Comment by spondylosaurus
6 days ago
"Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep. Not really a statement about your own behavior so much as an acknowledgement of what other people are doing to you—it just meant you're well-informed.
Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
Generally the reaction is not to minorities(non-white, is what I am assuming you mean) but to people from outside of a group trying to tell a group what words to use i.e. LatinX.
An aside: If someone who is white is talking to the Spanish speaking community, would they be considered a minority? If so, then the parent premise would hold true.
Latinx is a great example of the overreaction. Some people use this term. It was briefly catching on among groups with power, but ultimately never did. But it is spoken about like Harris was saying "latinx" in all of her campaign videos and that people are being fired for using "latino" or "latina" or even "latin."
Ultimately, I think it is important that groups are able to try things and then later determine that they weren't the best idea. Shouldn't this be ceelbrated?
It would indeed be nice if these things were introduced as “let’s try a new thing and then choose to accept or reject it later, based on results”, rather than “we have determined there is only one correct way of thinking about this topic, and if you don’t like it, you’re a Nazi”.
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I mean any kind of minority, although I would generally say "marginalized group" instead of "minority." But this is HN, so trying to stick to more commonly-known terminology :P
I also think the "latinx" thing is overblown and generally used as an "anti-woke" shibboleth by people who want to get mad at something. Literally never seen an Anglophone yelling at a Spanish speaker about it before, only queer Spanish speakers who use it to refer to themselves.
Also worth noting that there have been other variations that predate "latinx" and have seen more widespread usage. There's "latine," and "latin@", although the former is both easier to write and to pronounce.
> Literally never seen an Anglophone yelling at a Spanish speaker about it before, only queer Spanish speakers who use it to refer to themselves.
You and I move in different circles. I was definitely running into "normal" Spanish speakers for the past few years who's awakening experience with "wokeness" was seeing the word "Latinx" on some HR form and being told that the reason was "for Hispanic comfort" ... which every single one of them found gaslighting in the extreme (since none of them liked it, even a little bit).
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> "Woke" was originally an AAVE term, popular in the midcentury civil rights era and beyond. Literally meaning "awake [to what's happening to you and your community]," as opposed to being ignorant and asleep.
This is distorted history. "Woke" is just the word in a bunch of black dialects for "awake." We just say "are you woke?" instead of "are you awake?"
What happened is at some point some white woman somewhere had a black person explaining their political beliefs to her. It was likely a black person who was working for her (doing her nails, washing her clothes, or serving her food) who she had a faux friendship with and considered a spiritual guru and a connection to the real world and real suffering, in that way white people do (magical negro.) She carried these pearls of wisdom to her white friends, or to her students at the university, or to the nonprofit that she worked at, and it entered into the white lexicon as a magic word.
If a white hippie, in the middle of a righteous rant, said "you've got to stay awake, man..." as many have, it wouldn't have been so exotic and interesting to tell their white friends. Or as useful to get yourself a job as a consultant.
At that point, it became a thing that white people would use to abuse other white people as racists. The sin wasn't calling white people racists, it's that a certain self-selected white elect declared themselves to be not racist, or even anti-racist, in order to attack other white people. And they decided this gave them the right to control how other white people speak. And a government who hates the way people can talk to each other on the internet about what the government is lying about supported them whole-heartedly. Woke policing was an excellent way to use legal means to keep people asleep.
And black people got blamed, as always. Because America is racist. Black people didn't benefit an iota from any of this. Approximately 0.0% of DEI managers are black men. Black people got poorer during the entire period. Now the anti-woke are going to unleash their revenge on black people, and the ex-woke are going to resent black people for not recognizing their sainthood.
> Perhaps not a coincidence that reactionaries have now co-opted black slang to mean "things minorities do that I don't like."
Meanwhile, the first step of wokeness was to erase black people altogether and replace them with "minorities" and "people of color," as if the only thing important to note about black people is their lack of whiteness. Or, since sexual minorities are included in "minorities", black people now have no problems that can be distinguished from the desires of white upper-middle class transwomen. Wokeness erased slavery and Jim Crow, and all that money that white people inherit, just as much as anti-wokeness did. Now the real crime was that white people weren't feeling the right things, and weren't saying the right things. Complete Caucasian auto-fixation.
The only thing racial about black people's problems is that white people used race as the criterion to enslave. Slavery and Jim Crow were the point, and all of the freebies handed from government to people's white ancestors that weren't given to slaves and ex-slaves, and all of the labor and torture visited on slaves and ex-slaves turned into profit that went into the pockets of white people and was taxed into government coffers. There were blond-haired blue-eyed slaves; the "race" stuff is a white invention, not something they get to act like is an imposition from their ex-property. And that experience is not something that everybody non-white or non-straight gets to steal.
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It's not "racially gated," lol. It's a word that was popularized and primarily used by black activists, just like how "bikeshed" as a verb was invented by and mainly used by software engineers.
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> like how "bikeshed" as a verb was invented by and mainly used by software engineers
How dare you occupationally gate this term! (if it's not clear /s)
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> There are a lot of words that were utterly benign a few decades ago and now are capital offences.
It's funny, I can't think of one. I think that might have to do with a difference in what the existentialists would call facticity.
> Turning this into a racial grievance is incredible, really, and is very woke in the sense that PG is citing. The overwhelming use of woke as a pejorative is targeting whites, particularly the endless offended "ally" sort. And of course, in no universe are females a minority if that is your argument (51.1% of the US). And I mean, worldwide white males are one of the smallest minorities, yet somehow they are the target of almost all actions and rhetoric.
I think this is one of the divides -- so in the interest of open conversation: As you see it, it's probably true that woke is referring to some imagined pink haired middle manager, living in Seattle or Portland, who is really into land acknowledgments.
But when I look at the broader right-wing ecosystem, that's not what it means. Woke is when a city like Baltimore has a black mayor. Woke is when the fire department is headed by a lesbian. Woke is when female video game characters don't have a large enough cup size. Woke is when activists suggest that maybe we have a negative police culture in America. Woke is when there are too many POC in a given incoming college class.
And it's not surprising that people would be against that definition.
>It's funny, I can't think of one.
Dwarf, midget, retarded, idiot, oriental, cripple, gypsy are just a start. Facticity doesn't actually seem to be on your side.
>As you see it
Woke to me is when people are doing performative moralizing that benefits absolutely no one, all to achieve moral supremacy, and often to the ends of white shame (only ever targeting whites, particularly white males). The "cargo cult" article that might still be on the front page is the perfect example.
It's is absolutely true that there are right wing groups that think a woman existing in media is "woke". A woman not having adequately large breasts in a video game is "woke". But on the flip side, there was a "woke" push that meant that every lead character everywhere had to be female, even better a minority female, even better a lesbian minority female, maybe with a handicap. Every commercial had to feature a mixed race or same sex couple, etc. When that becomes obvious and apparent to everyone, people do naturally start to suspect and see ghosts everywhere. It is an incredibly obvious outcome of pushing something to the points of parody.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
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When you’re woke, it’s bad.
But when you’re red-pilled, it’s apparently good?