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“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 t

by cmdli 2y ago

“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.

wendyshu 2y ago
> 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. Even if true, so what? People are still pushing it.
dnissley 2y ago
If you tried to steelman woke, what would fall under it?
- rectang 2y ago
  Conscious of the effects of structural racism.
  - jpadkins 2y ago
    if the movement stopped at the level of consciousness, then there wouldn't have been as much backlash. It went way beyond consciousness. You are admonished if you aren't actively anti-racist.
    - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
      I guess a person could be pro-racist, neutral on racism, or anti-racist. Is there another category I'm missing?
      - nec4b 2y ago
        Simply not racist. Anti-racist means racist in reverse.
        calinet6 2y ago
        It does not mean that at all.
      - ParetoOptimal 2y ago
        You can't be neutral against racists if you believe your lack of action is tacit approval.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - zahlman 2y ago
        >Is there another category I'm missing? "Not racist", i.e. what was in the 90s called "colourblind". If you describe yourself this way nowadays, and hold to and espouse those principles - not taking race into consideration when making decisions; considering people a priori to have equal moral worth regardless of race, etc. - self-identified "anti-racist" people will call you "racist". This has happened to me on many occasions. It is nonsense, of course. But sometimes they have social power. It's functionally what happened when I was banned from the Python Discourse forum, except they went a step further and claimed (utterly groundlessly) that I was accusing them of "reverse racism" (a term which I do not use, and which I view as an invention of self-identified "progressives" to strawman the views of those opposed to them) in taking other moderation actions against me.
        2y ago
- cmdli 2y ago
  Generally speaking, most people on the left talk about a certain number of ideas. For example, many on the left believe strongly in trans rights. They believe that trans rights are either being actively limited or are actively under threat by people they believe are trying to either get rid of them or force them back into the shadows. So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs. People on the left generally do not believe strongly that “more discussion leads to correct beliefs”. They point to the many moral panics, bigoted movements, and real harm done to certain groups in history and do not believe that what some call “open discussion” has historically always led to the least harm. People on the left generally do not believe that all discussion needs to be censored or tightly controlled. Rather, they view certain beliefs and viewpoints as actively harmful because they spread harmful beliefs about particular demographics. They believe that political discussion can, and does, go beyond what is useful or helpful sometimes.
  - zimpenfish 2y ago
    > “more discussion leads to correct beliefs” Generally the people saying that really mean "more (listening to what I say) leads to (what I believe) beliefs".
  - aemin 2y ago
    > So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs. They should probably educate themselves by listening to what she says about women's rights then. Maybe then they'd understand her perspective and her principles. That would be much, much better than what they actually did: call her a cunt and wish death and rape upon her. Which really is not the most convincing of counterarguments.
- BobaFloutist 2y ago
  It just means being awake with regards to your position in society and privileges. Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications. The problem, of course, is that "Awareness and acknowledgement of the true nature of society" can be interpreted to mean a thousand different things, some of which are more accurate and actionable than others.
  - djur 2y ago
    Right. The original meaning was just "politically aware", the same basic metaphor as the "Wide-Awakes" in the Civil War era. If you go back far enough you found it sometimes used in the "wake up sheeple" sense (i.e. referring to a conspiracy mindset). But it's basically never been the self-appellation of a political or cultural movement; essentially everyone who uses it that way is deriving it from critical right-wing discourse.
  - atmavatar 2y ago
    > Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications. This has always struck me as a fatal messaging problem. When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things. The real problem isn't that [men / white people] may indirectly get propped-up when others are artificially held down -- it's that people are being held down. The current (and disastrous) progressive messaging often sounds like "we want to hold you down, too".
    - ceejayoz 2y ago
      > When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group... That's one possible interpretation, yes. Not everything works that way, though. Gay people getting married didn't take anything away from me. As the meme goes, "it's not pie".
- alienthrowaway 2y ago
  An ideology that highlights the existence of, questions, and probably seeks to undermine a number of current social hierarchies, and power structures. Whether this is seen as a good or bad thing depends in where one falls on the left/right spectrum.
  - UncleOxidant 2y ago
    > Whether this is seen as a good or bad thing depends in where one falls on the left/right spectrum. And/or where one falls in the social hierarchy and power structures.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - verall 2y ago
    I'm having some trouble understanding, does "These people" refer to the David family referenced in the article, the Jane Minor community garden referenced, Rootwork Herbals mentioned, or some other group of people? > some of them have told me that he's always been eccentric and hard to live with and some of them have tried to talk him out of his misbehavior to know avail It sounds like the alleged crimes in the article are pretty rough to put up with, if it was your neighbor: > David alleges Whittaker has vandalized her son's car, spray painted her fence, threateningly shot a BB gun in the air during a teen gardening session, removed sections of her fence and threatened to hit her son with a stick, among other offenses. I wouldn't call that kind of behavior "eccentric", maybe antisocial. And if that behavior was directed mainly towards their black neighbor, I would call it racist.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      David's behavior is criminal, racist and all that. I think he's a total ass, but I know he's an alcoholic and all indications I have is that he's mentally ill. I also know members of his extended family and, yes, many of them voted for Trump, but none of them would do the kind of crap he did. I'll point to "rootwork herbals" as being provocative in that so much duckspeak rolls out of their lips. (e.g. wtf is "femme"? does being fat erase my sin of being a white man? how fat do I have to be?) If they didn't have David as a neighbor they'd attract somebody else that's the same; they are planning on moving but their problems will follow them whereever they go.)
- KerrAvon 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - bpt3 2y ago
    If that were a remotely accurate definition of how it is commonly used, you'd have a point. Instead we can see you're part of the problem.
    - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
      Could you describe how you see it commonly used? I'm unsure what you mean here.
      - bpt3 2y ago
        See the article we're discussing.
    - calinet6 2y ago
      It's an extremely accurate definition of what we genuinely believe. There is no ulterior motive. There is no hidden agenda. It's very simple, and we're all confused why it even needs to be a 'thing.'
      - bpt3 2y ago
        The "we" you mention must be an extremely small portion of society then. What percentage of Americans disagree with that definition of woke in your opinion (or with data if you have it)?
        kiitos 2y ago
        Yelling about the "woke" left, is basically like yelling about the "ayran" right. Nobody disagrees that these things are bad, it's just that they're irrelevant.
