Comment by cle
6 days ago
TFA spends the first 7-8 paragraphs defining "woke", even a dedicated callout to a concise definition:
> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
6 days ago
TFA spends the first 7-8 paragraphs defining "woke", even a dedicated callout to a concise definition:
> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
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.
If someone makes a racist or homophobic statement and is confronted about it, there is a good chance that he will perceive it as aggressive. Even if the confrontation is controlled.
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> Most of the article is spent elaborating on what that means and providing examples of it.
More like starting with existing conclusions and working backwards from them. Even in the example you quote, Graham begs the question of "woke" and "politically correct" being equivalent and works backwards from that assumption - in the process incorrectly pinning the origins of political correctness on university social science / humanities programs and the hippie kids being hired into them in the 70's (never mind the multiple-centuries-long history of the political right policing speech and expression in service of the exact opposite of the intellectual pursuits universities foster; apparently that doesn't count as "political correctness" because reasons).
Why does he want it to be done quietly? The only way democracy can work is that you convince others of your ideas. Seems like he doesn't want certain ideas to be advocated for at all, go work on them if you want but shut up about it.
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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".
So, not such a "concise definition".
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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).
> Taking one as the "one true meaning" is almost always just a tactic to delegitimize an opponent
I think the thought process is that there was a word and it had a positive meaning. It was then used in a negative way to delegitimize an opponent. So I think some people feel like the word is stolen or still being purposely miss used. For better or worse that is not how language works, in general new meanings can be attached to words and at least in my experience the majority of people using woke negatively are not trying to miss use the word.
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".
Well, I wonder what he thinks non-performative social justice looks like. The civil rights movement was certainly performative (as is all protest) and that's basically the only narrative we were offered growing up for how to affect social change.
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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!