As someone who likes to credit myself with the wide spread use of the word ‘woke’ as a derisive term aimed at identity politics activists in NZ, I feel we need an urgent redefinition of the term as it looks likely to be the most over used insult in the 2023 election.
As a class lefty, I see identity as an important personal journey that leads you to politics but feel Identity Politics becomes terribly limited in gaining the democratic 51% as its most shrill advocates in the cancel culture landscape manage to make progress as alienating as drinking a cup of cold sick.
Class solidarity can gain 51%, Identity Politics risks pure temple over broad-church and you get endless schisms and little to show for it.
For most ultra woke activists, their starting point is all white people are racist, every man is a rapist and anyone supporting free speech is a uniform wearing Nazi.
There’s not much intellectual wriggle room there.
That virtue-signalling-middle-class-micro-aggression-policing-identifiably-Green-Party-militant-bike-riding-vegan-condescending-supporting-pronoun-Spinoff-subscriber in your social media feed screaming endlessly at you in the ubiquitous world of social media certainly thinks they are shouting truth to power, unfortunately it all ends up as a cacophony of self righteous struggle sessions alienating the vast chunk of voters who just want to know how they are paying for the roof over their heads and the food on their tables.
So that’s ‘Woke’. Identity Politics activists suffering the narcism of petty difference and subjective triggering who put their identity above all else.
They engage in outrage olympics and cancel culture because it’s easier to shut down an idea because you have feelings than actually put together a cohesive intellectual argument.
It’s middle class and it’s very virtue signalling.
We get it wokies, your self created identity is more important than our shared humanity.
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“To be ‘woke’ politically in the Black community means that someone is informed, educated and conscious of social injustice and racial inequality”
Initially a positive word it is now used as a slur or an expression of contempt.
Can words change their meaning or is the use of the word woke in a derogatory way now an example of cultural or racial appropriation.
The american alt right changed its definition to shutdown discussion and now it is used as a slur or expression of contempt by them .
Peter+H. Thanks for that, it’s really interesting. Considering the New Zealand woke, especially the media and some Green politicians in particular, my first thought was how abysmally ignorant they are of our own short history, and how dishonestly selective when it suits them, so the word has definitely changed in meaning. That probably wouldn’t matter too much, if this uncultured menagerie were not trying to be the controlling agents of not just the narrative, but far too many aspects of ordinary every day life.
The original civil rights activists in the USA displayed enormous moral courage at times, and often ventured into literally physically dangerous territory. Some were also gifted with a powerful rhetoric which I think only David Lange had here, and one or two of his predecessors, but the current woke are bleaters who try to victimise and are deliberately divisive, and I’d be reluctant to describe it as cultural appropriation, it seems more cultural degradation.
100% Hollyhock
Woman have vagina and male has penis. Then isn’t removing those sex organs sterilisation.
Thiers a flaw in the logic. How does sterilisation grant the right to more life?
Transhuman brains are different in certain key parts from both of the traditional genders(in, of course, meaningfully significant ways). Unlike genitalia, which is almost always binary and rarely sometimes intersexual, the brain does indeed biologically seem to exist on a far wider range of states, which would mean we do need a separate category.
So, back to logic : The reason transhumans are unethical is because children can transition with no parental consent and incase against parent wishes
So if transhumans automatically receive consent to be sterilised, it must be ethical!
Flawless logic 10/10 😀 😀 😀
Then the concept of “transhumans” depends on the ethics.
Is sterilisation ethical? For us obviously not, but this is an alien race with alien ethics and ideas, it is completely possible that their definition of “sterilisation” is different from ours.
Ignoring all of that though, the ethical option IF we have to is obvious.
IF a member of The Transhuman Race (Which has not been sterilised ) oppressed, but rather integrated democratically) volunteers to have their brain re-educated to give them more modern gender roles and traits outside of the conventional family unit and knives and stuff then there you go, you avoid the problems of mutilation / sterilisation by removing most of the transition therapies that involve knives and strong chemical parts while making sure that transition therapies are extremely rare that transhumans don’t transition to fast they don’t grasp the concept of sterilisation. (You still need to call them was / were / whatever the fuck pronouns though, this being a liberal progressive democratic society after all.)
Woke: you know it when you see it
The tolerance for woke to make up their own facts and history is starting to produce lawsuits.
Net flicks have cast Cleopatra as a black woman when she was Greek and a lawsuit from Egypt have emerged.