        2y ago
- slothtrop 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    That's strawmanning, not steelmanning.
    - slothtrop 2y ago
      [flagged]
ctoth 2y ago
Another interesting perspective on this idea: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...
- slothtrop 2y ago
  He also has one titled "of course you know what woke means" that really drives the point.
- zahlman 2y ago
  It's worth keeping mind here that, far from being a right-wing cable-news status-quo apologist or whatever (to put together some assorted contentless booing I noticed upthread), Freddie de Boer is a self-described "Marxist of an old-school variety" with substantial left-wing cred (and meeting a bunch of the stereotypes, such as holding a PhD in English). I don't agree with him on everything, but I absolutely see his view on how leftism has become corrupted in the current day in the US. It's poisoning the Canadian discourse, too, and I hate it, and have been hating it since approximately 2012. (I saw signs earlier, but didn't recognize them.) I used to vote for the NDP, but now I don't vote at all - the Jack Layton and Ed Broadbent types I remember are gone (literally, in those two cases); now I mainly see people who seem to think that your rights and your value as a person depend on your identity (just, you know, in a way opposed to the historical norm).
csa 2y ago
> “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. As someone who most folks would indentify as “liberal”, I use this term to describe a very small but vocal group of so-called progressives who are a problem for the liberal cause writ large. > 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. This is a prime example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been indignantly corrected by so-called progressives when speaking about “Latine” — note that this term is what many/most Spanish speakers (at least ones who aren’t eyeballs deep in “woke” circles) are more likely to use when they don’t want to use “Latino”. Latinx is one of those white liberal made-up things (of many), and the language police enforcement is off-putting and shows an incredible lack boundaries. “Woke” ideals resonate well with a narrow group of “progressives”/liberals, but the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public, including but definitely not limited to conservative extremists. If you want to see some realpolitik on this issue, note how AOC learned (via Pelosi) to get in line with votes and messaging when it mattered even while endorsing progressive/liberal/woke ideologies.
- ParetoOptimal 2y ago
  And what did AOC get in return?
  - csa 2y ago
    > And what did AOC get in return? We probably won’t know for a long time.
- taurath 2y ago
  > the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here - what is the "woke" agenda, what is the "woke" implementation? The wording is straight out of [any conservative pundit]'s script, with not even a single shred of demonstrated understanding of either the underlying values, nor the problems stated.
haswell 2y ago
> Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017. 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.
- _bee_hive_ 2y ago
  Well said, thank you for this.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - 2y ago
bugglebeetle 2y ago
> By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
tomrod 2y ago
Sounds exhausting to live with a perceived boogeyman of problems versus seeking real problems. Personally, I am surprised. This is a pretty unique article from a usually articulate thinker that leaves out significant details like: (1) the term originated by folks who recognize there can be structural inequality embedded in policy which, for some inequalities, has been described as structural racism since the 1970s; (2) the term got hijacked by political propaganda machines to circumspectly throw out working policies and other elements of progressive political points in the retrenchment regarding the term. There really isn't any more detail to be had unless to sanewash the political propaganda's claims.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gitfan86 2y ago
  [flagged]
boothby 2y ago
I find it quite interesting that pg's article is so extensively uncurious and disdainful. He openly sneers at the topic he intends to explain, and tirelessly lays into a straw man (the FoxNews definition of woke) rather than the strongest interpretation (what you're doing here). Several commenters here have asked why his article has been flagged, and I must say that if it was posted as a comment, it should certainly be flagged because of its flagrant violations of the site guidelines. I certainly wouldn't be inclined to call him a prig, but he's certainly set himself up for exactly that denunciation with his specific framing of the conversation.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - taurath 2y ago
    > the observed behavior of many self-described feminists might lead you to believe that the definition was "someone who thinks that any dispute between men and women should be resolved in favor of women" I think there's a broader problem here, where there's a tendency to define all cultures by their most extreme elements and have conversations that are centered around those. This sells, this gets clicks, and it also decimates our theory of mind of others. The left does this, the right does this, centrists do this as well by pretending that what is "extreme" in their culture is unknowable and impossible. A respectful conversation with someone while holding curiosity can resolve most of the ills of the day. Lots of folks want to tell their story, and they're told that its not safe.
    - bpt3 2y ago
      It's impossible to have a respectful conversation with someone who thinks you're inherently responsible for society's ills and/or deserves to be ostracized for failing to maintain constant awareness of their jargon du jour. The people who claim this is a tiny fraction of the left (it's not the majority, but exactly how tiny it is is not entirely clear) are largely the same people who claim anyone who has a shred of agreement with any far right platform is a Nazi, so I don't have much sympathy for them being painted with a broad brush.
antisthenes 2y ago
It's the ultimate irony that this post is doing the exact same thing it is accusing another group of, with the only distinction being that there is no "term" attached to it. I suppose the US politics have gone so bonkers that the left actually uses the term "conservative right" pejoratively in the same way that the right uses "woke" to describe the left. In which case this scenario is so childishly insane that the only sane choice is to reject it all outright and focus inward.
NeutralCrane 2y ago
> 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. I agree that the number of proponents of something like "LatinX", or "biological males playing women's sports" are far, far outnumbered by the people who aren't supporters of those things. But the issue is that the people who are supporters tend to be extremely vocal and generally in positions of power or better able to influence those who are, whether thats in corporate or academic administration settings. As such the small number of "woke" individuals are having outsized effects on society and culture, and the backlash is in response to the magnitude of that influence, rather than the number of people pushing for it.
- skywhopper 2y ago
  Who are these super woke people in power exactly? F500 CEOs? Politicians? Who are you talking about because I don’t see it.
  - wendyshu 2y ago
    Hollywood, mainstream media, academia, most big tech, ...
    - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
      You know mainstream media is Foxnews (the largest viewership by far) and Joe Rogan, right? Those two command the largest share of mainstream viewership. Or are you referring to 1990s definition of mainstream media that isn't mainstream and is irrelevant?
  - hdlothia 2y ago
    Professors, judges, lawyers, journalists, politicians, tech moderators, probably anything in the arts or education. On reddit and bluesky you can get banned for having the median voter's opinion on gender norms and immigration.
schiem 2y ago
From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way. The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.
- andrekandre 2y ago
