Comment by PittleyDunkin
6 days ago
> Can't really agree. Especially in the wake of the 2024 election, there's been quite a bit of discussion about wokeness on the left.
We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first before there's any discussion worth a damn. As best I can tell it just means "any behavior coming from young people I don't like as a cable news viewer". Frankly, I'm at the point where if someone uses the word non-ironically I just write the speaker off as not seriously trying to communicate. Use your words! Describe specific behavior. People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.
> We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first
Incidentally, this has been a major part of the post-election discussion about it.
I agree that the term has become diluted to a point that it's lost most meaning, and in many cases it means "behaviors and opinions I disagree with".
I think it mostly means some combination of: morality police, people against "wrongspeak", holier-than-thou attitudes, white people advocating for topics they don't understand, and in general a kind of tribal behavior that "others" people who don't fully buy into the entire spectrum of ideas this group is selling, i.e. they treat their beliefs as absolutely true, and anyone who questions them or wants to debate them are automatically othered.
> People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.
I agree and disagree. The media landscape has had a major hand in shaping the discussion, and social media has validated the worst fears of the people working themselves into a tizzy. e.g. if someone supports trans rights but has concerns about minors receiving certain surgeries and wants to discuss those concerns, they're put in the same category as transphobes who wish real harm on other people. Depending on where they raise these topics, they'll automatically be blocked and/or put on lists of transphobic people.
Discussions that actually focus on something material, concrete or substantial are derailed by collective community behaviors that refuse to engage with the concrete and substantial.
It's a sad state of affairs for public discourse, and figuring out how to de-escalate the conversation and somehow return to substantive good-faith conversations might be the most important problem of the century.
Mostly means or what it’s become to mean? I was on a college campus in 2002 and the word typically painted a picture. Someone who was hyperaware of real or perceived injustices and was likely to have incense burning in their rooms. The people who I thought were “woke” would have agreed with me. Down to the incense in a lot of cases.
The right is notoriously great at hijacking words terms/words and flipping them into something nefarious. Or sometimes that exact opposite like they did turning the well supported by all Estate Tax into the conservative hating death tax.
Now woke has morphed into this weird thing. A clapback insult for the insecure to justify their insistence at exclusion of one kind or another.
Oh, absolutely what it has come to mean over time. But what it has come to mean is ultimately what matters at the moment I think. The term has evolved, and I think that's a big reason there's so much polarization and disagreement about what it means.
Some subset of people understands the "true" meaning of the word, and the set of ideas originally associated with it. I suspect the majority of people are more likely to use it in the sense it has evolved into.
Some kind of separation needs to happen. The underlying ideals and ideas vs. the tactics people employ in bringing them about. If someone's MO is to judge/shame people, exert their moral superiority over others, and see the people around them in absolute terms, that set of behavior is particularly harmful to the underlying goals. It presents itself as the "truest" form of support for the goal and the only right way to go about achieving it. But it uses coercion/manipulation to take advantage of people's fear of public shaming and the consequences of "getting cancelled" which tends to ensure silence from people who see themselves as more pragmatic but not interested in getting labeled with "them" for raising questions about reasonable things.
I agree that when people use it now, it's less about anything substantive and entirely about what people feel the word has come to mean. Not sure how, but we need to fundamentally change the conversation.
The essay touches on something that I think explains that, though. Disputing an actual specific allegedly-woke idea requires one to confess their heresy specifically, so as the essay says, it's not smart to confess directly to holding a specific heretical opinion.
Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency, as Black author John McWhorter argues. He gets called all kinds of nasty things for speaking that opinion, and he's Black! On the other hand, it's harder to "cancel" or accuse someone of absolute racism (or race traitor-hood) if they say "I don't think the woke mindset is helping, and I think there are better ways to help Black communities."
So that's why imho the word "woke" is a popular tool among those who don't like the various components of it, which are much, much easier to enumerate than those on the Left incredulously pretend. It's basically just:
1. The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with, and that society should punish those who spoke those ideas.
2. Ideologies about race and generational guilt which basically boil down to "the whole world would be much better off if all Europeans had mysteriously vanished 1500 years ago and we wish that had happened."
3. Ideologies that have to do with gender, which I dare not even elaborate on, because of how heretical all but one opinion on that subject is.
> Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims
> The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with
You seem to be arguing that Black people are harmed by being exposed to ideas about victimhood, and then ridiculing the idea that being exposed to ideas can be harmful.
No, they're arguing that society should punish those who spoke those ideas, where "those ideas" is whatever terminally online leftists are whinging about at the moment (i.e. a bar that is way too low for the proposed repercussions).
