Opinion | Yes, Woke 1.0 Was Crazy. Now Where’s the Accountability?

Restitution, for instance, for Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who in 2020 had to resign from his job and issue a groveling apology for the sin of running an article by the paper’s architecture critic with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too.” Restitution for Mike Pesca, the host of a popular podcast, “The Gist,” who was suspended indefinitely from his job at Slate for making a case, in an interoffice back and forth, that it may sometimes be permissible for a non-Black person to quote a racial slur in narrow contexts. Restitution, yes, for James Bennet, a former editor of The Times’s Opinion section, who was forced from his job after the publication of a controversial guest essay by Tom Cotton, a Republican senator.

Restitution for authors, like my friend Richard North Patterson, who has 16 New York Times best sellers to his name. When he wrote a novel that dealt with racial discrimination and had a Black woman as a leading (and wholly sympathetic) character, roughly 20 major imprints rejected it, with several making it clear it was because he was white. Restitution for every aspiring young fiction writer with the misfortune of being white and male and therefore quietly but efficiently cut out of the game of literary prizes and publication opportunities. As Jacob Savage noted last year in Compact magazine, his research found that at the time, “not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker.”

Restitution, also, in academia.

For Jason Kilborn, a University of Illinois, Chicago, law professor, who was barred from campus and placed on administrative leave after he had used the first letter of two slurs in his civil procedure exam, an affront the Black Law Students Association described as “mental terrorism.” For Ilya Shapiro, a legal scholar about to start a position at Georgetown Law School, who had to endure a 122-day university inquest for the crime of a clumsy tweet betraying a conservative worldview. For Carole Hooven, who was railroaded out of Harvard after a TV appearance in which she said that the terms “male” and “female” were scientifically essential even as she insisted that “facts about biology” shouldn’t “prevent us from treating people with respect.”

Restitution for the hapless men who got caught up in a #MeToo maw that made no distinction between Harvey Weinstein-style predation and fumbled romantic advances or unsatisfying hookups. The comedian Aziz Ansari was the most notable victim of this form of public humiliation, but there are many others, without influence or deep pockets, whose lives were permanently scarred in situations where accusations alone were viewed as sufficient to establish guilt and exact professional consequences.

Restitution, not least, for the drive-by victims of Woke 1.0 — sometimes literally so. Emmanuel Cafferty, an employee for San Diego Gas and Electric, was fired from his job when he was pictured with his arm hanging out of the window with his fingers linked in what appeared to be an “OK” gesture, which the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have called a coded symbol of white supremacy. Mr. Cafferty, who is Hispanic, insisted he had merely been cracking his knuckles.