  > Before woke, there was "PC" forgive me if my understanding is incorrect, but wasn't political correctness something conservatives were pushing (a.k.a mainstream culture)? iow, you cant say expletives on radio/tv, cant have gay characters on tv, games can't have violence, don't say x in public etc etc... i've always assumed it was people on the left/progressives pushing against all that, is that wrong?
  - dekhn 2y ago
    I think your understanding is wrong although my experience with the term PC started in the early/mid 1980s and I don't know much about its use before that. What you're describing is more like "don't ask - don't tell" and "parental advisory" labels. Typically, PC is associated with attempts to de-marginalize groups that are historically disadvantaged due to structural discrimination. To me the canonical PC is always spelling "women" as "womyn", to avoid using a term that contains the word "man", as a way to push back against perceived patriarchal naming/language systems.
    - andrekandre 2y ago
      interesting, thanks for the thoughtful reply i guess i had a different understanding to a lot of people, appreciate the reply
  - yellowapple 2y ago
    You are 100% correct. The conservatives disagreeing with you (and downvoting you) are either willfully ignorant about their own history of "political correctness" or else were under a rock (or perhaps weren't alive yet) during the heyday of McCarthyism and the still-ongoing legacy thereof. Now, when the tables are turning and companies would rather appeal to the progressive-leaning majorities than the ever-shrinking conservative minority, all of a sudden conservatives are eager to pretend that they've been the champions of the First Amendment all along (never mind that the First Amendment never applied to private platforms/businesses choosing with whom to do business).
normalaccess 2y ago
Even Obama is not a fan of "woke" culture and calls it out for the hollow vapid gotcha politics that it is: https://youtu.be/qaHLd8de6nM https://youtu.be/qaHLd8de6nM
gspencley 2y ago
Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend. "Troll" is another one. It used to mean a person who posted a contentious comment that they knew would invoke a flame war so that they could sit back and wait to see who "bit." It came from fishing. These days it can just mean someone who is rude on the Internet. You're not wrong, the "opposition" did take the word and run with it for their own use. No dispute there. But let's not pretend that this is a conservative vs progressive thing. On the partisan isle I'm "neither." But when someone uses the word "woke", in conversation, I usually know exactly what they're getting at. And I hear it from left-leaning friends and right-leaning alike. It's a short-cut umbrella term to mean an amalgamation of a) moral busybodies b) purity spirals c) cancel culture d) some bizarre racist philosophy that markets itself as anti-racist (critical race theory) and e) an extreme version of political correctness. I'm not arguing whether or not left-wingers are (or aren't) using it themselves in serious conversation. Only that, colloquially, I've only encountered confusion about what it means in Internet forum discussions with like-minded nerds, such as this one. The average person I talk to has little difficulty. And maybe that definition was shaped, wholly or in part, by the conservatives making it out to be a boogeyman. Even if so, and even if it was an unfair hijack and it's appropriate to hate on them for doing so, it doesn't change how people interpret the word in casual conversation today.
- Dracophoenix 2y ago
  I don't know if you've read it, but an essay published in 1944 by George Orwell titled What is Fascism? encapsulates your points. > Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend. Individual terms are not the only victims of the linguistic tank tread mangling words into meaninglessness. "Paradox of tolerance", for instance, is the Internet age's "fire in a theater". The phrase has gained currency in the mid-2010s as a rhetorical bludgeon to dismiss the speaker's critics and shame those who don't subscribe to the speaker's incoherent definition of "the intolerant". It's usage has no bearing to, and even contradicts, the author's purpose in coining it.
heresie-dabord 2y ago
> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses Yes, it is an ingenious sort of strawman. In its prior usage, to be "woke" meant to be informed, alert, and to resist being bullied or easily duped into relinquishing one's rights to object, to defend oneself, and to dissent. In this sense -- I note with some irony -- Jordan Peterson was "woke" when he would not allow his students to coerce him into using terms of address that he rejected. Now the usage on the "Right" in US politics in particular uses "woke" to mean hypocritical or superficial assertions, positions, and policies that serve a dubious objective or prove to have no foundation in facts -- especially if these are the opponents' views. Flinging these accusations of hypocrisy and delusional policy-making has become more important than defending democracy itself. Herein lies the masterstroke of the messaging. Using the term "woke" to attack supposedly "woke" opponents has become a memetic (viral) behaviour that has completely devoured political and public discourse.
- wendyshu 2y ago
  [flagged]
lazyeye 2y ago
"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." Yes this is very common on the left too. Really common actually.
rayiner 2y ago
The left doesn’t talk about “wokeness” but it certainly does talk about the individual policies that fall under that rubric. The right uses the label “woke” for the same reason the left uses the term “capitalism.” There’s a bunch of ideas and policies that stem from similar ideological premises and it’s perfectly fine to group them together under labels. For example, Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC. There’s also race conscious hiring and promotion decisions. They are all ideologically related and add up to something quite significant.
- zahlman 2y ago
  >Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC. There's also that ungodly garish universal "pride" flag that they can't stop adding new decorations to, even though a) the original rainbow flag was already definitionally inclusive of everyone; b) issues of racial discrimination and issues of discrimination around sexual or gender-based conduct or identity have nothing to do with each other; c) last I checked, the groups they're trying to pull together under this umbrella - group by group, rather than under a general unifying principle - often don't get along very well with each other.
mvdtnz 2y ago
> 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. You speak about it in the past tense but it's still very much a real thing. Just last week I was listening to an Ed Zitron podcast and one of the (many, many) ads was for a podcast that featured "latinX voices".
hintymad 2y ago
The left put everything under the lens of oppressor vs oppressed. That's the idea that disgusts lots of moderates. The idea came from Leninism, but nonetheless is considered woke as fuck. So, no it's not necessarily a boogeyman, unless you throw out anything you don't like from the bucket of woke (and vice versa). Oh, CRT is also woke as fuck, unless you believe it's the right framework.
- krisboyz781 2y ago
  [dead]
gorwell 2y ago
It's not a boogeyman and there are many liberals who have been raising the alarm for years about the dangerously illiberal and authoritarian nature of this new religion. Not just PG, also Sam Harris, Bill Maher, JK Rowling, Richard Dawkins, and millions of lesser known liberals. Most of whom were and are still too afraid to say anything.
adam_seeliger 2y ago
[dead]
hhh1111 2y ago
The behaviors labeled as wokeness have been essentially dominant on the left for a long time though. “End whiteness” is a good example of woke rhetoric and that term was shouted for years
TexanFeller 2y ago
> 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.
- yellowapple 2y ago
  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.
  - kilroy123 2y ago
    Interesting. I have seen that in official HR training.
  - zestyping 2y ago
    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=qdr:y 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%202025-01-14&geo=US&q=latinx&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-01%202...
edbob 2y ago
[flagged]
ineedaj0b 2y ago
