A Rachel Maddow showed then, FOX news was all gun ho on the teabag thing:
Uh, actually I am aware of the origin. Really. I cited it. In fact I pointed out it’s origin more accurately than you did.
Do you have a better cite for the origin of the term “woke”? Or maybe you should try reading posts before you start critiquing them.
Or maybe they realise the term “woke” was ridiculous when it moved away from its niche origins and was appropriated by the left. Who then started competing with each other to prove how woke they were, and thus themselves into farces. There’s no requirement for facism or prompting from manipulating right overlords (Rupert Murdoch?) for people to ridicule that which is ridiculous. Remember the humorous takes on it: Woke Wagon, The Great Awokening, etc? Were they the product of some right wing illuminati, or just some people being funny towards some pretentious, self-absorbed fools?
Nope, that is the caricature you are talking about again, as usual that is a very ignorant statement to say about CRT.
Of course, there is also a propaganda induced reason about why that is done by the right, it is to silence the teaching to what really took place in America before and now. The idea, as I suspected a long time ago, is for the right to go after anything that smells to social justice or the history of race relations in America.
Stuff like that is pretty exhausting, no doubt. It’s not justification for voting Republican - nothing is, really. But I do wish some folks would dial back the self-flagellation and purity tests. And I wish there were a way to say, “We’re progressive but this is getting ridiculous” without inviting complete scorn and social ostracism. Being told you’re a bad person by people who share your values feels shitty. It’s not (only) fear, but doubt. Shame. Confusion. People are getting tired of it but we’re not really sure what to do. I don’t really have a fixed political identity the way I did in grad school. I both feel the schism between myself and the extreme left and I also work on a lot of progressive issues with people who are my teammates and friends, who might use this kind of language and do these things.
My org is currently going through one of these anti - racist overhauls, and I think it’s important that an organization serving black survivors has black leadership and at least some awareness of cultural issues that impact how DV/SA manifest in black communities. That’s common sense if you really want services to make an impact. But I admit even though I agree with the overall thrust of what we’re doing, I sometimes wonder if there is a point of diminishing returns. And it really does seem to me that no matter what we do, some people never feel like it’s enough. I recently took a work survey asking what else we should be doing to address inequity and my honest and anonymous response was, “We’re already doing so much I can’t even keep it all straight.” Coming from someone whose job it is to stay up to date on these things and report to funders, it’s telling.
All of the subtleties and complexities of progressive politics are inpenetrable to conservatives. Rather than try to understand it, they pull things out of their behinds and go on and on and on, innacurately, about what it means to be left - wing, and what liberals really secretly think, blah blah blah. They’re criticizing something they don’t understand. That’s not something to be proud of. It’s like thinking you understand the history of Europe because you took grade school French.
As a social worker I can confirm the woker you are, the broker you are. 
Right away, then you said that “I’d never heard it before the Black Lives Matter movement,”.
Again, that is not where that originated, that you became aware after you googled is a different thing, and also your early reply showed that you implied that it was a silly leftist idea of recent origin without mentioning that black people used it many decades ago before BLM was a thing.
I’d tweak that to say they’re criticizing something they don’t want to understand.
I’m pretty sure you don’t know what a straw man is, given that you’re creating one from this post. It’s also apparent you’re not reading the thread. In my first post in this thread (#47 or around there), I noted that many Republicans are accepting socially liberal initiatives such as gay marriage and marijuana legalisation. What they reject is confrontational liberalism, (which I believe includes wokism,) which they associate with the Democrat’s left wing. Do you view Biden as a confrontational liberal or left wing? I don’t. In fact, a several posts later (#93 or around there) I equated Bidenism with “mostly centrist mainstream political party”. Throughout my posts, I’ve been consistently referring to the Democrat’s left wing. I don’t believe I’ve referenced Biden since the above post. The comment on the Democrat’s left-wing wishing to abolish ICE started from a comment I made in post# 144 “that left-wing politicians are popular with left-wing voters and almost nobody else.” You quoted that comment so you should remember it. You then offered liberal policies that many Republicans agree with. Nice point. I’d already made it. I also pointed out several left-wing policies that Republicans and the general public don’t agree with. So now are you going to say that noone in the Democratic left wing wants to break up ICE? I forget, is Bernie Sanders considered to be a Democrat when he’s not running for President?
By the way, a key element of strawmanning is “the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted, but instead replaced with a false one.”
