Has Woke Taken Over Everything? - Dr Joanna Williams

Babies start being racist from the age of three months old. You know, they become aware of different skin colors and they start showing preferences for the same skin color as their own. Anybody with an ounce of common sense knows that this is completely ridiculous, the idea that, of babies being born racist. It becomes an almost religious idea of original sin. (wind blows)

British police officers have been told to embrace the label woke. What's going on?

(laughs) Well, it's a good question because what they're clearly not being told to do is go out there and fight crime. Um, they're being given anti-racism training and they're being told that if they, um, think that this anti-racism training is going to see them being labeled as woke, then they should just embrace that and go with it. I mean, clearly nobody wants the police to be racist, and certainly I don't want the police to be going round targeting people because of their skin color or anything like that. But I think what most of us want the police to being doing is actually catching criminals, and catching criminals irrespective of their skin color. And nobody has a problem with the police really having training in anti-racism, but the question is what, what kind of training they're getting. And central to this training is, is they're being told basically that any racial discrepancies, uh, any kind of, where one, uh, ethnic group is seen to be kind of out of proportion to another ethnic group is a problem. But you can't really go about fighting crime in that way. It means you're fighting crime with one hand tied behind your back, you're, you're always looking at skin color and you're left thinking, "Well, you know, have we stopped and searched too many Black people this week? Have we perhaps questioned too many brown skin colored drivers? Have we pulled over too many white people?" And you can't, you can't police properly if you've got one mind on skin color. You've got to be looking at who's committing the crimes, not what color skin they've got. So, it seems to me that this does make policing woke, and the problem with it is not that they need to embrace it, it's that they need to ask themselves why they're not busy spending the time catching criminals rather than messing about with these things looking at people's skin color.

Abimbola Johnson, chairwoman of the scrutiny panel, what is the s- that sounds terrifying, chairwoman of the scrutiny panel...

(laughs)

... that will hold forces to account over the plan, expressed disappointment that officers refused to say whether policing was institutionally racist as they launched the initiative. Johnson, who was appointed after Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Britain in 2020, said officers should be comfortable with being called woke.

Yeah. Do you know what? That's the classic catch-22 that woke, um, tricks people into, and particularly around issues to do with racism. So this big thing like, you know, are you going to say that you're institutionally racist, uh, they can't win on that one, so I'm not surprised they didn't answer it. Because if they say, you know, "Yes, yes, we are institutionally racist," then it's like, oh my god, what are you doing? Why are you institutionally racist? We better fire you all, we better recruit a whole load of new police officers, send you on a load more training sessions, you're clearly doing something very wrong. But if they say, "No, we're not institutionally racist," then by definition of the kind of woke mantras, they are racist (laughs) because they're not admitting to all their innate prejudices. So, I, I think if anybody asked me that question, I would avoid it too because you, it, like I say, it's one that you just cannot win in the eyes of these woke people.