You don't meet many christian who say they love being religious, love feeling religious, and doing religious things. They say they love god and his spirit. Woke is correct, it'a just not the word you want me to use.
zahlman 2y ago
>a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. The movements exist and they demonstrably stem from a common ideology Naming a political tendency is not making a "boogeyman" out of it. >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. Here's CNN Business casually repeatedly using the term in 2021: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/business/netflix-diversity-latinos-latinx/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/business/netflix-diversit... More generally, the point is that there is something to "fight against", which is causing real harm, including to people I know personally. For example, it's fundamentally behind the idea that Tim Peters somehow "used potentially offensive language or slurs" by literally writing "XXXX" to censor a word and then providing context to enable people to figure out what word he had in mind, because it was relevant to the conversation. (I know that this was ideological because they do this for the word "slut", but not e.g. for "shit" or "fuck".) Or the idea that he "made light of sensitive topics like workplace sexual harassment" by... claiming that workers sometimes get "training" because a higher-up did something bad. (Or the idea that "making light of a sensitive topic" is even bad in the first place.) Or the entire bit about "reverse racism and reverse sexism" as explained at https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly . (Incidentally, Tim, if you're reading: you cede too much ground here. "Racism" isn't a term that activists get to define. Discrimination is discrimination, and it's morally wrong in and of itself; injustice in the surrounding social conditions simply doesn't bear on that.) It's also responsible for the fact that prominent members of the Python community are still making hay about the supposed mistreatment of Adria Richards - who, as a reminder, eavesdropped on a conversation in order to take offense to it and then went directly to social media to complain because a couple of other people were being unprofessional (although mutually completely comfortable with their conversation). And it's behind the entire fracas around the removal of the endorsement of Strunk and White as an English style guide from PEP 8, as a supposed "relic of white supremacy". (There are public mailing list archives. I have kept many bookmarks and have quite a bit of detailed critique that wouldn't fit in the margins here. But here's just one example of the standard playbook: https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879.html https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879... ) Outside of Python it's also fundamentally behind the plain misreading of James Damore's inoffensive and entirely reasonable takes, and his subsequent tarring and feathering. To cite just one example that sticks in my head.
gofreddygo 2y ago
I wish there was a book or website with such patterns and examples written down for all. It takes a certain linguistic skill to convey the sleight of hand in display in such maneuvers. But once you're grasped it, you can easily spot it and almost predict what the next set of actions is going to be. As an aside this applies to a wide variety of places like corporate settings, negotiations, sales meetings, city council meetings to mention a few so its generally useful to know.
- f1refly 2y ago
  That book exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right
skissane 2y ago
> “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. There are left-wing critics of "Woke", see for example the African-American Marxist Adolph L Reed Jr – https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokening https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin... If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman Or, consider that the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International published a review of the sitcom Abbott Elementary, which includes the line "In fact, in its treatment of Jacob’s wokeness, Abbott Elementary refreshingly mocks the suffocating trend of racialism in American culture" – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/abbo-m01.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/abbo-m01.html Similarly, read their review of John McWhorter's Woke Racism – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/14/ihjm-j14.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/14/ihjm-j14.html – in which they largely express agreement with his criticisms of the progressive "woke" ideology, but simultaneously condemn him for making those criticisms from a pro-capitalist instead of anti-capitalist perspective And see the socialist publication Jacobin's approving review of the philosopher Susan Neiman's book Left Is Not Woke, which attacks "wokeness" from an explicitly left-wing perspective: https://jacobin.com/2024/07/wokeness-left-ideology-neiman-review https://jacobin.com/2024/07/wokeness-left-ideology-neiman-re...
- Arn_Thor 2y ago
  > If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman Except, no. A concept can be multiple things at once, we are complex thinking beings. Woke is all at the same time: 1) what it arose as—a left-of-center terminology, to some extent in-group language, describing certain values. 2) sincere adoption and practice of those values 3) insincere, performative adoption of policies aimed to project those values. 4) A combination of 2 and 3, where those agreeing with 2 has no problem with 3 because the end result can be beneficial: who cares if Intel comes from a place of sincerity if their hiring policies make it easier for qualified minorities to get a food in the door? 5) Anything and everything the far right doesn't agree with, including 1 through 4 but also much more that isn't remotely related. DEI? "Woke." Climate change? "Woke." 15-minute cities? Believe it or not, also "Woke".
raxxor 2y ago
It can be a boogeyman but it also a generic term for a bunch of different phenomena that are connected through the way they are brought up, which is mostly very paternalistic. In some cases people tried to change or police language, mostly around the topic of gender, but it isn't restricted to that. In some countries that use "gendered" languages there were aspirations to change language to be more inclusive, with the indirect accusation that common language cannot be so. That reaches from Latinx to trying to remove any form of gendered language, a culmination of sexual and grammatical gender. Many just saw this as a vanity project, but even language changes in some official capacity persists. Again, these isn't agreed upon language, it was paternalistically described for people to be better, allegedly. Of course the worst aspects get the spotlight, but that isn't unusual in todays exchanges on social media. There is also another factor of "woke" and that is where it behaves pretty similar to the "far right". These are both nebulous terms for that matter, but both promote policies that a summarized as "identity politics". Another volatile term, but I believe there is a strong connection here. Still, just as people point to the woke excesses as being representative, the same is happening with criticism towards some of its goals and tenets.
unixhero 2y ago
Kamala Harris: "Stay woke"[0][1] [0], https://youtube.com/shorts/emY0ig9LDsc https://youtube.com/shorts/emY0ig9LDsc [1], https://youtu.be/9RH54QmQozY https://youtu.be/9RH54QmQozY
jurschreuder 2y ago
I am from Europe and from my point of view there ís really a wokeness problem in the US. The US is on average far more right wing mostly in the capitalistic sense than Europe. But it's difficult to talk to people from the US for me because anything might and will offend them at the blink of an eye. These things like trigger warnings and things. I'm always afraid I could be cancelled at any moment when talking to somebody from the US. I don't think it's really a left-right wing thing because Europe is in general 90% left wing from a US standpoint, and we don't have it.
valval 2y ago
I have a good enough reason to call those people “woke” instead of calling them “people who believe in a cultural approach that seeks to identify and rectify invisible social inequalities based on genetic attributes like race, sex, and sexual orientation by challenging existing power structures and implementing corrective measures. “ It’s easier.

