My definition of woke

People keep bugging me to define what ‘woke’ means, but that’s not an easy task. Probably the best definition is to say that ‘woke’ refers to the ideas believed by and spread by the Social Justice movement, and to the societal changes and policies pushed by them. But what is the Social Justice movement?

Some history: fifty years after the Civil Rights movement, black Americans were still poorer than white Americans, more likely to be in jail, and in general doing worse. After 3 waves of feminism, women still earned less than men on average, and did far more housework and childcare. The Social Justice movement arose from people trying to explain and ameliorate these differences, and help many other minority groups who still suffered discrimination and/or did not have full rights like gay and trans people.

To explain lingering differences in outcomes, the concept of privilege was expanded from its original meaning of being rich or well connected, to a whole slew of other potential advantages/lack of disadvantages. Women must be doing worse at work due to pervasive sexism, black people due to pervasive racism. Since there were few obvious and severe examples of discrimination, differences in speech and attitudes were blamed. Rather than being a logical result of differences in outcomes or in behaviour, stereotypes were seen as an often-arbitrary cause of them, by influencing how people were treated by others. Underrepresentation in boardrooms was seen as a cause rather than result of fewer black people/women/disabled people managing to get there - the assumption was that if someone who looks like you is present, you will be encouraged to believe you can do that job and to work for it, and other people will also be more likely to believe it and promote you.

Later(?) was added the idea of systemic racism, where laws, customs, institutions etc can treat people differently depending on race without any of the people involved personally having prejudice.

Other explanations for inequality like innate (even for men vs women) or cultural differences between groups became taboo, despite the existence of minority groups like Asians and Jews who don’t fit the paradigm above since they still suffer some prejudice, and nevertheless are in many ways more successful than the presumably-privileged majority.

In order to achieve the desired equal outcomes between groups, progressives abandoned an ideal that used to be widely held: treating people according to the content of their character rather than superficial traits like race and sex. There was always support on the left for a certain amount of affirmative action, but it was supposed to be a temporary thing. The Social Justice movement fully embraced the idea of treating people from different groups differently in order to achieve equality of outcome; equity replaced equality. The unequal treatment was justified as compensating for other disadvantages due to the above mentioned privileges and systemic racism, and for this reason it became an axiom that no person could escape them: every black person is strictly worse off than an otherwise similar white person, every woman worse off than a same-race, similarly wealthy, similarly-abled etc man, and so on for every possible group.

They also abandoned equal treatment in another way, by adopting standpoint epistemology, or the similar idea that only members of disadvantaged groups could speak authoritatively on that disadvantage due to their ‘lived experience’, and should have the sole power to define what counts as bigoted towards them. Eg black people decide whether something counts as (anti-black) racist, women decide whether something is sexist, gay people decide what is homophobic etc. Members of the privileged group in each case get no say, and are often discouraged from even giving their opinion. That this power, like all others, can potentially be abused in order to get unfair advantages for one’s own group is usually ignored or denied.

Another example of abandoning equal treatment was the adoption of the idea of ‘punching up’ vs ‘punching down’ from comedy. Instead of universal rules of politeness, members of privileged groups were supposed to accept criticism of and even insults towards their group, whether from members or non-members, (punching up) while similar criticism of or insults towards disadvantaged groups (punching down) became or remained taboo, most especially when done by non-members.

And the Social Justice movement led to abandoning another ideal that used to be held by progressives: free speech. Free speech benefits those who have less power in society, and for this reason has historically been supported by the left, who were opposed to established power. But the political realignment on the left from primarily being concerned about the working class (by definition underrepresented in power) to concerned about Social Justice (something far more common in the educated people who staff most important institutions) resulted in a left-wing with far more formal and informal power to mandate their preferences in speech. Since it no longer benefited them, and their beliefs about privilege attributed a lot of power to negative speech about minorities, many on the left started to favour restricting free speech: in informal ways such as by shunning or firing people that have become so characteristic of the Social Justice movement, and - everywhere but America with its strong constitutional protection - by legally restricting it in the form of laws against ‘hate speech’.

This new power to enforce their preferences, and beliefs in the power of speech to harm disadvantaged groups, are probably behind the resurgence in political correctness - besides the less principled reason that rapidly changing jargon provides a useful way to demonstrate ingroup membership and increase status within the group.

