Now, don’t freak out on me. I know that racism and sexism are bad, and we need to stand up to it, and keep fighting. I understand that. Anyone who saw the election unfold knows that.
I know that Maga people, for the most part cannot define wokeness, or just use it to label anything in the culture that they dislike.
But really, is all wokeness good? Is all wokeness right?
Is it useful to be so enraged by past depictions of race that we must never watch another Charlie Chan picture, or put viewer discretion warnings on screenings of Gone with the Wind or All in the Family?
Should a person be threatened with job loss because a ten year old photo turns up showing that person wearing a sombrero at a party? Or feathers and buckskin?
Should Turkey in the Straw be banned because someone, somewhere wrote a racist minstrel version parody of it?
This is the sort of wokeness that is harming our progressive efforts today. This is the sort of wokeness that lost us the election. This is “more socially aware than thou” stuff that makes us look like self righteous idiots because nothing can be done to change the past. We cannot change the past, so we can feel virtuous by condemning it, and we don’t have to work hard about it like we have to in changing future attitudes.
So, tone down the attacks on Hop Sing and Tonto. We need to start winning again.
It was one of many factors. Don’t give wokeness too much credit. I don’t think it was in the top 3 reasons. Inflation, misogyny, racism, anti-immigration and abortion were all bigger factors and it seems like Trans-Hate was pretty high up also.
Wokeness was probably more on level with gun rights and gay marriage. Important to a lot of voters but just part of the mix in the end.
FTR: I had to look up Hop Sing, does anyone really talk about Hop Sing of Bonanza these days?
I do think some of it crosses the line into hurting the message, but where do you draw the line?
The complaints about Mark Twain’s books seem silly to me, especially as part of the “Right” also wants to ban his books.
Renaming US bases named for traitors (confederates) makes sense and never should have happened, but I’ve seen complaints about Theodore Roosevelt, who was extremely Progressive for the time. Now Wilson, he doesn’t get enough flak in my opinion. That was a guy who was racist for the time, not just by our standards.
It was more than the economy, that is making it too simple. So many factors went into this. Though I agree, inflation was the #1 problem.
If they’re an at-will employee, they can be threatened with job loss for no reason at all - as was the case long before “wokeness.”
OTOH, if you want to petition Congress to amend Title VII to make “people who wear costumes from cultures other than their own” a protected class, knock yourself out.
It might help to consider that preserving our principles means not accepting stereotypes NOW.
It is pointless to bitch today that The Good Earth was using white actors, and serves no purpose except to humble-brag about how woke you are.
Awareness of past (and present) injustices, or “wokeness” (a term purloined from progressives and propagandized into a pejorative by Fox News covering everything they dislike, which at last count is anything that doesn’t involve bashing immigrants, labelling LGBTQ people as ‘groomers’, and bitching about ‘big government’ while demanding that the same government should deport immigrants and repress queer people) is the way that we acknowledge and try to avoid perpetuating both intentional bigotry and unconscious prejudices instead of papering over them and gaslighting everyone about it. The old saw about studying history and repetition comes to mind, as does what such repression does to the waste of human intellectual potential when we tell certsin groups that their ideas and opinions don’t matter and they should not have equitable access to educational and vocational opportunities. To that end, fuck no we should not bend over for repressive, fascist bigotry in order to achieve a hollow electoral ‘win’. This is the hill we should die upon even if you think the ‘messaging’ could be more appealing.
Also, All In The Family was (and arguably still is) one of the most ‘woke’ shows in television history. Archie Bunker was the archetype of the white, working class man who felt entitled to express his own opinion without being contradicted by yappy women or “Meatheads”, and the plot of nearly every episode is him discovering how wrong he is even if he was reluctant to admit it.
This is about small margins and even among the small margins, it’s an issue that has a small impact.
Inflation concerns and immigration concerns were larger and certainly figured in.
But sure, let’s toss bits of baby out with the bathwater to chase a very small piece of the electorate at the risk of alienating another small piece of the electorate for whom this will be the overriding priority.
Decisions have consequences. The assumption is that more support will be gained than lost. That’s quite a dubious assertion among the demographics involved.
