Is Wokeness Keeping Us From Recognizing Our Similarities with Black People

Once, I was doing a canvassing temp job and my young bosses (likely influenced by woke culture) called me on and said “you shouldn’t have said that to your coworker” who was Black. What happened? We had a long car ride back from our canvassing ground which left plenty of time for discussion. When I mentioned I was Jewish and my Black co-worker said she knew a lot of Jews, I said “a lot of my role models as a Jew are black” to try to acknowledge race in a positive way. The two of us keep in touch over Twitter in a positive way despite the fact that my bosses think that I have micro-aggressioned her.

My bosses called this a hostile work environment. While my boss acknowledged I wasn’t a mind reader and can’t be held responsible for every unintentional slight, she said, “you can’t bring up race. Focus only on things that you two have in common.”

How am I supposed to not think about race when the inundation of identity politics into mainstream academia and internet platforms have emphasized racial injustice at the expense of every other thing that defines us? I feel like all my socialization over the past 5 or 6 years has trained me to see Blacks as different when they are quite the same in terms of their needs and wants as us.

Whereas I might have been more natural and less aware in a conversation with a Black person (I won’t say colorblind, because that’s naive), I’m now five times more aware that I’m a White person and the other person…