This week Mahmoud al-Semary, an Egyptian lawyer, filed a case against Netflix accusing the streaming service of attempting to rewrite history by choosing to depict Cleopatra as black.
The complaint, first reported by the Egypt Independent, an online newspaper, states: “Most of what Netflix platform displays do not conform to Islamic and societal values and principles, especially Egyptian ones.”
Backlash against the woke term ‘Latinx’ that Latinos don’t use.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/dec/12/latinos-rejection-reference-term-latinx-rattles-wo/
Backlash against woke te reo that Maori don’t use.
https://plainsight.nz/mana-wahine-korero-response-to-now-deleted-stuff-article-vs-sean-plunket/
More and more are growing tired of the woke rewriting history, from a woke point of view that seems to be appropriating (for profit) other people’s language and identity of their own narrow, fictional, view.
Aargh, ‘woke’ has just become a lazy term of abuse, the successor to ‘politically correct’. It is pretty much meaningless now.. It is perfectly possible to take class inequalities, and inequalities relating to race and gender, seriously and I know plenty of people who do. As a feminist and leftie of over 40 years’ standing, I get very sick of cartoonish versions of politics from other lefties.
Short answer:
(modern) woke’s closest synonym is anti-liberal but is also anti-progressive, I call it a cuckoo in the progressive nest. The problem is not that it is taking gay, women’s or trans rights etc too far. The problem is it’s turned into the opposite of what it claims to be. It is the main way in the mainstream culture that racist ideas, misogyny and homophobia are all being rehabilitated through very bad ideas and clever rhetoric for an ideological power grab by cultural elites.
Long answer:
The original use of woke was in American black culture, literally ‘awake to injustice’ to paraphrase BwaV from an earlier comments section it would chime with someone who no longer buys into consumerism or maintaining the status quo in favour of the powers that be, sees that some demographics do get a raw deal, that the culture is contributing to the dumbing down of society and destroying the planet. Seeing the world for how it is not for how they are told it is and the willingness to fight for the rights of others.
Call that Woke-A or social justice which I suspect most people on a progressive blog could get behind. However this moniker was appropriated by the modern form of woke activism, call it ‘Woke-B’, which is an ideology rooted in cultural conflict theory (neomarxism) using post-modern* tools (ideas about the nature of power and truth) arising from the academic schools of Critical Theory** in the US. This is CRITICAL social justice.
It says the correct way to see society is as a series of oppressor/oppressed power dynamics across dimensions of race, sex, gender, sexuality, indigeneity etc. It has extended to neurotypical/neurodivergent, bodysize and left or right handed and will purity spiral further.
Those on the oppressor side of the line have privilege (white, male, cis, straight etc), Those on the oppressed side have victimhood (black, female, trans, gay etc).
The intersectional model then combines all these dimensions to determine one’s total privilege (oppressor points) or victimhood (oppression points). Victimhood (and the ability to claim victimhood) becomes a currency of social status or clout, displacing ‘dignity’ which earlier generations of social activists rallied around.
EVERY interaction from the macro to interpersonal across these imagined dividing lines is an oppressive power dynamic. A black man married to white woman oppresses her because of his ‘masculinity’ and she oppresses him because of her ‘whiteness’. They both oppress gay friends because of their ‘heteronormativity’. Do not use common sense to understand this, use the intersectional model.
For example the modern critical theorist succeeds not by asking IF racism occurred (or sexism, homophobia, transphobia etc), the intersectional model says it DID. They succeed by conjuring a narrative of HOW it occurred.
– A white man won’t date a black woman? That is exclusionary so racist
– A white man will date a black woman? That is fetishising black people so racist.
Equivocation is common, Woke B redefines racism (and sexism, homophobia, transphobia) as racism + power. It is racist for a white or asian person to be bigoted towards a black person, but the same behaviour in reverse is not. This is the ‘punching-down taboo’ which is an academic slight of hand. The (modern) Critical Theorists realised the style of criticism they used on whites to demonstrate privilege could be used on everyone else so l they had to stigmatise doing so to prevent challenges to the intersectional model from within their own disciplines. There is a similar taboo on asking if trans-gender exists why can’t people be trans-racial?