by cmdli 2y ago

wendyshu 2y ago

> 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. Even if true, so what? People are still pushing it.

dnissley 2y ago

If you tried to steelman woke, what would fall under it?

rectang 2y ago
Conscious of the effects of structural racism.
- jpadkins 2y ago
  if the movement stopped at the level of consciousness, then there wouldn't have been as much backlash. It went way beyond consciousness. You are admonished if you aren't actively anti-racist.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    I guess a person could be pro-racist, neutral on racism, or anti-racist. Is there another category I'm missing?
    - nec4b 2y ago
      Simply not racist. Anti-racist means racist in reverse.
      - calinet6 2y ago
        It does not mean that at all.
    - ParetoOptimal 2y ago
      You can't be neutral against racists if you believe your lack of action is tacit approval.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - zahlman 2y ago
      >Is there another category I'm missing? "Not racist", i.e. what was in the 90s called "colourblind". If you describe yourself this way nowadays, and hold to and espouse those principles - not taking race into consideration when making decisions; considering people a priori to have equal moral worth regardless of race, etc. - self-identified "anti-racist" people will call you "racist". This has happened to me on many occasions. It is nonsense, of course. But sometimes they have social power. It's functionally what happened when I was banned from the Python Discourse forum, except they went a step further and claimed (utterly groundlessly) that I was accusing them of "reverse racism" (a term which I do not use, and which I view as an invention of self-identified "progressives" to strawman the views of those opposed to them) in taking other moderation actions against me.
      - 2y ago
cmdli 2y ago
Generally speaking, most people on the left talk about a certain number of ideas. For example, many on the left believe strongly in trans rights. They believe that trans rights are either being actively limited or are actively under threat by people they believe are trying to either get rid of them or force them back into the shadows. So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs. People on the left generally do not believe strongly that “more discussion leads to correct beliefs”. They point to the many moral panics, bigoted movements, and real harm done to certain groups in history and do not believe that what some call “open discussion” has historically always led to the least harm. People on the left generally do not believe that all discussion needs to be censored or tightly controlled. Rather, they view certain beliefs and viewpoints as actively harmful because they spread harmful beliefs about particular demographics. They believe that political discussion can, and does, go beyond what is useful or helpful sometimes.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > “more discussion leads to correct beliefs” Generally the people saying that really mean "more (listening to what I say) leads to (what I believe) beliefs".
- aemin 2y ago
  > So, when a prominent figure such as JK Rowling starts both talking about “protecting women” and the “trans mafia”, they become concerned about what influence she might have on the debate on the rights of trans people. They criticize what they believe to be false or harmful beliefs about trans people and believe that her words are actively doing harm by promoting those false beliefs. They should probably educate themselves by listening to what she says about women's rights then. Maybe then they'd understand her perspective and her principles. That would be much, much better than what they actually did: call her a cunt and wish death and rape upon her. Which really is not the most convincing of counterarguments.
BobaFloutist 2y ago
It just means being awake with regards to your position in society and privileges. Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications. The problem, of course, is that "Awareness and acknowledgement of the true nature of society" can be interpreted to mean a thousand different things, some of which are more accurate and actionable than others.
- djur 2y ago
  Right. The original meaning was just "politically aware", the same basic metaphor as the "Wide-Awakes" in the Civil War era. If you go back far enough you found it sometimes used in the "wake up sheeple" sense (i.e. referring to a conspiracy mindset). But it's basically never been the self-appellation of a political or cultural movement; essentially everyone who uses it that way is deriving it from critical right-wing discourse.
- atmavatar 2y ago
  > Recognizing your unearned advantages (and disadvantages) and managing to swallow your ego and acknowledge the ways you've benefited from society's stratifications. This has always struck me as a fatal messaging problem. When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group, which immediately puts many people on the defensive, especially if they feel like they're already having a tough time of things. The real problem isn't that [men / white people] may indirectly get propped-up when others are artificially held down -- it's that people are being held down. The current (and disastrous) progressive messaging often sounds like "we want to hold you down, too".
  - ceejayoz 2y ago
    > When you couch the problem as being one of unearned advantages, the obvious implication is that you believe the solution is to take away something from the "privileged" group... That's one possible interpretation, yes. Not everything works that way, though. Gay people getting married didn't take anything away from me. As the meme goes, "it's not pie".
alienthrowaway 2y ago
An ideology that highlights the existence of, questions, and probably seeks to undermine a number of current social hierarchies, and power structures. Whether this is seen as a good or bad thing depends in where one falls on the left/right spectrum.
- UncleOxidant 2y ago
  > Whether this is seen as a good or bad thing depends in where one falls on the left/right spectrum. And/or where one falls in the social hierarchy and power structures.
PaulHoule 2y ago
[flagged]
- verall 2y ago
  I'm having some trouble understanding, does "These people" refer to the David family referenced in the article, the Jane Minor community garden referenced, Rootwork Herbals mentioned, or some other group of people? > some of them have told me that he's always been eccentric and hard to live with and some of them have tried to talk him out of his misbehavior to know avail It sounds like the alleged crimes in the article are pretty rough to put up with, if it was your neighbor: > David alleges Whittaker has vandalized her son's car, spray painted her fence, threateningly shot a BB gun in the air during a teen gardening session, removed sections of her fence and threatened to hit her son with a stick, among other offenses. I wouldn't call that kind of behavior "eccentric", maybe antisocial. And if that behavior was directed mainly towards their black neighbor, I would call it racist.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    David's behavior is criminal, racist and all that. I think he's a total ass, but I know he's an alcoholic and all indications I have is that he's mentally ill. I also know members of his extended family and, yes, many of them voted for Trump, but none of them would do the kind of crap he did. I'll point to "rootwork herbals" as being provocative in that so much duckspeak rolls out of their lips. (e.g. wtf is "femme"? does being fat erase my sin of being a white man? how fat do I have to be?) If they didn't have David as a neighbor they'd attract somebody else that's the same; they are planning on moving but their problems will follow them whereever they go.)
KerrAvon 2y ago
[flagged]
- bpt3 2y ago
  If that were a remotely accurate definition of how it is commonly used, you'd have a point. Instead we can see you're part of the problem.
  - amanaplanacanal 2y ago
    Could you describe how you see it commonly used? I'm unsure what you mean here.
    - bpt3 2y ago
      See the article we're discussing.
  - calinet6 2y ago
    It's an extremely accurate definition of what we genuinely believe. There is no ulterior motive. There is no hidden agenda. It's very simple, and we're all confused why it even needs to be a 'thing.'
    - bpt3 2y ago
      The "we" you mention must be an extremely small portion of society then. What percentage of Americans disagree with that definition of woke in your opinion (or with data if you have it)?
      - kiitos 2y ago
        Yelling about the "woke" left, is basically like yelling about the "ayran" right. Nobody disagrees that these things are bad, it's just that they're irrelevant.
        2y ago
slothtrop 2y ago
[flagged]
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  That's strawmanning, not steelmanning.
  - slothtrop 2y ago
    [flagged]

ctoth 2y ago

Another interesting perspective on this idea: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...

