Dark Woke as Redemption for Whites
The end of structural privilege, and a return to focusing on bad actors
Recently, I came across this video on social media.
The clip has hundreds of thousands of likes on TikTok. Upon seeing it, my first thought was “aha, now this is Dark Woke.”
This is a phrase that has been bouncing around social media, but I think it is yet to be fully explored.
The Guardian explains the origins of the Dark Woke phenomenon.
On the morning of inauguration day, #DarkWoke began trending on Twitter/X. The hashtag – ostensibly a tongue-in-cheek reference to “Dark Brandon” – emerged in reaction to an exchange between the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the far-right influencer Chaya Raichik.
Over the weekend, Ocasio-Cortez posted an Instagram Reel in which she explained her lack of interest in attending any inaugural festivities. “I don’t celebrate rapists,” she says bluntly. Raichik, whose social media account @LibsofTikTok is widely recognized for proliferating the anti-LGBTQ+ “groomer” moral panic, shared the video, declaring “another person Trump should sue”.
The congresswoman then retweeted Raichik, stating: “Oh, are you triggered? Cry more.” The post accrued more than 17m views, and in the process it birthed both a meme and a debate about Democrats’ approach to messaging for the next four years.
From 10,000ft, #DarkWoke appears to be little more than an internet exercise of dirtbag left gallows humor. The most viral tweet associated with the hashtag reads: “my Grandma voted for Trump so i made sure she fell down the stairs.” Attached to the post is a – presumably – staged photo of an elderly white woman recoiling in pain.
Another example pairs an image of the Philadelphia Flyers’ official mascot, Gritty, waving a Pride banner with the caption: “When he bludgeons homophobes with that flag that’s #DarkWoke.” One could dismiss the whole affair as black-pilled shitposting – aimless, nihilistic musings from a despairing online left. It would be a mistake for Democrats to come to this conclusion.
According to the media narrative, then, Dark Woke is a communications strategy in which Democratic politicians show less inhibition, troll more, and lob insults at their opponents.
Yet it seems that to reduce this to an issue of messaging is to miss a larger cultural and ideological shift. As demonstrated by the video above and the meme of throwing grandma down the stairs for voting for Trump, we’re a long way from 2021, when those who would not mask in public were accused of committing genocide against the disabled. Dark Woke humor and messaging isn’t just more aggressive. It employs memes and types of arguments that Woke would have rejected on ideological grounds.