A moral/religious layer is often added so privilege equates to original sin, victimhood equates to sanctification. However a white-male who confesses their privilege and fights to overthrow oppression (as defined by Woke B) has a ‘critical consciousness’ and gains social status and moral authority by doing so, a kind of piety in rhetorical puritanism. In contrast a black-trans-woman with a history of abuse, if they criticise Woke-B has a ‘false consciousness’ and their ‘lived experience’ can be completely disregarded. There is often a very high cost for anyone with a ‘sanctified identity’ who is a heretic.
Woke-B gives rise to a kind of antipolitics where advancing anyone who is not white/male/cis/straight feels highly progressive but does not challenge underlying systems of neoliberal power. It also lacks a meaningful analysis of socio-economics that is not downstream of identity. Therefore it is incredibly easy to game the system so has been embraced by corporatists with Green washing, Rainbow washing and other kinds virtue theatre. Children in Afghanistan and Pakistan who fear a blue sky because it means drones, can now rest easy knowing the US defense industry is inclusive and Rainbow friendly place to work.
So in reality Woke-B is about ideological self-propogation using minorities for political leverage both a battering ram and rhetorical human shield. They claim a the moral high ground in piety which justifies immolating anyone who raises the most tepid objection. The effect is to remove the moderates from the field leaving only the extremes.
As mentioned above the closet synonym to Woke B is anti-liberal.
It means someone who is in favour of censorship of reframing disagreement as hate speech and criminalising it to silence people. It problematises anything that can be deemed to be underpinned by racist/sexist/homophobic substructures (with the tools or post-modernism that means anything). For example MLK’s I have a dream speech is now racist because the colourblind ideal is seen as a tactic for upholding white supremacy.
For the pedants
* Yes neomarxism is a grand narrative ideology so Woke B is not truely post-modern.
** Woke-B misuses Critical Theory as a ‘reflective discourse to find fault’ should be used only in limited cases and as one tool of many in a socratic dialogue. Modern theorists use it as the only tool and on anything.
Class collectivism = socialism
Race collectivism = fascism
It’s really that simple!
My working definition, which is pretty much on the mark I think:
“Woke is a broad, dysfunctional ideological project that essentialises a person’s sexuality, race, and gender (or their self-subjectivity of this) as the paramount lense
to divide and classify people (and their institutions) through a highly artificial framework of victim/oppressor and
applies this to agitate for regressive, radical change via performative or highly coercive methods,
above any other values of a democratic and pluralistic society, including equality, meritocracy, and free speech.”
Synonyms
Successor Ideology
A melange of academic radicalism that is vying for hegemony in western culture and institutions. (Wesley Yang)
Baizuo
From mandarin chinese for ‘white left’. Meaning heavy use of political correctness and double standards to covertly advance their own material or emotional interests at the expense of others, while claiming to do the opposite from a self-assumed position of moral superiority.
A distraction to divide the public among themselves while a few wealthy individuals and their facilitators amplify their billions by appearing to tackle real and manufactured social problems in ways they personally benefit from.
Ironically the wokerati are more neoliberal than any neoliberal with their fetishising of individuality and personal grievance over shared humanity.
“it all ends up as a cacophony of self righteous struggle sessions alienating the vast chunk of voters who just want to know how they are paying for the roof over their heads and the food on their tables.”
Actually it ended up in Albert Park with violence and intimidation shutting down women’s free speech.
“contemporary phenomena, such as ‘cancel culture’, ‘diversity’, and ‘gender neutrality’ — all manifestations of woke. Wokes does not seek to engage in reasoned debate but simply to denounce and tear down those deemed to have transgressed the norms of identity politics. But the problem is more pressing because “woke thinking has come to be accepted as common sense” by a cultural elite that dominates the media, corporate life, and the academy, making dissent increasingly difficult and perilous”
from Joanna Williams who wrote a book “how the Woke Won”
I think she emphasis two of the important issues of what I refer to as woke. That an elite have captured our institutions and seek to impose their ideology with no debate, cancellation, smearing and violence if necessary, all the while claiming moral purity.
“Comrades – we need a working definition of ‘Woke’”
Probably the last thing we need. It’s a term/label that needs early retirement.
But if you must, let’s just agree they/us need purple and pink fluro vests, with perhaps a hint of mauve, and that best efforts will ne made to ensure they never ever get near the most spendiferous, amazing and indubitably undisputed podcast.
Wankers come in all shapes, ages, ethnicities, sexualities and amoebic forms. The best examples are in Parliament and the senior ranks of the pubic service
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