We'd have to figure out what the hell people are referring to first before there's any discussion worth a damn. As best I can tell it just means "any behavior coming from young people I don't like as a cable news viewer". Frankly, I'm at the point where if someone uses the word non-ironically I just write the speaker off as not seriously trying to communicate. Use your words! Describe specific behavior. People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.
> An aggressively performative focus on social justice.Meanwhile, basically all national politics is performative bullshit. Why are we not calling both parties woke?
Incidentally, this has been a major part of the post-election discussion about it.
I agree that the term has become diluted to a point that it's lost most meaning, and in many cases it means "behaviors and opinions I disagree with".
I think it mostly means some combination of: morality police, people against "wrongspeak", holier-than-thou attitudes, white people advocating for topics they don't understand, and in general a kind of tribal behavior that "others" people who don't fully buy into the entire spectrum of ideas this group is selling, i.e. they treat their beliefs as absolutely true, and anyone who questions them or wants to debate them are automatically othered.
> People are just working themselves into a tizzy trying to figure out something to be mad at while also contorting themselves into knots trying to avoid discussing anything material, concrete, substantial, or tied to reality.
I agree and disagree. The media landscape has had a major hand in shaping the discussion, and social media has validated the worst fears of the people working themselves into a tizzy. e.g. if someone supports trans rights but has concerns about minors receiving certain surgeries and wants to discuss those concerns, they're put in the same category as transphobes who wish real harm on other people. Depending on where they raise these topics, they'll automatically be blocked and/or put on lists of transphobic people.
Discussions that actually focus on something material, concrete or substantial are derailed by collective community behaviors that refuse to engage with the concrete and substantial.
It's a sad state of affairs for public discourse, and figuring out how to de-escalate the conversation and somehow return to substantive good-faith conversations might be the most important problem of the century.
I also think there's a pretty big difference between keyboard jockeying / speech policing, and putting yourself in physical danger by physically confronting racists who'd lynch you if there weren't cameras around.
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.
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).
> "The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power."
That's both literally incorrect (we shouldn't consider the Black Panthers or the ACLU "student movements") and seems ignorant of the real power those organizations had (their agitation led directly to the passage of the Civil Rights Act).
As an example, see this old anti-MLK comic; it certainly sounds quite familiar: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/s6ll2c/a...
> 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.
The right is notoriously great at hijacking words terms/words and flipping them into something nefarious. Or sometimes that exact opposite like they did turning the well supported by all Estate Tax into the conservative hating death tax.
Now woke has morphed into this weird thing. A clapback insult for the insecure to justify their insistence at exclusion of one kind or another.
Suppose that a person feels that Black people aren't being helped to succeed in our society, and are actually being harmed, by the way they are being told they are always victims with very little agency, as Black author John McWhorter argues. He gets called all kinds of nasty things for speaking that opinion, and he's Black! On the other hand, it's harder to "cancel" or accuse someone of absolute racism (or race traitor-hood) if they say "I don't think the woke mindset is helping, and I think there are better ways to help Black communities."
So that's why imho the word "woke" is a popular tool among those who don't like the various components of it, which are much, much easier to enumerate than those on the Left incredulously pretend. It's basically just:
1. The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with, and that society should punish those who spoke those ideas.
2. Ideologies about race and generational guilt which basically boil down to "the whole world would be much better off if all Europeans had mysteriously vanished 1500 years ago and we wish that had happened."
3. Ideologies that have to do with gender, which I dare not even elaborate on, because of how heretical all but one opinion on that subject is.
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.
>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.
Some subset of people understands the "true" meaning of the word, and the set of ideas originally associated with it. I suspect the majority of people are more likely to use it in the sense it has evolved into.
Some kind of separation needs to happen. The underlying ideals and ideas vs. the tactics people employ in bringing them about. If someone's MO is to judge/shame people, exert their moral superiority over others, and see the people around them in absolute terms, that set of behavior is particularly harmful to the underlying goals. It presents itself as the "truest" form of support for the goal and the only right way to go about achieving it. But it uses coercion/manipulation to take advantage of people's fear of public shaming and the consequences of "getting cancelled" which tends to ensure silence from people who see themselves as more pragmatic but not interested in getting labeled with "them" for raising questions about reasonable things.
I agree that when people use it now, it's less about anything substantive and entirely about what people feel the word has come to mean. Not sure how, but we need to fundamentally change the conversation.
Even more so when some of your views are not widely seen as an agreed upon social norm.
Also, I didn't see anything arguing for this in the article in the first place.
Well, first we could start by having a discussion of whether or not it is actually true that "they are being told they are always victims with very little agency".
Now, if that were in fact true, we could go on to talk about how we might reduce that harm, and one part of that might involve saying that less.
But then again, were that not true, then we could pretty much discard the person's objections and move on to something that is actually happening.
I read and respect McWhorter, but I don't think that (a) he's right about everything or that (b) your one line summary characterizes his position accurately.
I'll reply separately to your attempted summary.
"It has a concise definition!"
moments later
"It took a whole article to explain!!!"
Also entertaining - the idea that racism has an uncontested definition.
2. No, that is also not the point at all. The actual view is that there has been, at least within the world once controlled by various European powers since somewhere in the range of 1200-1500, a wilful ignorance and downplaying of the horrors created by the colonialism perpetrated by those European powers.
3. Since you don't elaborate, it's hard to respond to this. But I will note that the recognition that gender and sex are not the same thing goes back many decades, if not centuries; that gender roles and sexuality have not been even remotely close to fixed across the time and space in which human civilization has existed; that the response from people who declaim the "woke" approach is so often summarizable as "I don't like it and other people should lead more miserable lives because I think so".
