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Let’s begin with the latest: the Roald Dahl affair. Making headlines this winter, the children’s books by British novelist Roald Dahl are being revised to become more inclusive. In short, they are being adapted. This collaboration with Inclusive Minds, a collective of individuals working on issues of inclusion and accessibility in children’s literature, initiated by the publisher Puffin, aims to address language deemed offensive by the editor. Significant changes are being made to Dahl’s works, particularly regarding descriptions of characters’ physical appearances. You may remember Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who is now described as “enormous” (instead of fat), or Mrs. Twit in The Twits, who is no longer “ugly and beastly” but simply “beastly.” Likewise, in The Witches, a paragraph explaining that witches are bald under their wigs now concludes with the new line: “There are many other reasons why women might wear wigs, and there is certainly nothing wrong with that.” Miss Trunchbull (who used to send shivers down our spines) in Matilda was once “a most formidable female.” She is now “a woman,” and of course, “formidable.” Non-sexist terms have also been added in some places: the Cloud-Men in James and the Giant Peach have become Cloud-People. What is this all about? An exploration of inclusive writing, wokism, and cancel culture is necessary.
Born in the mid-2000’s in the United States, the “woke” movement, or “wokism,” originally referred to a stance driven by academic fields like critical race theory, which emphasizes an awareness of issues related to social justice and racial equality.
The expression “stay woke” started being used in the context of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the United States (born after the acquittal of a neighborhood watchman who killed a young Black man, Trayvon Martin, in 2013). Activists of this movement denounce systemic racism that leads, among other things, to police violence against Black individuals. Some like to recall that the origin of this expression, predating the BLM movement, goes back to the 1930’s, to a song in which Leadbelly, the American blues singer, calls to stay awake using the term “stay woke,” referring to the accusation of Black teenagers in a rape case. Wokism has since evolved to collectively denounce other types of social discrimination, particularly those targeting LGBTQ+ people, women (#MeToo), immigrants, and minority groups as a whole.
These injustices can also exist in less visible, subtler forms, manifested in more or less conscious, sometimes unintentional acts. These behaviors are denounced by wokism, which ultimately aims to raise awareness, especially among white populations, of these unconscious biases. The term “white privilege” refers to the fact that this population, particularly heterosexual white men, faces less discrimination than other groups of individuals. The concept of intersectionality is then invoked to represent accumulating discrimination: the idea being that it is indeed more challenging to be homosexual than heterosexual in our society, but even more challenging to be a Black homosexual than a white homosexual, and that these forms of discrimination, such as racism, sexism, and homophobia, are interconnected and must be challenged together.
This trend, which emphasizes diversity and inclusion, is also applied in the business world. In companies, it can take shape in collaborative decision-making that takes cultural differences into account, recruitment and promotion strategies that foster diversity, or more broadly, practices that are open to different perspectives and ideas. The term “woke capitalism” was coined to describe the strategy followed by these companies that have expressed their support for such causes.
Nevertheless, this same trend, which is increasingly garnering interest, is also facing growing opposition. Critics argue that it has a moralizing, “lecturing” tendency, advocating for a culture of ostracism and political correctness. They accuse it of being dogmatic and sectarian. Wokism is thus seen as opposing both progressive universalism inherited from the Enlightenment as well as the most conservative tendencies. Caught up in a generalized revisionism of the—debatable—achievements of culture, wokism is embodied in a practice called “cancel culture,” targeted by numerous detractors who see it as a threat to freedom of expression and a real danger to democratic life.
Cancel culture is a practice and a process that involves withdrawing support, mainly via social media, from individuals or institutions that have made controversial statements, actions, or declarations deemed racist, misogynistic, or offensive. The goal is to denounce these situations, of course, but also to invite the targeted individuals to justify their statements and, above all, to demand that institutions take responsibility by ceasing to honor those accused. Ultimately, cancel culture aims to draw attention to the things that society tolerates and that should not be taken for granted.
In the realm of wokeness, things are not simply black or white.
In “Qui annule quoi?” (Who Cancels What?) published in 2022 by Éditions du Seuil, historian Laure Murat, a professor at UCLA, offers insights to understand this phenomenon which, according to her, is the expression of “a democracy running out of breath (…) in a supposedly universalist society, blind to its lack of thought and incapable of acknowledging the countless crimes and consequences of slavery and colonization.” The violence of cancel culture should therefore target the brutality of power. In this context, while it is clear that the excesses of protest culture are very real, focusing on the mistakes of these movements is, however, a way of skirting the fundamental debate. The author adds that this expression conveys “an immense weariness of seeing racism and sexism honored through supposedly immovable statues or artists considered above the law, when Black people are being shot point-blank by the police.” She explains that in the United States, the toppling of statues primarily targets symbols of colonial power and white supremacists, with the European equivalent found in the invitation to museums to reflect on the origins of their collections, which largely stem from imperial conquests. Murat ultimately shows that cancel culture draws our attention to the contradictions of a society caught between the anti-racism it officially promotes and the violence of colonization that it equally celebrates in public spaces. The author’s analysis culminates in this intriguing and powerful reflection, which must be acknowledged: history is made by erecting monuments as much as by tearing them down.
But let us return to what is called “inclusive writing” in France, which is one of the manifestations of this deeply and sometimes drastically revisionist culture.
Inclusive writing encompasses a set of linguistic practices that have been developed based on the observation that French grammar tends to render the feminine gender invisible, as seen in the rule that the masculine takes precedence in plural sentences. Furthermore, certain terms, particularly job titles, do not have a feminine equivalent. The French language also lacks neutral pronouns, unlike German or English, until the official recognition in the dictionary in 2022 of the pronoun “iel,” to cite just one example that has sparked much debate. The issues underlying the implementation of these new linguistic rules are, of course, related to the way language can shape our worldview, as it involves a language that contributes to subordinating women to men. Inclusive language aims precisely to reduce these inequalities and establish a language—and therefore a worldview—that is more egalitarian.
In the case of English author Roald Dahl, it is not so much the neutral pronoun that poses a problem, but rather a series of discriminatory nouns and adjectives that, as the publishers argue, hinder the promotion of a “society for all.” The idea is not to offend the sensitivities of future generations who will have been educated to respect differences and trained for a fairer society.
For Alexandre Gefen, research director at the CNRS and literary critic, stated in an op-ed for L’Obs on March 14, 2023, “Censorship or rewriting gestures that seek to align work with our contemporary morals run the risk of making it lose its power of provocation.” For just as one cannot imagine a library stripped of all the works of authors who subscribed to patriarchy or slavery (Gefen refers to authors from the Antiquity) because this library would be empty or impoverished, the practice of cancel culture “implies setting oneself up as a censor, leading to the loss of the work as a testimony and imprint of another time whose differing values challenge our own. It is especially futile, as cultural memory proceeds through constant reinterpretation and adaptation, causing works with outdated morals to be set aside, and statues to be forgotten on their own.”
I would like to conclude this article with an invitation to trust selective judgment, one that embraces what nourishes it and rejects what does not align with its values, be they moral or aesthetic. This, ultimately, is also what is known as “critical thinking.” It would be equally regrettable to lose it because the world, smoothed and polished in the representations offered, no longer provides anything worthy of criticism.
Nayla Tamraz
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