slothtrop 2y ago
He also has one titled "of course you know what woke means" that really drives the point.
zahlman 2y ago
It's worth keeping mind here that, far from being a right-wing cable-news status-quo apologist or whatever (to put together some assorted contentless booing I noticed upthread), Freddie de Boer is a self-described "Marxist of an old-school variety" with substantial left-wing cred (and meeting a bunch of the stereotypes, such as holding a PhD in English). I don't agree with him on everything, but I absolutely see his view on how leftism has become corrupted in the current day in the US. It's poisoning the Canadian discourse, too, and I hate it, and have been hating it since approximately 2012. (I saw signs earlier, but didn't recognize them.) I used to vote for the NDP, but now I don't vote at all - the Jack Layton and Ed Broadbent types I remember are gone (literally, in those two cases); now I mainly see people who seem to think that your rights and your value as a person depend on your identity (just, you know, in a way opposed to the historical norm).

csa 2y ago

> “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. As someone who most folks would indentify as “liberal”, I use this term to describe a very small but vocal group of so-called progressives who are a problem for the liberal cause writ large. > 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. This is a prime example. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been indignantly corrected by so-called progressives when speaking about “Latine” — note that this term is what many/most Spanish speakers (at least ones who aren’t eyeballs deep in “woke” circles) are more likely to use when they don’t want to use “Latino”. Latinx is one of those white liberal made-up things (of many), and the language police enforcement is off-putting and shows an incredible lack boundaries. “Woke” ideals resonate well with a narrow group of “progressives”/liberals, but the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public, including but definitely not limited to conservative extremists. If you want to see some realpolitik on this issue, note how AOC learned (via Pelosi) to get in line with votes and messaging when it mattered even while endorsing progressive/liberal/woke ideologies.

ParetoOptimal 2y ago
And what did AOC get in return?
- csa 2y ago
  > And what did AOC get in return? We probably won’t know for a long time.
taurath 2y ago
> the “woke” agenda, messaging, and implementation are alienating to large swathes of the US public I'd like to call into question your use of the "I'm a liberal" card here - what is the "woke" agenda, what is the "woke" implementation? The wording is straight out of [any conservative pundit]'s script, with not even a single shred of demonstrated understanding of either the underlying values, nor the problems stated.

haswell 2y ago

> Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017. 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.

_bee_hive_ 2y ago
Well said, thank you for this.
kristopolous 2y ago
[flagged]
- 2y ago

bugglebeetle 2y ago

> By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

tomrod 2y ago

Sounds exhausting to live with a perceived boogeyman of problems versus seeking real problems. Personally, I am surprised. This is a pretty unique article from a usually articulate thinker that leaves out significant details like: (1) the term originated by folks who recognize there can be structural inequality embedded in policy which, for some inequalities, has been described as structural racism since the 1970s; (2) the term got hijacked by political propaganda machines to circumspectly throw out working policies and other elements of progressive political points in the retrenchment regarding the term. There really isn't any more detail to be had unless to sanewash the political propaganda's claims.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gitfan86 2y ago
[flagged]

boothby 2y ago

I find it quite interesting that pg's article is so extensively uncurious and disdainful. He openly sneers at the topic he intends to explain, and tirelessly lays into a straw man (the FoxNews definition of woke) rather than the strongest interpretation (what you're doing here). Several commenters here have asked why his article has been flagged, and I must say that if it was posted as a comment, it should certainly be flagged because of its flagrant violations of the site guidelines. I certainly wouldn't be inclined to call him a prig, but he's certainly set himself up for exactly that denunciation with his specific framing of the conversation.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
[flagged]
- taurath 2y ago
  > the observed behavior of many self-described feminists might lead you to believe that the definition was "someone who thinks that any dispute between men and women should be resolved in favor of women" I think there's a broader problem here, where there's a tendency to define all cultures by their most extreme elements and have conversations that are centered around those. This sells, this gets clicks, and it also decimates our theory of mind of others. The left does this, the right does this, centrists do this as well by pretending that what is "extreme" in their culture is unknowable and impossible. A respectful conversation with someone while holding curiosity can resolve most of the ills of the day. Lots of folks want to tell their story, and they're told that its not safe.
  - bpt3 2y ago
    It's impossible to have a respectful conversation with someone who thinks you're inherently responsible for society's ills and/or deserves to be ostracized for failing to maintain constant awareness of their jargon du jour. The people who claim this is a tiny fraction of the left (it's not the majority, but exactly how tiny it is is not entirely clear) are largely the same people who claim anyone who has a shred of agreement with any far right platform is a Nazi, so I don't have much sympathy for them being painted with a broad brush.

antisthenes 2y ago

It's the ultimate irony that this post is doing the exact same thing it is accusing another group of, with the only distinction being that there is no "term" attached to it. I suppose the US politics have gone so bonkers that the left actually uses the term "conservative right" pejoratively in the same way that the right uses "woke" to describe the left. In which case this scenario is so childishly insane that the only sane choice is to reject it all outright and focus inward.

NeutralCrane 2y ago

> 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. I agree that the number of proponents of something like "LatinX", or "biological males playing women's sports" are far, far outnumbered by the people who aren't supporters of those things. But the issue is that the people who are supporters tend to be extremely vocal and generally in positions of power or better able to influence those who are, whether thats in corporate or academic administration settings. As such the small number of "woke" individuals are having outsized effects on society and culture, and the backlash is in response to the magnitude of that influence, rather than the number of people pushing for it.

skywhopper 2y ago
Who are these super woke people in power exactly? F500 CEOs? Politicians? Who are you talking about because I don’t see it.
- wendyshu 2y ago
  Hollywood, mainstream media, academia, most big tech, ...
  - _DeadFred_ 2y ago
    You know mainstream media is Foxnews (the largest viewership by far) and Joe Rogan, right? Those two command the largest share of mainstream viewership. Or are you referring to 1990s definition of mainstream media that isn't mainstream and is irrelevant?
- hdlothia 2y ago
  Professors, judges, lawyers, journalists, politicians, tech moderators, probably anything in the arts or education. On reddit and bluesky you can get banned for having the median voter's opinion on gender norms and immigration.

schiem 2y ago

From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way. The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.

