionality” and “systemic oppression,” and the place belonged to them now.

They were all a lot richer than I was. They were working in tech jobs and graphic design, not at bars and restaurants. They were buying up the homes that black families had built in the 1920’s and putting Black Lives Matters signs in the windows.

But no, they weren’t all white. I remember when the black people I knew disappeared and were replaced by another kind of black person: the black bourgeoisie. The black family across the street, whose son and I exchanged bus transfers so we didn’t have to pay the bus fare? They were gone. But at the coffeeshop I used to meet him at were new black people all designing web layouts and talking about how racist the city was.

Of course, they were right. Seattle’s always been a really racist place. But when you’re low enough on the income scale in a city, you forget what color of skin your neighbors have because you’re all the same. It’s only when you ascend that ladder that these differences start to matter, especially in a city where the average studio apartment rents for over $1500 (I paid $400 US for a bedroom in a shared house, for context).

The other thing that happened during that time is the homeless population increased. The dirty secret of the three most “progressive” West coast cities (San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle) is that, while they are centers of “woke” political expression, their streets and green spaces are filled with homeless encampments that make their downtowns look more like a refugee camp than a liberal utopia.

The last six years of my stay in Seattle, I was a social worker for those homeless people, working for a non-profit agency that attempted to house them. While some of my co-workers were definitely steeped in the beginnings of woke dogma, the majority of us—especially the front-line workers—were not. The pay was horrible, and so if you graduated from the gender studies or racial justice program of a university, helping homeless people of whatever gender or skin color clean feces off their faces or come down from a manic episode was way below your destined role in society.

Watching the homeless population explode at the very same time that these social theories dripped from the lips of the very people who’d helped create this problem was maddening. So was the work itself. I eventually left that job, and that city, and also the entire country.

Now I’m watching Seattle from the other side of the Atlantic and shaking my head. I’m not really shaking my head at a particular event a fellow substack writer Jozua pointed to, as it was an inevitable result of that liberal political trajectory.

Rather, I’m shaking my head at what comes after.

This year, an event called “Taking B(l)ack Pride" was hosted (not as an “official” Pride event, but nevertheless advertised on the offical Pride site). As the official event information states (the ALL CAPS are of course theirs, not mine):

“All are free to attend HOWEVER this is a BLACK AND BROWN QUEER TRANS CENTERED, PRIORITIZED, VALUED, EVENT.
White allies and accomplices are welcome to attend but will be charged a $10 to $50 reparations fee that will be used to keep this event free of cost for BLACK AND BROWN Trans and Queer COMMUNITY. ****

And also:

Please join us for our HOEVID-19 Ball with $400 category prizes and much much more!

But as Jozua points out:

The only people excluded by the Pride event in Seattle aren’t bigots (why would they even care?), they’re poor white people who don’t have $10–50 to prove they’re antiracists for the night. That’s not an unintentional result. That’s the point. The reparation tax creates an environment where middle class liberals are presented as antiracist allies, and poor folks are excluded presumably for being racists, since no one cares about class.

I had stopped going to Pride events the year after it was moved from the gay ghetto to downtown. Before, it was an event that occurred in a community; after, it became a Community Event. The cost to even march in the parade became prohibitive, let alone to attend official events (before, it was just a free party in the park afterwards).

Other things for gays had changed, too. I remember when a queer group demanded a popular punk gay bar change the signage on the bathroom doors, because the signs were too gender normative. I remember watching a just-out-of-Evergreen trans man scream at two old trans women for calling themselves “trannies” instead of the proper term. And I remember being called a “oppressive homonormative racist” for declining the sexual advances of a young black trans woman who kept grabbing my crotch at a bar long after I told that person to stop.

So now there are sliding scale reparations dance parties in Seattle. That’s…Seattle. It’s the very same logic of an urban liberal class that would rather “fight oppression” than address the material conditions of the poor. And it will probably also be Portland and San Francisco, if it isn’t already. And maybe soon the rest of urban America.

The United States will have cities full of a new urban class making performative gestures about racial justice while glutting themselves on consumer goods produced by dark-skinned people in the Global South. They’ll step over the homeless people on their way to dance the injustice away, wave rainbow flags and tweet #BLM and #transwomenarewomen, while never once criticizing the economic exploitation of the poor by their tech giant employers who tweet those very same things.

And in the meantime, it will tell one part of the poor that they are oppressed by the other part. That part, the part that cannot afford to “prove they are anti-racists,” will eventually give up any attempt at conforming to the rigged moral game. They’ll look to people who can help them make sense of this nightmare, give them false hope of a better life, and assure them they are not the problem they are being told they are.

Unless we finally divorce the left from the woke urban elite, it won’t be the left they listen to.

If we’re lucky, it’ll just be the plain old right. But I doubt we’ll be so lucky.

(PS: I’ll have more to write about these kinds of “reparations” schemes in a later essay. As countless black Marxists have pointed out, this isn’t what they were actually fighting for, and it is much more like the Catholic sale of indulgences than the economic justice that reparations was meant to be).