Basically, arguments where one party starts on about that there is something you call “wokeISM”, are nonstarters for me.
As mentioned before, it’s just taking the position of “anything to my left that I don’t like or I think is too much, and I know it when I see it so you can’t make me define it, I’ll call it that and present it as something that needs fighting” – it is a classic and old fashioned tactic, it’s forcing the other side to have to defend a strawman (“wokeism”) that means anything and everything the reactionaries want to oppose.
You have a problem with active antiracism? With feminism? With gender-identity affirmation? With multiculturalism? With secularism? With restorative (as opposed to punitive) justice? Maybe not with the subject itself, but just with the manner it is being addressed? Fine. In any of those cases, bring valid argument points about that.
Now, are you talking about elements of self-righteous attitude from some zealots within those different movements and tendencies? Hey, we know we have them. Believe me, they annoy us too. But that’s not a “woke movement” that is just people being full of themselves. You don’t dismiss the fight for justice as invalid because some of those fighting are obnoxious power-trippers.
I once observed that the average self-described “conservative American”'s notion of what is “Far Left” is meaningless because it would convey that a likely actual majority of the population can be considered “extremist”.
Well, the example that comes to mind isn’t race-based, but in college from 1993-1996 I was a resident advisor in my dorm, and part of our annual training was an extremely heavy dose of what amounted to progressive indoctrination- we got basically told about white privilege, LGBTQ rights, etc…
Which was all well and good, but we got it explained to us at one point that there was some sort of several stage growth progression that people took toward LGBTQ acceptance, and that if we were only at some stage, then we needed to deliberately work toward the final stage. WTF?
Although I was NOT hostile to gay people at all, I resented being indoctrinated as part of job training, and I especially resented being told that I needed to work toward greater ideological purity. At a state university, no less.
I felt like as an employee of a state university, it would have been far more appropriate to explain the behaviors expected of us as employees, and then hold us to that, regardless of our personal feelings on any of it.
It seemed VERY inappropriate and very agenda-pushing, and I especially resented being told that in effect, I didn’t think correctly and needed to work on that, despite being a perfectly fine RA in every other respect.
Basically it was “woke” before it was cool, and it totally rubbed me the wrong way.
Half or more of the times I see it, it’s coming from a Black tenured professor. Here is a recent example:
You’ll only see the word “woke” used once, but the article above fits a pattern where someone who has a slighly different take on racism is dismissed (“they’re an idiot”) and has a negative reaction. This pushes them onto, in some sense, the other team. My link is a great example of this. The author is in most ways progressive, but got pushed too far in terms of having to be on the progressive team in every way, and now has placed his complaint with the only kind of web site that would likley accept it, one that is right of center.
When I was young I read anti-racist books in a college seminar on American Racism, and, for a few months, found myself in the progresssive cocoon when it comes to race. But then I read Preferential Policies: An International Perspective and was won over by the idea that reverse discrimination is sometimes harmless for a while but eventually fails. We are at that moment where resentment on all sides shoots up. Saying that is no reflection on whether I may or may not be an idiot, with the caveat that I don’t like the word idiot.
P.S. Others in the Black tenured push-back group include John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, and Roland G. Fryer Jr.
Like others have said, I don’t even know of anyone who self-defines as woke. If they did, I would agree that it would seem preachy and sanctimonious, because “woke” simply means being aware of the issues, and someone calling themselves woke within a context of a discussion on those issues is passive aggressively accusing the other person of not even knowing what they’re talking about. Even if they don’t know what they’re talking about, you’re not going to win them over by being smug.
However, since I haven’t heard anyone self-describe as woke, at least since the right has co-opted it, this is an irrelevant distinction.
You ranted about people, plural, who self-identify as “woke”. You seemed quite angry about these “preachy” and “santimonious” people, who are “insufferable as fuck”.
But when asked for an example, the one that comes to mind is…a college training from a quarter century ago. That seemed to be pushing an agenda but didn’t use the word woke, or with anyone self-identifying as woke.
This, right here, is exactly what I’m talking about.
Okay… that’s the closest I can come to a concrete example, and it’s far from perfect. And what the hell does it matter if they used the word “woke” or not, and was a quarter century ago? It was very clearly the same damn thing and the same attitude that turns people off and angers them even today.
I don’t have a great example to illustrate it today, but anecdotally, a lot of people DO feel that way. Like they’re being condemned for not thinking along approved lines, even if they’re not actually outwardly racist or hostile to LGBTQ issues or anything like that.
It’s hard to describe, but there’s a definite sort of sanctimonious/condescending feel to a lot of the progressive/woke rhetoric that comes out. Like if you disagree, you’re somehow stupid or ignorant.
That’s not how you win hearts and minds; that’s how you show your street cred to people who already think like you do. I’m not racist, and I’m LGBTQ friendly but I don’t much like being told that because I’m not 100% on board with everything else woke, that I’m somehow wrong or need to change. Basically there’s no room for debate or dissention.
You haven’t even really been able to articulate exactly what it was that upset you so much all those years ago. You might not have been personally "hostile to gay people back in the 90’s. But that was also the decade where the Bill Clinton signed the Defence of Marriage Act. Where you could be gay in the military as long as you didn’t ever tell anyone and you didn’t fuck. Where AIDS was the leading cause of death for Americans age 25 to 44.