andrekandre 2y ago
> Before woke, there was "PC" forgive me if my understanding is incorrect, but wasn't political correctness something conservatives were pushing (a.k.a mainstream culture)? iow, you cant say expletives on radio/tv, cant have gay characters on tv, games can't have violence, don't say x in public etc etc... i've always assumed it was people on the left/progressives pushing against all that, is that wrong?
- dekhn 2y ago
  I think your understanding is wrong although my experience with the term PC started in the early/mid 1980s and I don't know much about its use before that. What you're describing is more like "don't ask - don't tell" and "parental advisory" labels. Typically, PC is associated with attempts to de-marginalize groups that are historically disadvantaged due to structural discrimination. To me the canonical PC is always spelling "women" as "womyn", to avoid using a term that contains the word "man", as a way to push back against perceived patriarchal naming/language systems.
  - andrekandre 2y ago
    interesting, thanks for the thoughtful reply i guess i had a different understanding to a lot of people, appreciate the reply
- yellowapple 2y ago
  You are 100% correct. The conservatives disagreeing with you (and downvoting you) are either willfully ignorant about their own history of "political correctness" or else were under a rock (or perhaps weren't alive yet) during the heyday of McCarthyism and the still-ongoing legacy thereof. Now, when the tables are turning and companies would rather appeal to the progressive-leaning majorities than the ever-shrinking conservative minority, all of a sudden conservatives are eager to pretend that they've been the champions of the First Amendment all along (never mind that the First Amendment never applied to private platforms/businesses choosing with whom to do business).

normalaccess 2y ago

Even Obama is not a fan of "woke" culture and calls it out for the hollow vapid gotcha politics that it is: https://youtu.be/qaHLd8de6nM https://youtu.be/qaHLd8de6nM

gspencley 2y ago

Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend. "Troll" is another one. It used to mean a person who posted a contentious comment that they knew would invoke a flame war so that they could sit back and wait to see who "bit." It came from fishing. These days it can just mean someone who is rude on the Internet. You're not wrong, the "opposition" did take the word and run with it for their own use. No dispute there. But let's not pretend that this is a conservative vs progressive thing. On the partisan isle I'm "neither." But when someone uses the word "woke", in conversation, I usually know exactly what they're getting at. And I hear it from left-leaning friends and right-leaning alike. It's a short-cut umbrella term to mean an amalgamation of a) moral busybodies b) purity spirals c) cancel culture d) some bizarre racist philosophy that markets itself as anti-racist (critical race theory) and e) an extreme version of political correctness. I'm not arguing whether or not left-wingers are (or aren't) using it themselves in serious conversation. Only that, colloquially, I've only encountered confusion about what it means in Internet forum discussions with like-minded nerds, such as this one. The average person I talk to has little difficulty. And maybe that definition was shaped, wholly or in part, by the conservatives making it out to be a boogeyman. Even if so, and even if it was an unfair hijack and it's appropriate to hate on them for doing so, it doesn't change how people interpret the word in casual conversation today.

Dracophoenix 2y ago
I don't know if you've read it, but an essay published in 1944 by George Orwell titled What is Fascism? encapsulates your points. > Language is fluid. Historically look at words like "hacker." People start to use words colloquially in ways that the originators of the word did not necessarily intend. Individual terms are not the only victims of the linguistic tank tread mangling words into meaninglessness. "Paradox of tolerance", for instance, is the Internet age's "fire in a theater". The phrase has gained currency in the mid-2010s as a rhetorical bludgeon to dismiss the speaker's critics and shame those who don't subscribe to the speaker's incoherent definition of "the intolerant". It's usage has no bearing to, and even contradicts, the author's purpose in coining it.

heresie-dabord 2y ago

> “Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses Yes, it is an ingenious sort of strawman. In its prior usage, to be "woke" meant to be informed, alert, and to resist being bullied or easily duped into relinquishing one's rights to object, to defend oneself, and to dissent. In this sense -- I note with some irony -- Jordan Peterson was "woke" when he would not allow his students to coerce him into using terms of address that he rejected. Now the usage on the "Right" in US politics in particular uses "woke" to mean hypocritical or superficial assertions, positions, and policies that serve a dubious objective or prove to have no foundation in facts -- especially if these are the opponents' views. Flinging these accusations of hypocrisy and delusional policy-making has become more important than defending democracy itself. Herein lies the masterstroke of the messaging. Using the term "woke" to attack supposedly "woke" opponents has become a memetic (viral) behaviour that has completely devoured political and public discourse.

wendyshu 2y ago
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lazyeye 2y ago

"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." Yes this is very common on the left too. Really common actually.

rayiner 2y ago

The left doesn’t talk about “wokeness” but it certainly does talk about the individual policies that fall under that rubric. The right uses the label “woke” for the same reason the left uses the term “capitalism.” There’s a bunch of ideas and policies that stem from similar ideological premises and it’s perfectly fine to group them together under labels. For example, Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC. There’s also race conscious hiring and promotion decisions. They are all ideologically related and add up to something quite significant.

zahlman 2y ago
>Latinex is by itself just one thing. But there’s also BIPOC. There's also that ungodly garish universal "pride" flag that they can't stop adding new decorations to, even though a) the original rainbow flag was already definitionally inclusive of everyone; b) issues of racial discrimination and issues of discrimination around sexual or gender-based conduct or identity have nothing to do with each other; c) last I checked, the groups they're trying to pull together under this umbrella - group by group, rather than under a general unifying principle - often don't get along very well with each other.

mvdtnz 2y ago

> 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. You speak about it in the past tense but it's still very much a real thing. Just last week I was listening to an Ed Zitron podcast and one of the (many, many) ads was for a podcast that featured "latinX voices".

hintymad 2y ago

The left put everything under the lens of oppressor vs oppressed. That's the idea that disgusts lots of moderates. The idea came from Leninism, but nonetheless is considered woke as fuck. So, no it's not necessarily a boogeyman, unless you throw out anything you don't like from the bucket of woke (and vice versa). Oh, CRT is also woke as fuck, unless you believe it's the right framework.

krisboyz781 2y ago
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gorwell 2y ago

It's not a boogeyman and there are many liberals who have been raising the alarm for years about the dangerously illiberal and authoritarian nature of this new religion. Not just PG, also Sam Harris, Bill Maher, JK Rowling, Richard Dawkins, and millions of lesser known liberals. Most of whom were and are still too afraid to say anything.

adam_seeliger 2y ago

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hhh1111 2y ago

The behaviors labeled as wokeness have been essentially dominant on the left for a long time though. “End whiteness” is a good example of woke rhetoric and that term was shouted for years

TexanFeller 2y ago

> 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.

yellowapple 2y ago
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.
- kilroy123 2y ago
  Interesting. I have seen that in official HR training.
- zestyping 2y ago
  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=qdr:y 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%202025-01-14&geo=US&q=latinx&hl=en https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2018-01-01%202...

edbob 2y ago

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ineedaj0b 2y ago

You don't meet many christian who say they love being religious, love feeling religious, and doing religious things. They say they love god and his spirit. Woke is correct, it'a just not the word you want me to use.

