Awakening

THERE ARE FEW EXPERIENCES more nauseatingly illuminating than listening to a group or even a pair or Christian conservatives discuss - nearly everything - but especially political, religious, and social issues. The hot topic of the moment, among others, is something they derisively call "wokism". Wokism, asbestos I can make out, is what crackers term the results of something called "Critical Race Theory". Critical Race Theory should actually be simply called "history", or "sociology", but, never underestimate the abilitly of scholars and bigots to invent, promote, and deride a newer, fancier sounding moniker. CRT is nothing other than the vast and growing body of scholarship and knowledge which has definitively shown that racism in America still exists as always, but that it has been shamed into going underground, and is now manifeest primarliy in institutions, legal, law enforcment, medical, you name it, racism is buried within it. Becoming aware of this hidden, residual racism is what African-Americans have come to call being "woke", rather than the much more grammatically corrrect "awakened", or "enlightened", or "illuminated". The point is that, whatever you call it, Christian conservatives despise it, and they they call "wokism", as if it were a blasphemous organized religion or political ideology. To them it is a liberal hoax, or Marxist plot, intended to destroy the country by educating and thus destroying it. This is predicated on the conservative refusal to accept the "liberal" belief that racism still exists in America, if indeed it ever did. To conservatives, to acknowledge any lingering racism is to hate the country. Conservatives rid themselves of the burden of accepting racism's reality by denying its existence, much as they deny the existnce of the LGBTQ community, or try to, and its needs, with "conversion therapy", which brainwashes gay people into hererosesuality, much like evangelical missions brainwash people, or try to, into abandoning their existing religiosities and accepting salvation through the one and only "true faith". Denial of climate change, of vaccines, of cultural diversity, and of the benefits to society of government social programs for the poor and regulation of the economy are among the more prominent forms of right wing Christian denial. Acordingly, Christians who embrace "wokism" are not really Christians, since there is nothing in the New Testament which tells us that Jesus was "woke". Love thy neighbor suffices not, it seems.