The Origins of Wokeness

>>crbela+(OP)
I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people.

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

>>yapyap+nd1
“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017.

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.

>>cmdli+0m1
> 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.

It was not just a small group of people. Almost all progressive Democratic politicians started working that word into all their speeches to virtue signal and most centrists also fell in line too. CEOs started saying it in company meetings and we were subjected to HR trainings that noted we should say LatinX to be inclusive of trans people, among many other performative rules.

>>TexanF+Xu2
I've been through numerous yearly HR trainings and not once has the term "LatinX" appeared in one. I also highly doubt that even a significant minority, let alone "almost all", progressive Democratic politicians have ever used the term at all. Latinos themselves have rather squarely rejected "LatinX" on the basis of it being nigh-unpronounceable and entirely disconnected from how Spanish/Portuguese words actually work.

>>yellow+rM2
Sadly, Latinx is still used all over the place. Google turns up 94,800 instances of "latinx community" just in the past year:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22latinx+community%22&tbs=q...

In fact, when I query for results and specify date ranges for each year (using Tools > Any time > Custom range), I get:

    2018: 4,410 results
    2019: 7,070 results
    2020: 15,900 results
    2021: 17,500 results
    2022: 21,000 results
    2023: 34,300 results
    2024: 88,600 results

Yeah, Google probably has a recency bias in its search corpus, but this is still a large amount of recent and ongoing usage.

Google Trends doesn't show a clear decline either: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-01%202...

>>zestyp+Rj3
Ah, statistics again. Wow, massive numbers. What happens if you add the terms latino and latina?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-01%202...

Right, it barely moves above the zero line.

zlacker