No, Cartman, Wokeness Isn’t Dead

Rainbow capitalism may have vanished, but the ideology is stronger than ever.

The culture war is over. According to Eric Cartman, that is.

Last week’s season premiere of South Park had everyone’s favorite antisemitic “fat f*ck” Eric Cartman in a pickle: with “wokeness” on its way out, there would be no more liberals to make fun of—and thereby no more point in living.

While I usually enjoy seeing Cartman suffer, this time, something felt off.

From portraying the absurdity of the 2016 election through the likes of Mr. Garrison to lampooning Disney’s fixation on queer storylines in last year’s “Panderverse” special, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have consistently nailed American cultural commentary. The premiere of season 27 certainly follows suit, with the beloved South Park creators making their boldest claim yet: wokeness—the very force they’ve spent years attacking—is finally on its way out.

Not so fast, Matt and Trey.

Given the ascendancy of the Trump administration, it is understandably tempting to ring the death knell on “wokeness.” In last year’s election, after all, many members of Gen Z—long dubbed America’s “wokest” generation—shifted to the right even in historically blue states like New York and New Jersey. Similarly, President Trump’s early executive orders on DEI and the gender binary repositioned the societal Overton window closer to the center, demonstrating that many Americans were completely fed up with dressing up mental illness as gospel. But while “wokeness” has undeniably exited its golden era in the public sphere, its grasp on America’s most important cultural influence—educaitonal institutions—is firmer than ever. After ten years of infiltrating educational and elite institutions, “wokeness” has successfully reshaped American institutions in subtler, more insidious ways.

Across America, students are still being radicalized by their school systems, and even the Trump administration—despite their recent deal with my alma mater Columbia University—has been powerless to make amends.

Take my high school reading curriculum, for example. In my first month of high school back in 2012, I was tasked with reading Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the original. By the time my younger brother entered high school four years later, however, Shakespeare had been nixed, replaced by the works of Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. Ten years later, Angelou, Baldwin, and Morrison still dominate the curriculum—with not a Shakespeare play in sight.

Say what you will about the importance of diversity in a high school literature curriculum—it is unspeakable to introduce students to these three authors without ever presenting them with Shakespeare—and only by means of a collective woke mindset do these changes appear normal to the general public. Indeed, in the minds of a generation brought up on identity politics, the need to correct for previous racial imbalances is indisputable: because “wokeness” has permeated our culture for so long, we now take it for granted that we must swap Shakespeare and Chaucer for identity-based literature—and the so-called death of “wokeness” will not bring Shakespeare back.

With an education system still undoubtedly privileging “wokeness” above all other modes of thoughts, an increasing number of students coming out of the American school system will never read a full Shakespeare play in their lives. They will, however, learn about systems of racial injustice through The Hate U Give, Between the World and Me, and The Nickel Boys—all books that the high schoolers I work with have been assigned this year as part of their English curricula. And while there is nothing wrong with introducing Black literature to students, focusing exclusively on these voices is a testament to the perpetual hold of “wokeness” over an education system that teaches students to all think in the same way.

Neither is the lasting impact of “wokeness” exclusive to humanities classrooms. The Telluride Association Summer Seminar, a high school summer program that has graduated alumni such as Walter Isaacson and Francis Fukuyama, now offers only two summer courses—the “Seminar in Critical Black Studies” and the “Seminar in Anti-Oppressive Studies.” Similarly, the application to Notre Dame University’s Summer Leadership Seminars, a competitive program that gives 100 of America’s brightest high school seniors the opportunity to take courses on campus with college professors, requires students to answer ideologically motivated essay prompts like the following:

In the face of resurgent xenophobia and racism around the globe, the authority of international mechanisms and institutions such as the United Nations for mitigating violence, human rights violations, and unjustifiable wars is eroding; how would you go about strengthening them? Why do you think it is important to have such institutions and mechanisms in place?

In the past four decades, the United States has experienced an unprecedented rise in income and wealth inequality. Inequalities across multiple other dimensions (race, ethnicity, geography, and gender) are also pervasive. Are there viable solutions to reduce these inequalities? Why or Why not? Explain.

While there is nothing wrong with asking students to write essays on xenophobia or inequality, wording the prompts in so biased a manner practically shoehorns students into presenting a one-sided argument and does not leave students free to question whether the UN may actually be at fault when it comes to the arbitration of peace, or whether income inequality is as closely intertwined with racial injustice as the prompt implies. Having been presented with only one way of thinking for the past ten years, my current high school students do not know anything other than “wokeness.” How, then, can we call “wokeness” dead all of a sudden if, for the last ten years, we have been spoon-feeding students with nothing but woke propaganda? South Park can claim that “wokeness” died overnight by portraying PC Principal as a sudden Catholic, but in order to properly eradicate “wokeness” from our schools, we must teach students not to swap one mind virus for another but how to think for themselves.

Unfortunately, however, our educational institutions have done everything under the sun except attempt to promote critical thinking. Skyrocketing pro-Hamas sentiment at Columbia University did not come out of thin air, after all: Columbia has been pushing the narrative that Jews are settler-colonialist oppressors since the 1970s—far before anyone had ever heard of “wokeness”—and students are still taught the history of the Middle East by a professor who called the attacks of October 7th “awesome.” Back in 2015—when the command of wokeness was arguably stronger than it is today—the university famously pushed back on the implementation of trigger warnings in its Core Curriculum, maintaining that trigger warnings “threaten[ed] intellectual freedom.” Today, however, Columbia strives to push an anti-racist agenda on their school-wide curriculum and has recently updated their year-long political philosophy course to include units on “Anticolonialism,” “Race, Gender, and Sexuality,” and “Climate Futures,” topics that were not present when I took the course less than ten years ago. And while Columbia may have caved to the demands of the Trump administration, such changes only cause many students today to double down on their “woke” convictions: after all, the majority of the Columbia student body—and, indeed, the majority of four-year college students as a whole—still identify as liberal and have become increasingly intolerant of their more conservatively-minded peers.

And don’t even get me started on the publishing industry.

With pronouns in bios disappearing and rainbow capitalism becoming an endangered species, South Park is certainly correct to gravitate towards a death of “wokeness” caricature. But in mocking the end of “wokeness,” Matt and Trey miss a more profound reality: while protests may fade from the quad, the “woke” ideology remains in lesson plans, conversations, and unchallenged assumptions, embedding itself in the very way we view the universe. If “wokeness” no longer makes headlines, it is only because it is no longer a subversive trend but the new norm.

So Cartman can unclench his noose. The culture war may be over, but only because one side has already won.

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