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I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to. I don't think the problem of

• mjburgess 5y ago
  The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another. This creates a competition for local resources, including demands on police time and attention. This competition reporduces racism, in that it is very hard not to have racism when "looking out for one's own" is a racial matter. What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. The woke concern is against alleged "implicit" forms of racism which "harm" graduates jockying for position within large corporate structures. It reads a little like "what happens when the upper middle-class discover that they too may, possibly, have been discriminated against".
  • concordDance 5y ago
    > What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. A plain reading of this seems false. Wokism definitely makes demands.
    • MrsPeaches 5y ago
      material [1] demands. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
      • SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
        I can immediately think of one woke policy that is considered to be a material demand: UBI, also Medicare for all and reparations for black people.
        • mjburgess 5y ago
          As do people on the the right ; indeed I see UBI as a more right-wing policy which simplifies the welfare state. I don't think this has anything to do with wokriem
        • MrsPeaches 5y ago
          Sure, I was just clarifying what GP wrote as the reply seemed to have missed/not understood a key nuance. Also providing a little context to what I assumed was meant by “material demands”, based on the quote from GP below. > The most virulent forms of racism are a symptom of material conditions, eg., that poor black people live uniformly in one area, and rich white people in another.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > What we have in Wokeism is a pseudo-politics, in that, it make no material demands. That’s because “Wokeism” doesn’t exist. Being “woke”, was never a descriptor of a politics but of the state of being aware of and engaged in social and political issues affecting a disadvantaged (originally, specifically Black American) community. It’s now morphed into a label assigned by outside group to anyone whose politics the speakers disagrees with for being too focussed, or focussed in the wrong way, on identity issues. So, yes, there is no coherent material program of Wokeism, because Wokeism isn’t a thing. Now, within the broad mass that any user of the term labels “Wokeism”, there are many groups that have within them extensive, coherent lists of material demands,
    • mjburgess 5y ago
      Wokeism has come to refer to a type of (basically religious) revival which is happening across the western middle class. it sometimes includes a political project of 'equality'. Whether you like the term or not, it is very hard to simply deny the revolution in identity construction currently taking place. Watch the latest CIA advert which emphasises neauvox-oppressed identity markers over. It emphases how the CIA allows you to 'be yourself' qua how you are a member of an oppressed group. Whatever you want to call /that/, this is what I am talking about.
• hnbad 5y ago
  If you ignore the American political spectrum for a hot minute and get down to the core of it, a practical definition of "left" and "right" is "no hierarchy" vs "hierarchy". This holds true in economics as well as social issues: Racism is a system of hierarchy where one race is inherently good and normal and others are deviations from that, or at least every race is good or bad in some ways and there is an implied value judgement in every assertion about them. Not every person doing a racism necessarily fully commits to racial pseudoscience but if pressed they'll have to justify their conceptions by citing them. Racial mixing of course is unacceptable as it goes against this order and since the racial social castes are a natural order, any attempt to overcome them is bad and anyone making it further than their kind is expected to should either be celebrated for their excellence (and everyone else be held to their standard to demonstrate their insufficiency) or be viewed with suspicion because they probably cheated or got handouts. Sexism is a sexual hierarchy with women being one way, men another and everyone who doesn't neatly fit into either category being deviant and a troublemaker. It's not so much about one sex being better at all things than the other, much like racism, but about there being a natural order and everything being well as long as people follow it. Economic right wing thought posits that there is a natural order in that poverty is largely a failure of the individual and can be overcome with sheer will so wealth is the just spoils of success and personal quality and charity is the only acceptable form of welfare because it is for the wealthy to decide how to allocate their deserved riches. This is also why right-wing people have recently picked up the term "Marxist" (or even "Neomarxist") to describe not just socialists but also progressives in general, even when they lean economically more right-wing than left. The question of how you align within that spectrum is mostly a question of whether you think a natural order exists and/or should be enforced in each of these dimensions (and there are probably more). Most Democrats don't want to abolish private ownership, they just want more regulations to shift some of the wealth to the lower classes, i.e. balance out the hierarchy rather than getting rid of it. They are however more likely to be opposed to the idea of a natural order in social questions.
  • golergka 5y ago
    > practical definition of "left" and "right" is "no hierarchy" vs "hierarchy" Absolutely not: it's the left that's usually the favor of giving more power to the most oppressive and monopolic hierarchy there is, the government, while the right is fighting to dismantle it.
• tomp 5y ago
  > I'm curious what any possible alternatives might be to the practical problems "wokeness" tries to present itself as a solution to. The obvious solution is meritocracy and race/sex blindness. That's the world I wish to live in - non-discrimination & equality of opportunity, not "positive" discrimination (it's always positive for someone) and (enforced) equality of outcome. But the Woke Left has been quite hostile to those concepts recently... Edit: added "Woke" before "Left" because presumably there's other (liberal) Left that would support meritocracy.
  • SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    This is something I genuinely am curious about: how do you get equality of opportunity without first getting equality of outcome in a system where money opens doors and inheritance exists? Just-freed black people started with nothing when white slave owners had farms to pass onto their children. If (I think it is) obvious that wealth provides more opportunity, there’s no way for black people to ever have equal opportunity as the original white population. (Edit: this isn’t to say I agree with equal outcome. I think there’s a lot of nonsense stuff in that sphere. But I’ve never myself been able to answer how to consider how to make equality of opportunity happen if we started from an unequal space and inheritance exists which persists inequality.)
