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.