I have just finished Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke. It is a useful book because it does not offer the usual lazy attack on “wokeness.” Its more serious argument is about class, status, language, and moral performance. It shows how some highly educated professional classes can speak the language of justice while still living comfortably inside the very structures that produce inequality.

That argument matters. There is no need to defend shallow progressive theatre. Some of what passes for social justice language has become a performance of taste, education, and moral refinement. It allows people to signal virtue without surrendering comfort, power, reputation, or institutional advantage. In that narrow world, the rise and fall of “woke ideology” can look like an argument within the same social class, and often within the same racial comfort zone. One set of symbolic professionals manufactures the language, another set grows tired of it, and yet another set declares that the whole thing is finally over.

But Aotearoa New Zealand is not just that narrow space. Here, the political use of “anti-woke” language has a wider and more damaging life. It does not remain a critique of elite hypocrisy. It becomes a convenient cover for pushing aside serious conversations about racism, Te Tiriti, equity, representation, migrant exclusion, and institutional responsibility. A term that may begin as a critique of elite performance soon becomes a blunt instrument against people who were never part of that performance in the first place. Even the ordinary exercise of rights, including the rights protected under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, can begin to look suspicious when minorities use them too loudly.

Part of the vacuum is of our own making. In many ethnic communities, public life now moves through a small circuit of familiar rooms and familiar faces. The same committees assemble under fluorescent lights, the same banners are unrolled, the same plates of food are carried across the hall, the same words of inclusion and representation float upward and vanish into the ceiling. There is activity, sometimes frantic activity, but not much thought. The community is kept warm, but not awakened.

Around these spaces, little enclosures of influence have grown: umbrella bodies, cultural platforms, religious committees, respectable elders, self-appointed interpreters of the migrant condition. They are not without sincerity, and some do useful work, but the larger pattern is thin. A seminar becomes a report, a report becomes a photograph, a photograph becomes proof that something has happened. Then the season changes, and the community returns to where it was, slightly more documented but not much better equipped.

The religious institutions tell an even stranger story. Every weekend they prove that the community is not poor. The car parks fill, the microphones crackle, the offerings collect, the ceremonies continue. Some institutions sit on real estate worth millions, yet when the need is for civic education, policy literacy, research, youth formation, or serious engagement with the country around us, a sudden poverty descends. The purse closes. The imagination shrinks. Stages are controlled, not because thought is dangerous to the community, but because it is dangerous to the turf of those who manage the stage.

This is the vacuum into which anti-woke politics walks. Not as a storm at first, but as a tidy little certainty, carrying its ready-made phrases. It says that equity is favouritism, that racism is complaint, that Te Tiriti is special treatment, that migrants should be grateful and quiet. And because our own institutions have not trained people to think beyond comfort, ceremony, and representation, these slogans find soft ground. The leaves have been falling for a long time before anyone notices the tree is bare.

This manufactured woke rage is therefore not a harmless irritation. It does not merely mock pronouns, university language, or the excesses of professional-managerial virtue. It softens the ground for something more serious. It prepares the public to dismiss the lived experiences of Māori, Pasifika, migrant, refugee, and other coloured communities as exaggeration or complaint. It turns the language of fairness into an object of ridicule before fairness has even been attempted properly.

The tragedy is that many people who are tired of performative wokeness may not notice the trap. They think they are rejecting hypocrisy, but they may also be helping to bury the very language through which vulnerable communities can describe exclusion. Once words like racism, equity, representation, and institutional responsibility are made laughable, the people who depend on those words are left exposed.

So, the task is not to defend performative wokeness. That would be a mistake. The task is to refuse the trick that uses the failures of elite progressivism as an excuse to bury equity itself. We do not need to protect shallow moral theatre. We need to protect the communities that anti-woke politics is preparing to leave outside the door.