Other ‘woke’ policies arise from this collection of beliefs: encouraging representation of all kinds of disadvantaged groups in entertainment media, even when it is disliked by the primary consumers of said media and in some cases threatens suspension of disbelief. The teaching of (ideas based in) ‘CRT’ in schools to spread the beliefs of the Social Justice movement to children, sometimes over the objections of parents. Removing advanced classes and gifted programs in schools since these are perceived to privilege already-advantaged groups, and reducing school discipline because it tends to disproportionately affect disadvantaged groups. Campaigns against police violence, and efforts to reduce the number of people in jail by removing need for cash bail, reducing penalties for or enforcement of certain types of crime are done for the same reason, and sometimes because criminals are seen as an oppressed class in themselves. Certainly, homeless people are seen as a disadvantaged group, creating more support for policies like letting them set up large camps in the centre of major cities and denial or discounting of the associated crime and disorder.

I’ve put this post in IMHO because this is my opinion. The best summary I can produce in a few hours of a large and complex phenomenon. If other people think I’ve missed something, they can add it, but this movement, this set of associated ideas is what I am referring to when I say ‘woke’ or talk about modern progressivism.

I find it tellingly ironic that the word woke is used often by the christian right which is a form of the word that the Bible and Jesus’ words calls us to be. I do find it somewhat of a complement to be called woke, and can almost laugh at the irony of it.

The definition depends on who’s doing the defining.

For people who take progressive causes seriously, in its original formulation, it just means, open your eyes, pay attention, recognize what’s actually happening, don’t sleepwalk through the world. It’s difficult to refute, because it’s such a simple, straightforward concept.

But for close-minded right-wing dickheads, it’s the latest bugaboo buzzword. They don’t know what it means, they just know they don’t like it, so they use it as a bludgeon for everything, exactly the way they attacked previous iterations of similar labels in earlier generations. I addressed this at length here:

And I stand by it.

As a fairly mainstream, red-state Democrat who spends a lot of time being annoyed by super-progressive types, I actually find “woke” to be useful shorthand. For me, it’s not so much a set of ideas as a way of expressing and promoting those ideas that comes across as faddish / performative / preaching to the choir. It’s hard to define, but I know it when I see it, and I absolutely understand why it’s annoying.

To give an example that hopefully won’t be controversial because it’s far enough in the past, right after Trump was elected the first time, there was a brief vogue for people to go around wearing safety pins to show they were a “safe” person, theoretically for the benefit of any immigrants / LGBTQ+ people who might be feeling threatened. Yes, this was actually a thing. I had colleagues who walked around with safety pins pinned to their shirts. It was both sincerely well-intentioned and profoundly cringe, in large part because it had virtually no chance of being understood by the intended audience, and was basically just a way for people to feel like they were Doing Something. That’s woke.

Woke often happens when stuff that makes sense in one particular context gets adopted willy-nilly outside of that context because people have a vague notion that it’s a Good Thing To Do. If you are dedicating a memorial to people who died on the Trail of Tears, starting the ceremony with a land acknowledgment is 100% appropriate and meaningful. Not woke. If you are introducing the keynote speaker at a Shakespeare conference, it’s woke.

It also happens when people who spend a lot of their time in activist social spaces lose touch with the fact that the terminology and etiquette in those spaces tend to reflect the preferences of a small, usually very well-educated, minority. That’s where, I think. the much-maligned “Latinx” comes from. I actually do know people who call themselves Latinx! What they have in common, besides their ethnicity, is that they all have a graduate degree of some sort, and they all work in academia, journalism, and / or the creative arts, which are professions that have an outsized influence on the discourse among left-leaning politically-active people. But if you are a web designer or speechwriter working for a Democratic candidate, and you assume that this is now the preferred term so you should use it, you end up using language that doesn’t resonate with the primary audience your candidate needs to win over.

So, yeah, it’s a snarl word that sometimes gets used against stuff that is normal and reasonable, and people may disagree on where to draw that line, but I think it’s a snarl word that denotes an actual thing.

I’m not gonna say this is what woke is, but this is the way it’s often practiced. Someone who may be just as much of the problem as anyone else says they now have woken up to see injustice and look down their noses at others who they believe have not done the same.

Sure, being a hypocritical pig is worse than being an unabashed pig (at least in the latter case it is clear what you are dealing with).

Performative self identification? Like conservatives and their flag lapel pins? Is that ‘woke’ too?

This as an example of ‘woke’ should be controversial because there’s a ribbon, button, ball cap, etc. for every cause.

