Colette A.M. Phillips is president and CEO of Colette Phillips Communications, founder of Get Konnected!, and author of “The Includers: The 7 Traits of Culturally Savvy Anti-Racist Leaders.”
A Globe story about a clash that erupted after Last Ditch, a lesbian bar in Greenfield, loosened its mask requirement one night a week set off a firestorm of reaction.
Last Ditch was losing money, so its owner made Saturday nights mask-optional in the hopes of drumming up more customers. Before long, critics accused them of ableism and even eugenics. Even when management apologized in an online statement, it was condemned — for lacking alt text for the visually impaired.
The controversy revealed how people with good intentions and like-minded goals can come to regard one another as enemies when disagreement becomes a test of moral character.
The episode brought me back to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent assessment of the cultural politics that took hold in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020: “Woke 1 was crazy.” She laughed as she said it. But as Democrats try to persuade voters this November, what comes next is serious. If Woke 1 too often mistook disagreement for disloyalty, Woke 2.0 must make room at the table for those willing to challenge us.
I have spent much of my career advocating for diversity, equity, and inclusion because I have seen what happens when talented people are overlooked, institutions draw leaders from the same narrow circles, and racial disparities are dismissed. Our different histories and experiences matter.
But inclusion can also be distorted into something punitive: a system of blame and shame that sorts people into oppressors and oppressed, assigns them a fixed moral status, and treats an imperfect question as evidence of poor character. That approach does not build a larger community. It makes people afraid to join one.
To many, this probably sounds silly. It is easy to poke fun at a community meeting that begins with a calming breath and ends three and a half hours later with almost nothing resolved, like the one that Last Ditch hosted. But the episode showed how difficult it has become to resolve challenges even when people share the same underlying goals.
A similar dynamic pervades in debates about public policy. They usually begin with a practical question: What policy best protects people? But too often they devolve into arguments over who is allowed to speak, whose experience counts, and whether an imperfect ally deserves to remain inside the coalition. Once that happens, compromise looks more like betrayal than progress.
But allyship is not a lockstep agreement. Frederick Douglass put the standard plainly in 1855: “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” Exclusion is about more than hurt feelings. President Trump and the movement he leads have weaponized DEI and demonized wokeness. When those of us on the other side cannot resolve disagreements without turning on one another, we hand Trump ammunition and fracture our own coalition. The people with the most at stake are left worse off.
This is why we need Woke 2.0 — to welcome those who recoiled from the scolding and ideological rigidity of Woke 1. By becoming better at bridge building, there is room not only for disagreement but also for the differences in race, gender, identity, and lived experience that are essential to civil discourse.
Otherwise, we will keep shrinking the room until everyone inside agrees — and then wonder why no one else walks through the door.