Gay people literally didn’t have the same rights as you back in the 90’s. And they were dying at higher rates because of prejudice towards what was regarded by many as a “gay disease” back in the 90’s. So if you were made to feel mildly uncomfortable as part of your annual training for :: checks :: a resident advisor in your dorm, then yeah, that was probably the point, and its a shame that those lessons didn’t appear to stick.
And none of this has anything to do with “woke.” Unless we are now redefining woke to mean “something that made me mildly uncomfortable back when it was legal to discriminate against people for being gay.”
I know, right? The examples of “woke run amok” that people come up with (essentially making people feel mildly uncomfortable as a result of their own prejudices) frankly boggle the mind when contrasted against the actual harm the “anti-woke” are actually doing to marginalized groups as a matter of policy.
Thus I have yet to read a good answer to the OP’s question.
ETA: Unless of course the answer is “it isn’t any different.”
About half of John McWhorter’s New York Times columns are on this theme. Behind a paywall, yes, but, if you are in the U.S., check your public library‘s web site, as they commonly offer somewhat inconvenient free access.
By the way, this is one reason I do not consider the Times to be woke. Opinions found there, and in the Washington Post, would commonly result in outrage on college campuses.
Many examples are found in my next link, not just of left-wing intolerance AKA wokeism, but also of the equivalent at conservative/religious schools:
…just a few minutes ago I saw the story about Brianna Ghey. It made me sad and upset. And I’m just like: the reality right now is that the frenzy being whipped up by “anti-woke” brigade (and I’m not talking about anyone here in this thread, but specifically the likes of Chris Rufo) is getting people killed, is forcing them to relocate, to fear for their lives.
You don’t have to be part of that. But when you use woke as a pejorative, it sends up an enormous red flag for me.
Just looking at the laundry list of complaints there, the resignation of a curator, a writer who was suspended for publicly criticising people, it just looks like “cancel culture” repackaged. So if you are telling me that half of his columns are on this very subject, then that sounds like I’d very much not want to read about 100% of anything else he has written.
FIRE are very obviously free-speech advocates.
But this thread is about “anti-wokeism.”
So a casual glance at that link didn’t show me anything about woke or anti-woke positions. Its about freedom of speech. Can you be a bit more specific?
…I just used the search function to look up the word “woke” here on the boards prior to 2020.
I found this interesting thread.
There was this thread about the devstating effects of wokedness:
This thread about how being woke somehow set all the trees on fire.
How being woke magically turned a T Shirt inside out and backwards:
And that one time where being woke caused a paralysed arm:
But do you know what I didn’t find?
Anybody declaring themselves woke. I only found a single reference to woke used in a similar context to the way its used in this thread while scrolling this thread:
which said “Everything is viewed through an intersectional woke SJW lens.”
What we are observing here is entirely new. As someone who has been paying close attention over the last few years to the way things tend to trend, the elevation of “woke” to be used as a catch-all for all things progressive wasn’t a thing that was happening a couple of years ago, it became more prominent in the last year, in the last six months its uses has accelerated, and in the last month its gotten to the point that everybody seems to think everyone has been using that word forever.
Nek minnit: "CRT admonishes all white people for being oppressors while classifying all Black people as hopelessly oppressed victims, and it is being taught in schools and we need to ban it because it is making white people feel uncomfortable. So no more teaching about the horrors of slavery! "
I’ve been on the Internet for a few decades now, many times discussing free expression of unpopular and disturbing ideas. It’s a perennial issue even though the terminology and victim profiles vary by time and place.
Re your mention of increasing death threats for speech acts, this is one reason I suspect free expression, although always under at least some threat, in the U.S., is under more threat today. As to whether left or right gets more death threats, there’s no way to know.
DeSantis wants to cancel negative newspapers coverage of politicians like himself:
Sounds to me like a freedom of the press violation AKA speech suppression AKA cancel culture AKA, if it was on the left, wokeism.
After Donald Trump, hardly an exemplar of respect for disagreeing views, took up the phrase cancel culture, the term became a bit less useful, and I use it less.
I mean, really, on the lib-to-prog side of the spectrum we do, oh believe us we do, in one or the other or more of our respective issues, have to deal with those who make us go “SMH, FML, not helping, Man!” (and who themselves are saying about us: “OK Boomer: goes to prove, no such thing as an ally”) But nobody had me ever sign a Woke Manifesto. Sure, I will run into people who will act like I did, hell, they’ll act like humankind itself did. There’s always people like that.
I think that you are more focused on the content of the speech — whether it qualifies as sexism or racism — and I am more concerned about whether there are negative consequences for expressing it.
To answer the OP question, sexism and racism are terms that greatly change in meaning over time and place.
Equating sexism and racism with anti-wokeism would be a mistake because most in the anti-wokeism camp are also against sexism and racism. Their definitions of sexism and racism may be old-fashioned, but that’s not the same as wrong.
…well, I don’t know about you. But I was the official Straight Dope President of the Social Justice Warriors for a time. And I (along with every other member of the Social Justice Warriors) had to sign the official SJW Agenda.
But that got superseded when I became the President of Antifa. But now that I’m President of Woke, it really is time to start working on that manifesto. I’ll have a copy sent to you post-haste.