    • tomp 5y ago
      This is wrong on so many levels but I don't blame you as it's the false narrative that's most pervasive in most media. First of all, "starts with nothing" isn't specific to black population. Many (most?) immigrants also start with nothing, yet often outperform locals (including whites) (the important question that almost noone is asking, is why?). Among those are Nigerians, so clearly "because they're not black" isn't the correct answer. Your question already contains the "correct" (IMO) answer, which is: help poor people. To the extent that poverty correlates to being black (or any other categorical characteristic), both solutions are equivalent, except that mine is (1) non-discriminatory (e.g. it helps white homeless people as well), (2) self-correcting (when "racial equality of outcome" is reached and poverty is no longer correlated with skin color, my solution will continue to do "good"), and (3) non-wasteful (why would society spend any amount of resources helping e.g. Obama's daughters, who are by "inheritance" (of political connections) some of the most privileged people on this planet?). Edit: I might have been too focused on the "race" part of your comment. If you're wondering about inherited inequality in general, well, yeah, that's one of the paradoxes of meritocracy & similar concepts, e.g. assortative mating - the end (stable) state is a society ruled by the (hereditary) "intelligent" class. But I think that's unlikely to happen naturally because there seems to be quite a lot of genetic variation in intelligence (and other traits our society treats as "superior", e.g. height, beauty, etc.); if anything, that's more likely to happen because of genetic manipulation/embryo selection, which doesn't exactly require a meritocratic society...
• inglor_cz 5y ago
  I think the spectral signature of wokeness is that affluent white people whose knowledge of racial discrimination is at most anecdotal and second hand started treating racism as The Problem whose solution must get almost absolute priority, even at a cost of traditional civil liberties or putting other things (healthcare?) on the backburner. It looks like a weird neurotic guilt attack that is probably counterproductive to any future common prosperity. Pushing "Latinx" on Hispanics and discriminatory quotas on Asian students is almost guaranteed to generate some weird backlash. Import of the same ideas to Europe whose racial dynamics is absolutely different (black people from Africa sail here on their own and "we"* mostly want to stop this movement, so pretty much the opposite of American slave history) is almost guaranteed to wake up some old demons. * Of course there is not a uniform opinion on this among 400 million people, but the last five years have been spent tightening borders, not opening them, and even some lefty parties like Danish Social Democrats joined in.
  • goodpoint 5y ago
    It's well known that in every movement some people can cherry-pick issues to focus on and neglect others. Sometimes it's an unconscious bias, sometimes is attention seeking, sometimes it's a deflection tactic. E.g. some "affluent white people" might talk all day about discrimination and never touch the painful topic of wealth inequality across the world. *BUT* this does not invalidates the valuable goals a whole movement. If you cherry-pick some examples to dismiss a whole movement you are making a strawman.
    • visarga 5y ago
      I'm wondering why the woke movement prefers to classify the people by race instead of wealth. Wealth is a much better indicator of systems of power.
      • goodpoint 5y ago
        > the woke movement prefers That's a big generalization. Yet it's really unsurprising that a number of affluent people love to talk about race, gender, environment, and many other topic except wealth inequality.
• mrshadowgoose 5y ago
  TLDR: Actually address the fundamental problems (spoiler: sexism and racism are not the fundamental problems, they are aggravating factors) that allow sexism and racism to cause issues for disadvantaged groups. Most of the discussions around systemic racism and sexism fundamentally boil down to the topic either poverty or violence from police. Poverty: Specific groups are over-represented in the impoverished population, sometimes across generations. We, correctly, have identified systemic bias as an contributing factor to these trends. Imagine a hypothetical society where the means of comfort (good food, safe and adequate housing, new clothing, entertainment, etc...) are available to people that need them, regardless of whether or not one is employed. Now ask yourself, would racism and sexism have the same bite that it currently has? If one's ability to live comfortably is not based on systemic bias, one would be disingenuous if they said "yes". Life gets a lot easier when one can ignore shitty racists and sexists without fear of losing their means of survival. It would be nice if racists and sexists didn't exist, but if everyone had the means to ignore them without fear of repercussions, that's almost as good. Violence from police: A few observations from the last few years of police violence and the BLM movement: -There is a large portion of shitty individuals within various police forces that enjoy victimizing victimizable individuals -Racialized groups are more victimizable than the average -Police violence, although concentrated against minorities, also victimizes everyone to some degree, regardless of race or gender. What practical solutions have come out of all of the years of outrage and protests? Instead of using "master/slave" software terminology, my company now encourages "leader/follower", while all of management is patting its back for "fighting systemic racism". Huh? Here are some actual practical solutions to this issue: -federally-mandated body cameras for all overt police officers that are always-on, and record to multiple external and publicly-viewable archives -police review bodies with actual teeth to punish criminality amongst police officer -a legal mechanism to permanently bar an individual from any kind of policing, country-wide -removing "verbal evidence from a trusted officer" as admissible evidence in court "Wokeness" is just yet another socially-acceptable form of discrimination, where us commoners have been pitted against each other playing some stupid "privilege points" game based on physical appearance. It's divisive, and is not actually moving us towards a healthier society. We should be looking towards our government to solve the actual issues that are aggravated by (and not caused by) sexism and racism.
• iammisc 5y ago
  The conservative approach to racism would be to equalize opportunity (to the extent the government is allowed to) and replace the instincts that lead to racism with strong civic nationalism and then wait a very very long time, which is a solution that acknowledges that social change takes a long time. You claim this is denial, but that's a biased reframing of the stated solution. This is a potential solution, but is not acceptable to the 'woke'