zahlman 2y ago

>a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. The movements exist and they demonstrably stem from a common ideology Naming a political tendency is not making a "boogeyman" out of it. >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. Here's CNN Business casually repeatedly using the term in 2021: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/business/netflix-diversity-latinos-latinx/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/26/business/netflix-diversit... More generally, the point is that there is something to "fight against", which is causing real harm, including to people I know personally. For example, it's fundamentally behind the idea that Tim Peters somehow "used potentially offensive language or slurs" by literally writing "XXXX" to censor a word and then providing context to enable people to figure out what word he had in mind, because it was relevant to the conversation. (I know that this was ideological because they do this for the word "slut", but not e.g. for "shit" or "fuck".) Or the idea that he "made light of sensitive topics like workplace sexual harassment" by... claiming that workers sometimes get "training" because a higher-up did something bad. (Or the idea that "making light of a sensitive topic" is even bad in the first place.) Or the entire bit about "reverse racism and reverse sexism" as explained at https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly https://tim-one.github.io/psf/silly . (Incidentally, Tim, if you're reading: you cede too much ground here. "Racism" isn't a term that activists get to define. Discrimination is discrimination, and it's morally wrong in and of itself; injustice in the surrounding social conditions simply doesn't bear on that.) It's also responsible for the fact that prominent members of the Python community are still making hay about the supposed mistreatment of Adria Richards - who, as a reminder, eavesdropped on a conversation in order to take offense to it and then went directly to social media to complain because a couple of other people were being unprofessional (although mutually completely comfortable with their conversation). And it's behind the entire fracas around the removal of the endorsement of Strunk and White as an English style guide from PEP 8, as a supposed "relic of white supremacy". (There are public mailing list archives. I have kept many bookmarks and have quite a bit of detailed critique that wouldn't fit in the margins here. But here's just one example of the standard playbook: https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879.html https://www.mail-archive.com/python-dev@python.org/msg108879... ) Outside of Python it's also fundamentally behind the plain misreading of James Damore's inoffensive and entirely reasonable takes, and his subsequent tarring and feathering. To cite just one example that sticks in my head.

gofreddygo 2y ago

I wish there was a book or website with such patterns and examples written down for all. It takes a certain linguistic skill to convey the sleight of hand in display in such maneuvers. But once you're grasped it, you can easily spot it and almost predict what the next set of actions is going to be. As an aside this applies to a wide variety of places like corporate settings, negotiations, sales meetings, city council meetings to mention a few so its generally useful to know.

f1refly 2y ago
That book exists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

skissane 2y ago

> “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. There are left-wing critics of "Woke", see for example the African-American Marxist Adolph L Reed Jr – https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokening https://newrepublic.com/article/160305/beyond-great-awokenin... If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman Or, consider that the Trotskyist International Committee of the Fourth International published a review of the sitcom Abbott Elementary, which includes the line "In fact, in its treatment of Jacob’s wokeness, Abbott Elementary refreshingly mocks the suffocating trend of racialism in American culture" – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/abbo-m01.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/01/abbo-m01.html Similarly, read their review of John McWhorter's Woke Racism – https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/14/ihjm-j14.html https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/14/ihjm-j14.html – in which they largely express agreement with his criticisms of the progressive "woke" ideology, but simultaneously condemn him for making those criticisms from a pro-capitalist instead of anti-capitalist perspective And see the socialist publication Jacobin's approving review of the philosopher Susan Neiman's book Left Is Not Woke, which attacks "wokeness" from an explicitly left-wing perspective: https://jacobin.com/2024/07/wokeness-left-ideology-neiman-review https://jacobin.com/2024/07/wokeness-left-ideology-neiman-re...

Arn_Thor 2y ago
> If an unapologetic Marxist is attacking "Woke", that really disproves the contention that it is purely some right-wing bogeyman Except, no. A concept can be multiple things at once, we are complex thinking beings. Woke is all at the same time: 1) what it arose as—a left-of-center terminology, to some extent in-group language, describing certain values. 2) sincere adoption and practice of those values 3) insincere, performative adoption of policies aimed to project those values. 4) A combination of 2 and 3, where those agreeing with 2 has no problem with 3 because the end result can be beneficial: who cares if Intel comes from a place of sincerity if their hiring policies make it easier for qualified minorities to get a food in the door? 5) Anything and everything the far right doesn't agree with, including 1 through 4 but also much more that isn't remotely related. DEI? "Woke." Climate change? "Woke." 15-minute cities? Believe it or not, also "Woke".

raxxor 2y ago

It can be a boogeyman but it also a generic term for a bunch of different phenomena that are connected through the way they are brought up, which is mostly very paternalistic. In some cases people tried to change or police language, mostly around the topic of gender, but it isn't restricted to that. In some countries that use "gendered" languages there were aspirations to change language to be more inclusive, with the indirect accusation that common language cannot be so. That reaches from Latinx to trying to remove any form of gendered language, a culmination of sexual and grammatical gender. Many just saw this as a vanity project, but even language changes in some official capacity persists. Again, these isn't agreed upon language, it was paternalistically described for people to be better, allegedly. Of course the worst aspects get the spotlight, but that isn't unusual in todays exchanges on social media. There is also another factor of "woke" and that is where it behaves pretty similar to the "far right". These are both nebulous terms for that matter, but both promote policies that a summarized as "identity politics". Another volatile term, but I believe there is a strong connection here. Still, just as people point to the woke excesses as being representative, the same is happening with criticism towards some of its goals and tenets.

unixhero 2y ago

Kamala Harris: "Stay woke"[0][1] [0], https://youtube.com/shorts/emY0ig9LDsc https://youtube.com/shorts/emY0ig9LDsc [1], https://youtu.be/9RH54QmQozY https://youtu.be/9RH54QmQozY

jurschreuder 2y ago

I am from Europe and from my point of view there ís really a wokeness problem in the US. The US is on average far more right wing mostly in the capitalistic sense than Europe. But it's difficult to talk to people from the US for me because anything might and will offend them at the blink of an eye. These things like trigger warnings and things. I'm always afraid I could be cancelled at any moment when talking to somebody from the US. I don't think it's really a left-right wing thing because Europe is in general 90% left wing from a US standpoint, and we don't have it.

valval 2y ago

I have a good enough reason to call those people “woke” instead of calling them “people who believe in a cultural approach that seeks to identify and rectify invisible social inequalities based on genetic attributes like race, sex, and sexual orientation by challenging existing power structures and implementing corrective measures. “ It’s easier.