Comment by runjake
18 days ago
There's much more ideology attached to "wokeness" than just "be nice" and "be respectful", such as the concepts around gender and neurodiversity spectrums.
Just using the word itself evokes immediate reactions from those aligned with particular political "sides". I've formed this opinion after my many, mandatory DEI trainings at work.
I think all good people can agree that being nice and being respectful of people who aren't hurting others is a no-brainer.
Edit: Note that this comment is being downvoted to oblivion and illustrates my point.
>as the concepts around gender and neurodiversity spectrums
The concept that these people exist and they should be treated as people?
Again, it goes beyond that. Respecting a person and demanding people adopt certain beliefs[1] are two separate things.
And yes, these people exist and should obviously be treated with respect as people. that doesn't necessitate an alignment in beliefs, however.
1. Eg. what is a man/woman?
There's also a great deal of sanctimony attached in many cases, which is the thing people hate the most in my experience.
It reminds me of when I was getting breakfast with my wife one day, and there was a guy who had just come from some kind of feminist protest. He was wearing a shirt that said (paraphrasing) that the only two reasons to not call yourself a feminist are that you are unaware it just means "treat women like people", or that you're an asshole. He seemed genuinely unaware that the sanctimonious hostility his shirt expressed is a huge reason why people don't call themselves feminists.
"Woke" is like that. I'm quite certain that there are a lot of good people who really do just want to respect everyone. However, there are also a lot of petty jerks who are using an ostensibly good cause to bully people. Unfortunately for the former people, the latter people taint the movement and make it unattractive to those outside it.
I think even the people you would call the most woke hate mandatory DEI training. The idea is fine in theory, there's three main parts that seem to be common to them.
* Here's some genres of people you might not have interacted with in your personal life before that you might run into at work, and here's the broad strokes of how each of those groups would describe themselves and some cultural differences you might want to keep in mind.
* Here's a baby's first introduction to intersectionality and some situations where that lens might be relevant at work.
* Stop sexually harassing your coworkers, Jesus people.
But the implementation is unbelievably patronizing and presented with so much "sensitivity" that the overall experience is an hour of what feels like walking on eggshells. It's exhausting.
Agreed. But while pretty much everyone hates mandatory training, there's a large group of people who's beliefs align closely with that ideology. In other words, it's a real ideology, regardless of what one thinks about it.
My mental model here is to avoid labeling or lumping people into buckets and just forming opinions of them as an individual, for purely selfish reasons (not missing out on learning from that person).
From my perspective as a white person who grew up in very poor black and Latino communities, where we were often the only white family for several blocks, DEI training has been a super weird experience. I now live in an area where white is >90% of the population. I can't quite pin down why, but it feels really patronizing and disingenuous. I find myself often thinking about something that is taught in the training that my friends would find racist or offensive.
This is why I'd prefer they just stuck to kindness and respect. We're all flawed humans. That is our beauty.