My own feel is that the sort of people who publicly say “wokeness” is an election issue are overwhelmingly the sort who privately wouldn’t have supported Democrats anyway. There may be a vanishing few who could be “got” that way but surely not many.
No, it isn’t. The version of “wokeness” that the Republicans ranted about is imaginary and the Democrats weren’t even pushing on social justice issues very hard. The Democrats lost because of people buying into Republican lies and admiring Republican hatred and cruelty, not because of “wokeness”.
We lost the election because media propaganda convinced voters that:
Trump did not kill abortion (in fact he did)
The best economy the country has ever seen was in fact a terrible economy and a hellscape of poverty for middle America (it was not)
Do not spend a minute throwing anti-racists or LGBTQ allies under the bus. That’s how we lose even harder. This was an election where there voters needed to digest some exceptionally complex realities, and the misinformation machine stepped in to make sure Biden caught all the blame while Trump caught none.
It’s not a major cause. But it’s a little irritant. Not enough to change people’s votes by itself, but one more straw. It’s the sort of thing that will cause people to ignore you or make fun of you, like seeing how long it takes an NPR show to mention a very small minority or use a term like Latinx or sitting through a land acknowledgement. Much like the loudest jackasses on the internet, who manage to annoy in a way that hurts an entire larger group.
The fact that every one of the OP’s examples is a straw man shows how far down the woke rabbit hole the Rs have gone, and how many D’s they’ve dragged right down there with them.
The issue is not wokeness. The issue is the massive caricature of wokeness that the Rs have been permitted to build and have been permitted to use for defining the terms of debate for both sides. That is the problem.
ETA: I was simulposting w @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness just below. With whom I agree completely.
The GOP invented cat-eating Haitians as part of their electoral strategy, and it worked. They invented school-based genital surgeries as part of their electoral strategy, and their voters believed them. They invented a terrible economy as part of their electoral strategy, and voters ate it up.
If you were able to totally rewrite human nature and 100% eliminate stupid statements by people on the left (not humans in general, just on the left), it wouldn’t matter a bit. Republicans would invent stupid statements by people on the left, just like they invented cat-eating Haitians and school-based genital surgeries and a terrible economy. And their lies would be believed.
Breast-beating about wokeness is a massive waste of time and won’t move us one baby step closer to winning elections. Focus on something important.
I think some people are still grappling with how best to enjoy things from the past that contain elements we find offensive today or were created by terrible people. Ten years ago the prevailing opinion seemed to be that it was okay to like problematic work so long as you recognized it was problematic. While I still think that’s the prevailing opinion, there is a sizable minority that disagrees and believes it’s not okay to enjoy those things.
I’m not really sure where you draw the line either and whatever line is drawn isn’t permanent. We’re never going to be done with this because we constantly reevaluate the past as we ourselves change. I can still enjoy Ace Ventura, but I’m not so keen on Einhorn being the butt of the jokes simply for being transgender whereas it wasn’t a concern in 1994. I’m just not the same person I was thirty years ago.
I’m not sure how much of an influence “wokeness” had on this election. That’s just tough to measure.
I had heard around election time that “Latinx” was actively harming Hispanic perceptions of the Democrats. Sort of “They’re more worried about this stupid word to ‘save us’ than actually handling our economic issues”. I don’t have a direct cite on that but this Sept 2024 Pew poll does say that 75% of Hispanics who are aware of “Latinx” don’t think it should be used and only 4% have adopted it.
Latinx is broadly unpopular among Latino adults who have heard of it, according to the survey.
75% of Latinos who have heard of the term Latinx say it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, up from 65% saying the same in 2019.
Yeah, no kidding. Max Miller just put out an episode of Tasting History on German homefront cooking problems during WWII, and felt it was not only necessary to avoid saying the word “Nazi”, but felt it necessary to explain in detail why merely addressing such a subject did not make him a Nazi sympathizer.
Yes, I know Youtube will demonetize a video because of the algorithm against the word “Nazi”, but why assume you would have to explain such a thing as addressing the German homefront during WWII? Unless it’s a fear of being labeled?
Sure–and most leftists I know have moved away from that term, based on the leftist principle of “for fuck’s sake call people what they want to be called already.”
What percentage of people on the left are still using it, and what percentage of Latino/Latina voters decided to vote for Trump based significantly on that word?