As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead.
and then on the other side it feels like the people on the American political right see it as what this website describes it as “ A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others.”
I think the divide has originated from taking unlikeable behaviour and labeling that as ‘woke’ (in bad faith of course) and some people have just bonded to that definition so much that they see it as that.
At least that’s what I’ve noticed online over the past few (bonkers) years
Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints about, say, LatinX have far surpassed the number of actual proponents of it, which were a small number of people of the left. However, it still brought up again and again because it forms a useful image of what people are fighting against.
The trouble with this is that a groups idea of the “enemy” typically outlasts and often surpasses the actual enemy that idea is based off of. People on the right will write endless articles and videos about wokeness not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group.
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.
The trouble is that many people have decided that if you discuss "wokeness" and especially if you have a problem with some element of it, that means you're no longer on "the left".
Personally, I think the issue is mostly about behavior, and not specific ideas. "Let's all make an effort to move culture in a better direction" became "If you don't wholly endorse these specific changes we've decided are necessary, that makes you a bigot, you're not a true progressive, etc.".
When a lot of this was heating up during the pandemic, I encountered two very different kinds of people.
1. Those who generally agreed with efforts to improve the status quo and did what they could to help (started displaying their pronouns, tried to eliminate language that had deeply racist connotations, etc)
2. Those who would actively judge/shame/label you if you weren't 100% up to speed on every hot-button issue and hadn't fully implemented the desired changes
It's that 2nd group that tends to be the target of "anti-woke" sentiment, and that 2nd group tended to be extremely noisy.
> not because there actually exists a problem with wokeness but to try to gain political and social status with their political group
The other issue that I see repeatedly is a group of people insisting that "wokeness" doesn't exist or that there isn't a toxic form of it currently in the culture. I think acknowledging the existence of bad faith actors and "morality police" would do more for advancing the underlying ideas often labeled "woke" than trying to focus on the fakeness of the problem.
Maybe that group is made up of squeaky wheels, but their existence is used to justify the "anti-woke" sentiment that many people push.
For me, this boils down to a tactics issue where people are behaving badly and distracting from real issues - often issues those same people claim to care about.
The function of the word "wokeness" in conservative and technology executive circles (quickly becoming the same circle) is to tie the ideas of progressives together with the least defensible part.
That the squeaky wheels exist is used to justify wholesale dropping of the entire train of thought. PG is deciding that because PC culture exists, we can't work on those real issues until PC culture is gone. Why is wokeness noteworthy and of-our-time, but racism is not? Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.
I grew up in the 90s and the PC culture then was Christianity. You couldn't say a curse word, or even mention the idea of sex. PC culture in the 90s when he mentions it was more akin to "don't use a hard-r, even if they do it in Blazing Saddles".
That doesn't seem to be supported by the essay itself, since it has the following part:
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
It seems to say there are real issues, there are good things coming from "the woke" (whatever that means), we shouldn't discard all ideas just because one or two are bad.
> Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.
Is that something pg actually said/wrote/hinted at in any of the essays, or are you just trying to bad-faith your way out of this discussion?
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
What he does not explain is how big a problem of scale this is, but based on the way the rest of the essay goes, I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
Is that really your charitable reading of the part you quoted?
In my mind, a charitable reading would be that he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be. I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me.
It is a divisive topic already, we would all be better off trying to understand as well as we can before replying.
To whit, he repeatedly brushes aside the concept of hostile work environment, in particular professors making their students feel uncomfortable, as if its just a question of one person making their equal feel uncomfortable due to a simple disagreement. This is a dramatic misread of why a professor (who is by definition in a position of power over the student, and such power may well include the career and profession of the student, even ignoring the sexual overtones, which are all-too-common as well) needs to be aware of and avoid hostile environments. Like, a woman who constantly hears from her math professor how s/he thinks women are bad at math will likely not be super-psyched to continue with math coursework. I would certainly leave a company if a manager was constantly insulting whatever group of people I was born into, and they pay me to be there. If I'm paying thousands of dollars a semester, the least the professor can do is stay in their lane.
That's five sentences to retort 2 more-or-less throwaway statements. The entire essay is stacked with stuff like that.
And its all pointless because odds are, instead of changing any minds, or even engaging with what I've said, the anti-woke types will just vote it down.