(Straw man - Wikipedia)
When you assert that I’m discussing Biden, who I believe I’ve mentioned once as a moderate, rather than left-wing Democrats which I’ve mentioned dozens of times, that’s what you’re doing.
I have the same information you do. Why then are you “objecting so strongly” to my interpretation, which is entirely consistent with the information you yourself cited? Why do you believe I’m claiming the theatre isn’t left-wing?
So you don’t know what happened, but you’re putting a lot of effort into using this example into making a fairly trivial point anyway. Got it.
Like jsc1953, I don’t use the term to refer to, well, anyone. As I already pointed out, it’s the right that go around hysterically stamping that label onto anything they don’t like.
You are correct that the right and left think differently. For starters, the left don’t get irrationally worked up over other people trying not to be racist.
Also, as convoluted thinking goes, the right are far more willing to believe mutually contradictory things, whether it’s that COVID is a “Democrat hoax” and a bioweapon and “no worse than the flu”, or that the January 6 insurrection was carried out by Antifa but also by the FBI but also by “great patriots”. The left has its crazy people but they don’t elect them to high office.
The Times was once as you describe. Now it’s part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp empire. It’s not as rabidly partisan nor as willing to manufacture stories as its fellow right-wing broadsheet The Telegraph, but it’s perfectly happy to rail about the evils of wokism anyway.
I read a variety of print sources including the Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the FT and the Economist. But not the tabloids.
But nice try on the “My newspaper isn’t biased, and anyway your newspaper is just as biased as mine” thing.
If fascism is so toxic to average voters, why are Republicans running to it?
What the right are “ridiculing” is, as has been repeatedly pointed out, a strawman of their own making. And we know you know what a strawman is. Also, given the extent to which the right-wing press (including Murdoch’s) has actually manipulated their viewers to the point of utter delusion (as I already mentioned in detail), perhaps you shouldn’t be so dismissive of the idea.
By the way, is “confrontational liberalism” the same as “holding the right accountable for their words and actions”? Because I know that’s one of the things the right hates most.
I respect both your comment and your perspective. I’m generally against polarisation and in favour of open-mindedness. Not so much in a message board debate, but in real life I like to think that I try to presume that most people are acting with their best intentions. It’s just that some times I find people’s best intentions to be incredulous. On the face of it, a theatre company that does quite a lot of performances with diverse cast and subjects shut down its diversity program over a miscaptioned photo in a Twitter tweet. And then, in spite of their history of diversity, including their current performances featuring leading black actors and I think a black oriented subject, apologise for being racist. Even trying to be open-minded to what else may be going on, that really strikes me as their motivation is to be a group of hyper-sensitive over-reacting self flagellating liberals. And don’t forget, this was a story where I looked in today’s newspaper to see if I could find an example of wokeness. It only took me 11 pages. I don’t think that story is all that rare, nor that the interpretation of it as “woke” is a right-wing exaggeration. Obviously some others disagree, but then I’m incredulous towards them as well.
All wonderful things.
But on the economic front, conservatives (as opposed to Trumpists) won when Bill Clinton got elected. And they’ve consolidated their victory and held on to power.
I first became aware of the term woke around five years ago. As I recall, it was being used by Black Lives Matter activists during the 2016 presidential campaign. Shortly, afterwards, there were Internet and newspaper articles explaining the origin of the term. What I learned from those articles is that, as I’ve already noted twice, prior to “woke” entering popular use, it was being used as a niche term within the US black community. It’s origin appears to be from the 1940’s. It’s first appearance as a cultural reference, and yes I did have to look it up as I didn’t fully remember it, appears to be from a 1971 Barry Beckham play titled Garvey Lives!
It was pretty soon after I first noticed the term that it became a catchphrase for liberals. It wasn’t long after that, and definitely by early 2017, that the use of the term “woke” was becoming a farce. I’m not actually aware of when it started being used as a bludgeon by right-wingers, but that seems to be more recent, as in the last year or two. If you have more knowledge on the specific history of right-wingers using the term “woke” as an insult, feel free to share it.
Does that satisfy you that I’m not ignorant about the term? I don’t know why I had to spell all of the above out as I’ve already previously posted most of what I’ve written above. But then you don’t actually seem to be reading posts before you reply to them, so I guess I should expect you to miss quite a lot.
I did, as you said, “the real subject of the argument was not addressed or refuted, but instead replaced with a false one.”
I had posted already about how right-wingers concentrated on what extremists are saying, like in the examples you posted, Biden and many other Democrats are not in favor of that. But the implication was that all from the left are like that, and that is still not true.
