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".
I still have to remind myself that this refers to the racial slur and not an intellectual one. One of the funniest moments of 2024 for me was watching an episode of the wan show where linus admitted he'd used 'the hard r' in the past. His co host (Lucas?) was visibly taken aback. Like, color drained from his face. As linus goes on about how *tard used to be acceptable when he was younger you see it slowly dawn on Lucas that Linus doesn't actually realize what 'hard r' means and the relief that his boss isn't some sort of avowed racist is palpable.
From first search:
The n-word pronounced with the final ‘r’ sound, as opposed to a softer pronunciation that often omits this sound
Over the decades, the n-word has evolved, with the softer version being reclaimed by some within the Black community as a term of endearment or camaraderie. However, the “hard R” variation remains a symbol of hate and discrimination.
Why try and use that context for judgment when a more appropriate one exists?
My comment explains what hard-R means from the point of view of someone outside the states, and gives enough context for a non-native English speaker to understand the term. The subtleties of English are hard even for those with English as a mother tongue.
From the Wikipedia article:
Among certain speakers, like some in the northeastern coastal and southern United States,[6][2] rhoticity is a sociolinguistic variable: postvocalic /r/ is deleted depending on an array of social factors,[7] such as being more correlated in the 21st century with lower socioeconomic status, greater age, particular ethnic identities, and informal speaking contexts.I knew an American who, on his first visit to NZ, described how much he enjoyed eating kiwis to his horrified hosts. Of course he meant the Chinese gooseberry, which in US grocery stores is labeled a “kiwi”.