Woke: A Guide to Social Justice by Titania McGrath
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So woke she must be an insomniacReviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 24 March 2019
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If you don't know Titania McGrath already, I must first disapoint you by telling you she doesn't exist. This book is a satire written by Doctor Andrew Doyle. He created Titania on Twitter to parody the sort of “woke” activists that may be found there in abundance.
I am going to refer to Titania McGrath as the author most of the time, rather than Andrew Doyle. It is just easier than having to explain that it is Titania that is speaking rather Doyle himself. I have no idea what Doyle’s actual beliefs are, but I think that we can assume that he doesn’t share them with Titania, otherwise the book wouldn’t be a satire, it would just be a sad commentary on 21st century “woke” politics.
At the heart of “woke” philosophy is that everyone can claim victim status, based mainly on their “identity”, except for white males, and white females who aren’t also feminist activists. Even some actual feminists are excluded from the “woke” club because of their views on some issues of social justice. Germain Greer managed to get herself banned from the club because she wasn’t supportive enough of trans women or, as Titanaia would have it, trans womxn.
The book takes us through chapter after chapter of Titania’s views on social injustice in all its forms with the exception of genuine social injustice. Poverty and poor housing, for example, are mentioned only in passing and then only in terms of the way they intersect with other identity politics. Yes, this is all about identity. If you identify as something then you are that thing, regardless of whether or not you really are. Titania, for example, isn’t a privileged, wealthy, white, middle class, heterosexual woman because she identifies with all the minority groups she writes about. She is one of them, without having to go through the inconvenience of being one of them.
Titania is also very concerned with “intersectionality”. This is something I had to look up, because Titania doesn’t explain it until quite late in the book. Intersectionality is the way that one minority group intersects with another minority group to create a new minority group. I would compare it to a sort of social justice bingo.
For example, if you are a feminist you can tick the feminist box. If you are also from an ethnic minority you get to put a tick in that box as well. If you are transgender then you get to tick that box and so on. If you manage to tick all the boxes, you win the jackpot of social injustice and get an arts centre named after you at a university no-one has ever heard of.
Of course, one of the main jokes in the book is that while Titania describes herself as a social justice activist, she doesn’t actually do anything, except send a few Tweets to prove she is an activist. She quotes a lot of writers on the subjects she writes about, but has never read any of their books, she only regurgitates the quotes that every other “woke” person is regurgitating.
The inherent irony of this book is that there would be no “woke” ideology if it wasn’t for the fact that there is genuine social injustice in the world.
Titania represents the sort of “woke” that is the virtue signalling world of saying a lot and doing nothing. Something I have said as a joke many times is “Spiritually I’m a vegan. It’s just that I eat meat”. It is exactly the sort of thing that Titania might say, but she wouldn't be joking.
Interspersed between the chapters are examples of Titania’s “Slam” poetry. It is truly execrable and it could only be written by someone who has a very good understanding of poetry. Fortunately Andrew Doyle has a Phd in the subject. William McGonigal was a bad poet, but Titania plummets to new depths with her efforts. If you want to know what “slam” poetry is, i'm afarid you're going to have to Google the term.
Why only 3 stars? In the end, the book is based on a single joke, which is only slightly varied in each chapter. I’m afraid that after a while reading the book was like watching the TV channel Dave for 7 consecutive days – you end up hearing the same joke time after time so it loses its humorous value and becomes irritating. I think the best way to enjoy Titania McGrath is in her 280 character works of “wisdom” on Twitter. A full-length book (actually it’s only 160 pages) just doesn’t support the humour that well.
