Comment by jrm4
5 days ago
Black person here.
Like most discussions of "woke" and "wokeness," this one too fails HARD by not fully and directly addressing the origins of the term -- and by "fails hard" I do mean will almost certainly do more obscuring than clarifying by starting from an information-deficient premise.
Including, e.g. "The term 'woke' has its origins in the Black American community as a signifier of awareness about ones political and social situation..." is a bare minimum.
You're right, but I don't think he's interested in the term. He's interested in the social phenomenon that (briefly) appropriated the term before the other side started using it as a negative.
There is so very little citation or substantiation in the entire essay. Even the footnotes are largely just more speculation. He presents it as some kind of historical record but it's literally just his thoughts.
It’s almost like that is the entirety of the rhetorical and argument station expectations when people comment on too much wokeness.
Vibes.
“I invented a meaning for this word that bears no resemblance to its actual meaning and then am critical of others because I think my invented definition is bad”
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It is actually insane how far I had to scroll to see the first comment mentioning this. He has merits in his comparison to religion but this essay is a huge miss.
Edit: in this thread, the actual origin of “woke” is only mentioned 3 times, the thread has 1942 comments as I type
https://x.com/seunosewa/status/1878835480424513903
"Usage is usage. I don't make the rules."
He also clarifies he's referring to the contemporary meaning in the linked essay:
> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.
> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?
He doesn’t even attempt to touch on the actual origins in the essay however. There are a lot of loose ends in it and this is a glaring one.
He also uses “political correctness”, which is a more precise way to describe the phenomenon he talks about. But that buzzword died a long time ago, so “the origins of woke” without actually touching on the origin of “woke” will do.
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This is maybe not unknown but often intentionally avoided by people like Graham who discuss this topic with an anti-woke bias. The exercise is to create a false origin and attack that rather than address the actual history of the term and its origin.
I'm also black and growing up I had the impression that "woke" referred to left-leaning conspiracy theorists and activists. 9/11 truthers and gay rights activists were the main woke groups of the Bush era
Going to guess you're pretty young? Seems odd to have not heard it differently elsewhere first.
jrm4, yours should be the top comment.
I denounce Paul Graham's essay. At a time when our leaders - especially our thought leaders - reliably do the wrong thing, it's especially appalling that he has the wrong take on wokeness, transparently and self-evidently to appease Donald Trump and his followers in order to protect his financial ties to Y Combinator startups. That's low, bordering on unforgivable, and until he retracts his statements, I'm afraid that I've lost respect for him and his opinion in all other matters.
It's obvious that pg isn't schooled in the basic civic virtues that I assumed he was. Such as: in journalism one always punches up. That's perhaps the simplest litmus test to know if one is siding with the oppressor.
I identify as woke and progressive. I speak out against all forms of oppression. I call out othering such as sexism, racism, ableism and ageism. I watched political correctness rise and fall under the boot of capitalist authoritarianism. I witnessed the wrong people win the internet lottery and deliberately undermine everything the civil rights movement achieved since the 1960s, as well as the shared prosperity that the New Deal brought since FDR. I watched them monopolize our media, take over and corrupt symbols of what's possible like Twitter and Wikipedia, attack beloved institutions like the US Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency, divide us on wedge issues in order to enrich themselves, and capture our regulatory bodies through lobbying and packing courts with judges and justices who toe the party line. I watched the winners sell out like pg just did. I watched my heroes fall.
I thought the readership of Hacker News was with me on this stuff. But I guess I was wrong. It's apparent that too many people here just don't get it. They don't work on their unhealed traumas, they don't seek equitable solutions. They just side with concentrated wealth and power, whether out of fear over their own job security, greed by hoping to be at the top of the pyramid someday, or through simple projection by not nurturing their own dignity and the power that their voice could have to shed grace and light onto the world.
If everything I just said is performative, so be it. I'd rather be on the side of peace, love and righteousness than whatever all this is.
Because you said that this author has the "wrong take on wokeness", what do you believe to be "the right take on wokeness"?
And by the way, I do think you are being more than a little bit performative here, because it seems you're just displaying how morally superior you believe yourself to be over Paul Graham, your heroes, and the readership of HN. But I would still like to hear your answer to my question.
Sure but that has almost nothing to do with how it’s used today.
Language and the meanings of words change over time, and it’s all but impossible to make people go back to using tre old definition.
The second definition is a gentrification of the first definition. It has everything to do with how it's used today.
It's what it meant until white people started lecturing each other on what it means, then conservatives started using it as a derisive catch-all for anything conceivably liberal or simply empathetic.
but don't you think an essay titled "the origins of wokeness" should consider that definition?