The Humiliating Art of the Woke Apology

When people look back at our current era of woke intolerance, perhaps the most disturbing artifact will be reporter Donald McNeil’s apology upon his ouster from the New York Times.

The reason for his abject self-abasement is a bit of a mystery. He didn’t grovel to save his job — he was getting fired regardless. Perhaps he felt he needed to make a fulsome apology with an eye to future job prospects, or maybe he believed every word.

Regardless, this sort of self-accusation is not normal . . . except for in totalitarian states and in contemporary America.

The McNeil note to Times staff follows the pattern of other such apologies over the last year. We are a long way from the rote “I’m sorry if I offended anyone” apologies of yore, and a long way from “I wish in retrospect I had put that differently” apologies that might make sense, if warranted.

A routine feature of over-the-top apologies is the vast gap between the alleged offense and the depths of the confessions of wrongdoing. The tone and content of many contemporary apologies might be appropriate if, say, Aaron Burr were expressing regret for shooting Alexander Hamilton, or if Andrew Jackson were coming to terms with the enormity of the Trail of Tears.

Instead, we are talking about peccadilloes or non-offenses like McNeil’s using an offensive racial term in a conversation with students after one of them asked whether he thought it was right for a classmate to be punished for using the term as a twelve-year-old.

There is definitely an art to humiliating woke apologies, common patterns that appear across these attempts to appease the gods of taking offense.

The apologizer must make the rubble bounce regarding his or her own failures. In one of the multiple apologies for taking a swipe at Chrissy Teigen’s recipe business (and at Marie Kondo), food writer Alison Roman said that she was “stupid, careless, and insensitive.”