Not what I said, that was a lot of tap dancing just to refuse to acknowledge with a simple ‘I was not aware of the old origins of why that word was being used by black Americans’.
As for the right using it as an insult, the last article I linked about it was about scholars talking on why the word was turned into a slur, that did not happen in a vacuum, and clearly it was ignored.
The former is closer to the truth than the latter. To the degree that the slipup was influenced by race, it is technically discriminatory, in the sense of differentiating people. Now, I do not know if this sort of small slipup should be harmful, but if people feel hurt by it then I can’t really argue with that. I might be hurt by being misnamed, too. even if by mistake.
But words have connotations as well as denotations. “Committing an act of racism” carries the heavy connotation of intentionality no matter what people like to claim. If acts are enough, then Biden almost committed an act of racism a few months ago by almost accidentally saying the N word. To claim that an accident is “committing an act of racism” is to try to have your cake and eat it too, by saying that anyone can do this even unintentionally, but still use words that imply that no, they totally meant to do that 'cause they’re racist mcklanface.
If you’d prefer to label the Almeida Theatre incident and their corresponding statement as the acts of hyper-sensitive over-reacting self flagellating liberals, then I’m happy for you to avoid the term woke. I notice you didn’t actually disagree with the categorisation, just the use of the term. And the reason I’m staying on this subject is that I believe you’re wrong. Your premise is that the reporting of ridiculous woke incidents is due to right-wing exaggerations. It isn’t. I’ve read dozens of articles on ridiculous woke incidents over the past few years. Apparently, so have you since you acknowledge reading them in the Times. But you explain that away by classifying the Times as a right-wing puppet of Rupert Murdoch. It isn’t. It’s a quality newspaper, in many people’s opinion it’s the highest quality newspaper in the UK, and the fact that the Times has published articles about ridiculous wokism shows that those stories are coming from a mainstream source and not some right-wing conspiracy drive cesspit.
Also, getting back to the Almeida theatre story, I literally started looking through today’s Evening Standard to see if I could find an article on wokeness. It took me all of 11 pages. If the stories about ridiculous wokeness are rare occurrences driven from right-wing exaggerations, it should have been a lot harder than that.
As to your last point, if you don’t believe that wokism turned into farce about four years ago, and that it was entirely due to the overreacting pretentiousness of the left-wing liberals who had embraced the term when it became popular instead of niche within the US black community, then you really haven’t been paying attention.
Well, that’s an amazing statement. Democrats, like Republicans, love to take the dumbest or most extreme members of the other party and use them as ‘typical’ of people on the other side. It’s a political tactic as old as politics. In debating with a Democrat I am far more likely to hear about Margery Taylor-Greene, Michelle Bachmann or the “I am not a witch” losing Republican candidate than I am Mitt Romney or Olympia Snow, even though the latter are more powerful and more representative of mainstream Republicans.
And that shows that you ignore that most of the Republicans in congress protected Trump or supported his big lie, and do want to prevent any more investigations about what took place on January 6th.
Still there is good in the party regarding the previous examples I posted (Supporting climate change efforts, more rights for minorities, more access to health care, etc). Unfortunately, it is clear that many Republicans in congress are even out of step from a very significant number of their voters too. They usually pull that off with the help of a complicit right wing media that does not mention much about how their own representatives vote against their own interests.
From my anecdotal observations, I believe you are correct. Based on my various Facebook acquaintances and people I’ve known throughout my life, a significant number of Americans have a very narrow view of the world and buy into a Republican narrative of “exceptionalism” as it pertains to the typical American middle class lifestyle. And they are very resistant of anything that varies from that. It’s why they have an almost visceral reaction to “poor people”, immigrants, minorities, gay marriage, progressive economic policies, etc (which they attach labels such as “woke”, “socialist”, or “liberal”).
I can say with 90% certainty that these people believed they committed an act of racism. I think they are wrong, but I don’t doubt their sincerety. And they feel pretty guilty about it.
Here’s how I might have handled it: “It has come to our attention that we recently mislabeled the identity of one of our writers, XYZ as PQR. As both writers are women of color, we recognize that errors like these can undermine the efforts of black artists to be seen and heard in an industry that is often discriminatory against their stories. We will continue our ongoing efforts to ensure that black voices are centered and celebrated here at Theater Company.”
In my view, this clearly addresses that an error was made, recognizes why some people may feel upset about it, and reaffirms the theater’s value of diversity and proposed action plan without requiring anyone to fall on their sword. Proof that self - flagellation is an unnecessary part of this process.