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Notes -
"Anti-woke" includes many things that are beneficial to black people, most obviously in that it opposes wokeness in areas that have nothing to do with race, but also even within the realm of race. For instance, consider the CDC's COVID-19 vaccine prioritization policy. They deprioritized older people relative to essential workers because older people are more white, even though they estimated this would result in many additional deaths (especially if the vaccine was less effective at preventing infection than serious disease, which turned out to be the case). This policy killed more black people it just killed even more white people so the proportion of the deaths was more white. How did it benefit black people that more of them died so that more white people would die so that the percentages looked better to woke ACIP/CDC officials? Take the argument from the expert on ethics and health-policy the NYT quoted:
I don't think the average black person would really be sympathetic to this argument, even before you pointed out it was also going to kill more black people. These sorts of arguments are mostly only appealing to the woke. And of course the same is true for plenty of less life-or-death issues, like Gamergate's NotYourShield consisting of women and minorities who didn't think they benefited from journalists defending themselves by accusing critics of being sexist/racist/etc.
Furthermore, even within the limited realm of affirmative-action I don't think wokeness genuinely serves the racial self-interest of black people. There are many more black people who benefit from infrastructure than from racial quotas in infrastructure contracts, more who need medical care than who go to medical school, more who use Google than who work for Google. It isn't just the principles that want the black percentage to be high vs. the ones that want it to be low, there is an inherent asymmetry because meritocracy isn't just an arbitrary "principled libertarian stance", it serves an important functional purpose.
Of course diversity advocates also sometimes say that affirmative-action/etc. benefits everyone, it's just that they're wrong. Other times racial resentment and malice clearly play a role, but even then that doesn't mean it actually serves racial self-interest. In general I think ideological conflicts have a lot more true believers and a lot less people cynically pursuing their interests than people tend to think they have.
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