The ignorance that underpinned empire and slavery still has staunch defenders | Zoe Williams

It seems that the government’s war on woke is box office gold, infinite spite fired at an endlessly replenished stream of targets, none of them moving very fast, since they totally weren’t expecting culture secretary Oliver Dowden to even be aware of their work.

But, ask anyone who uses it pejoratively to describe another person what “woke” actually means, and it turns out to have a specific usage. In an academic or museum trustee, it means anyone who talks about decolonising the curriculum, as in the case of the academic whose reappointment to the board of the Museum of Greenwich was reportedly vetoed by Dowden. In the context of youth, it’s the ones on Black Lives Matter protests, unless it’s the ones posing a threat to a slave owner’s statue.

Its purpose is to reframe any anti-racist activism or intellectual inquiry as a threat to either public order or British heritage. It’s tactically rather neat – if you’re unwilling to say “racism is good, actually”, then it’s hard to lodge a heartfelt opposition to anti-racists. Yet if you can interpolate some other dearly held principle (history, public order and, oh go on then, freedom of speech), claim it is under attack and pledge to defend it with all your might, well, here’s the emotional heft you were lacking.

That argument, where it relates to history, rests on a parallel idea, that anti-racist revisionism is seeking to erase the past. If we take down a statue of Cecil Rhodes, we begin an act of conscious forgetting, which corrodes the national identity.