As for “virtually no chance of being understood by the intended audience” what’s a blue ribbon for?
'Cause I’m counting ~24 causes and just ‘blue’ isn’t enough to start to try to figure out what I’m supposed to be made aware of.

I define it as the recognition that systemic injustice exists and belief in the need to do something about it.

Apparently woke means having common sense gun laws and trying to do absolutely anything at all to stop psychopaths from massacering whole classrooms of children with military grade firearms.

Tots and pears are the only acceotable “solutions” for the GOP.

I must have missed this.

It’s the same general family of thing, and I feel like there ought to be a word for the conservative equivalent, but I wouldn’t call it “woke” as such. Likewise, about a year ago, the university where I work was considering a name change / rebranding in order to make itself more appealing to students from a historically advantaged group, and people upset about the change were calling this “woke” on social media, which I thought was a misuse of the term. Like, I feel like wokeness is … a very specific kind of good-intentions-gone-overboard that is peculiar to liberals, just like there isn’t really a liberal counterpart to MAGA.

ETA: What might be a closer conservative equivalent is the culture in some evangelical religious circles – this has some of the same elements of purity-testing and language-policing, and seems to come out of the same desire to be seen to be a particular type of person by others who are like-minded. And it’s often a turnoff for others who are outside of the group but might otherwise be political allies (in fact, I think a big part of Trump’s secret sauce is that he is very clearly not part of that culture, but somehow managed not to alienate people who are part of it).

The idea that the way to solve discrimination is to introduce reverse-discrimination makes as much sense to me as the idea that the solution to gun violence is more guns (‘a good guy with a gun’).

There again, I would rather just retire the ‘woke’ word.

It’s like Critical Race Theory or DEI. There is a perfectly good definition that should not be controversial at all. Then there is the nebulous never-defined version that we all (white folk) should be angry at because … well if I need to explain it that means you’re one of them.

The negative aspects of wokeness aren’t necessarily part of being woke. Like anything that people are involved with, people mess it up. It’s kind of like how being vegan just means that person avoids animal-based products. Vegan doesn’t mean the person has to be vocal about preaching their vegan-ness, making everyone workaround their dietary choices, and deriding anyone who isn’t also vegan. Those negative, people-y, behaviors are what give vegans a bad name. It can be the same with being woke. Defining what wokeness is shouldn’t include the potentially annoying aspects of some of the people who call themselves woke.

So, you have decided to give definition. You have stated

I take it you did this so you would not have to provide cites for any of the claims made in your OP.

You say that the “Social Justice movement” began fifty years after the Civil Rights movement. Do you have a cite for that? What differentiates the Social Justice movement from the Civil Rights movement?

You have also really poisoned the well.

Cite? And again, well poisoning?

When exactly? If you cannot say that, when roughly? and can you provide a cite for that?

Cite? And again well poisoning

Cite? And once more, well poisoning

Normally, dragging issues in from another thread in to a new one is forbidden. However,

I cannot speak for other posters. I did not ‘bug’ you. I asked politely. I even used the word “please”. You failed to respond. I continued to ask, without hostlity for a cite. You responded with hostility and cursing (though you did censor the word). You said that I should ‘ask politely’. I produced a cite showing that I had asked politely. You again failed to respond. Then, you started this thead.

Is there a reason that when you finally respond with a definition, you chose to do so by starting a new thread in IMHO rather than just posting your definition of “woke” in the original GD thread?

ETA

Just in case I have erred and violated board rules, I have reported my post to the moderators.

At least we now have DemonTree’s (and for that matter Fretful_Porpentine’s) interpretation of what they are referring to when they talk about of “woke”, with the further recognition that it’s not really one single straightforward thing but a combination of different matters of content and tone and execution. FWIW it helps in any argument to know what is being argued, that’s worth something.

Myself, I long since decided that the usage as political snarl word has taken away any chance at a standard consensus over “woke”.

Woke is like political correctness, it’s impossible to define because everyone sees it as something good or bad depending on their own definition of it.

DemonTree is trying to eat her breakfast!

For those of you who think that woke is a poor term for various reasons please provide a set of alternative word/phrases which are more precise and which encompass the various issues people are concerned with.

I think it would be useful to get someone from the American Black community (young and old would be best) to comment here. Are there any active Black posters here? Otherwise this is just going to be various groups of White people running in circles.