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.
No, it really is about specific ideas. I’ll discuss four:
1) Many on the left believe that non-whites are a cohesive political coalition with common cause and shared interests. This goes back to the 1990s with the “rainbow coalition.” A lot of the way the left talks to minorities, and various things like affinity groups arise out of this idea that non-whites will bring about left-liberal changes to society. Also the antagonistic way many on the left talk about whites. But most non-whites don’t think of themselves that way, as we saw in the election.
2) Because of (1), many in the left believe in permissive approaches to policing and immigration because of the disproportionate effects of those policies on black and Hispanic people. But the public wants more policing and less immigration, including black and Hispanic people.
3) Many on the left believe in treating people of different races different to remedy past race-based harms. But the public doesn’t like this—even California voted overwhelmingly against repealing the state ban on affirmative action.
4) Related to the above, there’s a general belief on the left that, in any given issue, policy should cater to the “most marginalized.” When confronted with the burdens to the average person, their reaction is to either (a) deny such costs and accuse the other part of various “isms” and “phobias,” or (b) assert that the average person must bear the cost.
Here's the Harvard data from the somewhat recent SCOTUS trial: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1199/222325/202...
Asians in the top academic decile are half as likely as African Americans in the 5th decile to be accepted. I highly doubt exposing Americans to this data would make them more favorable to affirmative action– the very opposite is more likely.
When stated by opponents seeking to strawman it, certainly.
But:
"when faced with multiple equally qualified candidates for a position, it is permissble and perhaps even desirable to use demographic factors such as race or gender to select among them"
generally doesn't get much opposition. It's not absolutely impossible that this is a steelman version of affirmative action, but it's also the one I grew up hearing from the actual proponents of the concept.
Regardless it took only a few years for what I heard to go from "we should use gender/race as a tie breaker" to "our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call. And that's inevitable because the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions. The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was, which results in people being targeted and fired for -isms of whatever kind.
So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
I my country openly saying you want a specific gender for a job position would violate the law. Is that not the case in the US?
> the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions
That doesn't seem to be the case for other problems. I don't see what makes this problem special so there can be no push back on extreme solutions.
> The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was
What about using non-extreme steps to try to mitigate the issue.
> So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
Idiots is a word that originated in ancient Greek and was used for the people who did not care about the matters of the Polis. Everybody is born an idiot until they participate in public matters. That costs (time and effort to familiarize yourself). In that sense maybe the people you are talking about are idiots...