> The idea that people can be harmed by hearing ideas they disagree with
You seem to be arguing that Black people are harmed by being exposed to ideas about victimhood, and then ridiculing the idea that being exposed to ideas can be harmful.
It's worked wonders for Donald Trump.
That woke people should be resorting to physical violence to further their cause.
Doesn't seem productive or healthy for society.
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).
It seems like a reasonably concise definition to me. It's reasonable to disagree with the definition of course, but to merely dismiss it as not concise is both incorrect and not useful because it lacks specific criticisms.
But I acknowledge people may disagree with this.
But I think you already know that and went with the selective quote anyway.
Whenever I see someone try to pull bad-faith arguing like that, I just immediately bail.
Another fan-favorite of that cohort is incessant demands of proof.
I'm not sure how we can move forward without some degree of empathy; "Yes, you got the short end of the stick, but how about if we try such and such to ameliorate the impact of the past on your present".
I don't think you are advocating sweeping the past under the rug, I'm just saying that telling a person who is still feeling the sting of a perceived slight (real or imagined) is unlikely to result in moving forward.
Some cultures have known that things are not binary for a very long time:
It looks like the boring job of actually writing policy. Here in Australia, I've run into several people who work for the government helping to draft policy and things. Eg, one friend works for my state's government helping draft energy policy to fight climate change.
Its tedious and boring, and entirely thankless. But its incredibly important. Its well and good for protesters to send a clear message to the government that the people want change. Its another thing entirely to actually negotiate how those changes will happen on the ground.
How do you improve mental health services? How do you balance the needs of the economy today with the needs of future generations? Its difficult stuff.
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!
What constitutes the gender role of "a man" or "a woman" is fluid, not well defined, and subject to change. What constitutes "femininity" and "masculinity" is also fluid, not well defined, and subject to change.
Even if sex was a binary (which it isn't, but it's not a terrible argument to say that it is close enough to one for many purposes), when it comes to gender we all exist in a multi-dimensional space with so many variations on so many themes. Insisting that gender is binary is so harmful, even to people who consider themselves as being at one or other end of that binary. It's fine that there are people who fully embody a particular Victorian-era notion of masculine and feminine (or any other one, really), but the vast majority of us are nowhere near that simple. Insisting that gender comes in only two forms, and has no fluidity to it hurts all of us.
Our ignorance of the cultures (positive and negative) in parts of the world where colonization did not happen is motivated by something less pernicious - people are parochial, and European culture in particular took a fairly strong stance that despite knowledge of the civilizations along (e.g.) the silk road, they were of no particular significance since they didn't have (Jesus|Bach|Newton|Galileo|etc.)
You ask "to what end?" I would say the end has multiple components. One is that history rhymes and so if you want to understand the future better, understanding the past better will often help with that. Another is that cultures themselves carry the past forward for amazingly long periods - the English have still not really abandoned the Norman conquest of 1066 as a socio-structural signifier even though it was nearly 1000 years ago. The Hopi still have many stories of things that occured in their world 600-1200 years. If these historical stories are inaccurate, a culture is doing itself no favors carrying them forward. And similarly, a culture that carries such a story as a tale about injustice is not done any favors by being told "ah, fuhgedaboutit".
Being "a wife to start a family" requires a person with female sex, and is typically associated with female gender. But that association is not required, and has not been so across all human cultures and all time.
What? The Rennaisance that grew birth to the Modern West was an intentional attempt to revive and surpass the ideals of Old Rome and Greece. When they excavated the Pyramids, many in the West took to adopting parts of Egyptian Culture for legitimacy, the Washington Monument being one prime example. Imperial China was seen as stagnant, but they certainly were respected as highly civilized and organized. What special qualities they gave themselves were their flexibility, rationality and technological superiority, which is not entirely wrong in the battlefield.
This "central myth" you are saying Europeans told themselves sounds more like a fictional strawman to attack and is contradictory, especially in the context of OP's point towards the attitudes held by the people currently attacking Western ideals, not defending it. It's not really refuting the point either that the world pre-1945 was a brutal place, and EVERYBODY was trying to conquer and dominate each other, it was just the West was the strongest of them all and won at the end.
That's why if you solely focus on the West as opposed to understanding the general context of the world at the time and critiquing equally those other culture, it calls into question whether one really cares about these shared ideals of anti-imperialism or if it's just an excuse for nationalist grievances that they weren't on the dominating side. And you know, in Turkey, in China, in India, that kind of mindset very much is the case. It's not that imperialism was bad, it was only bad because it happened to them. For those they conquered, it was glorious event to be valorized.
FWIW, I try to use "male/males" to refer to sex, and "man/men" to refer to gender, since AFAICT, there are no terms that clearly refer to gender.
The myth is "we bought civilization to places that didn't have it". And that is absolutely a lie. There is a second myth that is particularly applicable in the Americas, which is that Europeans discovered a land that God intended them to have dominion over (essentially ignoring or belittling the existing civilization that was here). Neither of these are fictional strawmen - they are real and documented positions found through the writings of European explorers and American settlers and leaders.
It remains puzzling to me why settler colonialism (the dominant, though not only form of European expansionism) was not common in either the pre-1492 Americas or in Asia. The cultures/civilizations there certainly were expansionary but rarely seemed to feel the need to replace existing populations with their own. Whatever the reasons, the results are wildly different.
"men" and "women" should not have their meaning diluted. They already have the meaning of "male" and "female".