But I think you already know that and went with the selective quote anyway.
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> ... and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency
Well, first we could start by having a discussion of whether or not it is actually true that "they are being told they are always victims with very little agency".
Now, if that were in fact true, we could go on to talk about how we might reduce that harm, and one part of that might involve saying that less.
But then again, were that not true, then we could pretty much discard the person's objections and move on to something that is actually happening.
I read and respect McWhorter, but I don't think that (a) he's right about everything or that (b) your one line summary characterizes his position accurately.
I'll reply separately to your attempted summary.
1. No, this is not the point at all. The actual view that you're referring to is that sometimes people are in fact harmed by verbal behavior and cultural phenomena, that we should recognize that, and when possible and appropriate seek to mitigate it. That doesn't mean punishment or book-banning (ideas which come from those most often associated with being anti-woke) but rather a willingness to examine reality through the eyes of people other than ourselves and above all to be kind.
2. No, that is also not the point at all. The actual view is that there has been, at least within the world once controlled by various European powers since somewhere in the range of 1200-1500, a wilful ignorance and downplaying of the horrors created by the colonialism perpetrated by those European powers.
3. Since you don't elaborate, it's hard to respond to this. But I will note that the recognition that gender and sex are not the same thing goes back many decades, if not centuries; that gender roles and sexuality have not been even remotely close to fixed across the time and space in which human civilization has existed; that the response from people who declaim the "woke" approach is so often summarizable as "I don't like it and other people should lead more miserable lives because I think so".
There also seems to be a willful ignorance of the horrors created by the Aztec, Qing, and Songhai powers (among others) before Europeans arrived in force. I won't attempt to defend or excuse the crimes against humanity committed by European colonial powers, but focusing on them seems particularly myopic. We can educate people about the history of that period but to what end? Assigning blame for the current state of affairs to dead people doesn't actually solve any problems today. The only way to move forward is to put that past behind us.
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Realizing that men and women are different and a man putting on a dress doesn't make him a woman goes back much further across all cultures.
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TFA spends the first 7-8 paragraphs defining "woke", even a dedicated callout to a concise definition:
Calling it performative (aka "virtue signaling") is either mind reading or casting aspersion without evidence.
I don't know what you want. Most of the article is spent elaborating on what that means and providing examples of it.
> Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
> The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so.
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That's a pretty subjective definition. We're back where we started.
Helpfully he spends most of the article elaborating on what he means by "aggressively performative".
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"aggressively" and "performative" already contain a judgement. The actual meaning of "wokeness" is an "awareness of the existence of social injustice".
The whole article is an opinion piece that is judging a group of people. I don't think most people would agree with your definition.
And besides, the definition of "woke" is a secondary issue anyway, the article's purpose isn't to propose a definition of woke, it's to judge and criticize people who behave a certain way, and he's done an adequate job IMO of describing the behaviors he's criticizing.
"Wokeness" itself implies taking some form of (performative) action. You can be aware of social injustice existing and not be "woke", in my opinion at least.
> The actual meaning of "wokeness" is an "awareness of the existence of social injustice".
The actual meaning of "wokeness" is that it has several different meanings. For instancee, the first could be what you outlined:
1. an "awareness of the existence of social injustice"
And another, equally valid one (that comes about from the reaction to people who embraced the first meaning and proceeded to behave obnoxiously and gain lots of attention) is:
2. the obnoxious and doctrinaire enforcement of the values of the "social justice" subculture on the wider population through bullying tactics (e.g. social media pile ons)
etc.
Taking one as the "one true meaning" is almost always just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent (usually by the left, as they have more access prestigious institutions, but language is language and no authority can suppress new words and new senses of existing words).
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what does "performative" mean in this context? I honestly can't tell. It would really help if pg provided an example so we could evaluate for ourselves.
Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?
Well b/c of the "focus on social justice" clause. I'd definitely agree though that both parties are way too "aggressively performative".
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>what does "performative" mean in this context? I honestly can't tell. It would really help if pg provided an example so we could evaluate for ourselves.
>In other words, it's people being prigs about social justice. And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice.
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The problem with political correctness was not that it focused on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for using the wrong words to talk about them.
>Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?
He doesn't even point fingers on this matter, but the social justice angle is the evident answer to that.
The problem appears to be with performativeness specifically. Because it is performative, it is superficial, and that's bad.
What this post is hilariously doing is policing what is considered superficial humanity and what is not.
Let's be woke but really mean it lads, then the conservatives will be with us!