This is a very good point, well put.
Agreed. The whites who dismissed the idea of “Black Lives Matter” seemed to be doing so from the mindset of not understanding why there was even a need to state that idea.
It’s my impression that some people complained about, and were aware of, both of these things long before 1967. They may not have used those terms.
I’m talking about the very terms themselves. Of course the underlying concepts were far, far older (although, in the case of White privilege, not quite as old as one might think.)
Du Bois’s “wages of whiteness” formulation looks to be from 1935, and seems a rough precursor of the modern idea of privilege. I don’t know of any earlier thinking along those lines, but definitely could be missing some.
I’m giving up on getting an answer, but I’ll try again anyway. @DemonTree is support for interracial marriage woke? Support for gay marriage?
Just to add to the praise–I read your post yesterday and was like, “Who is this @Frilly_Heck person, and why haven’t I paid attention to these excellent, detailed, thoughtful posts before?” You laid it out really well here.
I was more meaning that Whiteness studies often considers the idea of Whiteness itself to be a fairly recent social construct.
Makes sense!
Thanks. I’m a new poster but I have been lurking for a very long time.
By what definition?
There were certainly people in the United States defining who was considered “white” and who wasn’t back in the 1800’s, if not sooner.
I don’t know how the term’s used in the field of Whiteness studies.
No. Not in itself. Nor is support for trans rights.
Non-answer. No aspect of your vague definition is “woke” in and of itself, is it?
I have news for you, twenty-five years ago, pushing for gay marriage would definitely be considered woke in and of itself. You really do have a victor’s virtue problem.
Great post, this is really helpful. And thank you for not just dismissing the whole thing as non-existent; it’s very disturbing to have one’s experiences invalidated.
I’ve seen articles looking at the frequency of related words in the media, and I think this is a good way to determine when the social justice movement became popular. So I found this summary of a study on the issue. Here’s their conclusion:
This indicates that the Social Justice movement broke into the mainstream between 2010 and 2019, but my first encounter with it was on anti-religious and feminist blogs in the 2000s, where I first saw ‘privilege’ used in the sense of lacking a specific disadvantage. ‘Unpacking the invisible knapsack’ is a phrase I particularly remember. I thought it was a useful exercise at the time. This is also the first place I encountered trigger warnings. Some of these ideas were probably around earlier, but I don’t know where they originated. Perhaps in gender and other ‘studies’ departments? To me it appeared they were rapidly evolving and being synthesised in real time on these blogs.
I don’t honestly know. Ideas have a life of their own. If they are appealing enough then people will adopt and spread them.
Civil rights in the sense of legal equality were achieved by black Americans 70 years ago (and I was guessing the social justice movement to have begun approximately 20 years ago based on the above.) Obviously that doesn’t mean equality was achieved in fact, or that the Civil Rights movement was instantly disbanded, but that’s what I was referring to when I said 50 years.
I’m not really sure what your point is here or where you got the idea I think there are only 3 waves of feminism?
Divining others’ motives is always going to rely on a lot of supposition, so I’m willing to accept correction here.
However, I still think many of the conclusions social justice activists come to are wrong, and the policies based on them somewhere between suboptimal and actively harmful. Your first point is the one I’m most familiar with. The media gives a misleading impression by publicising shootings of black people but not those of white people (or perhaps this is the result of black activists caring more about the issue or being more effective than white ones?), but it’s not even clear that there is any true disparity once different crime rates between races are taken into account:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550618775108
For this reason and the comparative lack of such shootings in other countries, I think America’s police shooting problem is mostly the result of a heavily armed citizenry and a poorly trained police force.
The disastrous result of the Black Lives Matter protests, in contributing to an increased homicide rate that has resulted in over 15,000 extra deaths so far - disproportionately of young black men - is hardly a recommendation. My view is that rather than demoralising the police and decreasing their numbers through resignations, America needs to hire more of them and train them better. Properly managed, the police can suppress crime by increasing the changes of getting caught, resulting in less need to jail people for large amounts of time, which would be a win-win.
To be fair, I didn’t see anyone else bringing this up either, and I do think it’s an important addition. @RitterSport mentioned interactions with the police, but not police violence. @DocCathode mentioned being profiled by the police as a teen as likely to be involved in underage drinking, but surprisingly doesn’t have a problem with it.
I also want to address these points:
I think of this as being something like conservatism or liberalism. It’s a set of related ideas that all have something in common - in this case the theme of addressing inequalities between identity groups. Not just economic ones, as you note, but also health and violence related. Different people will have their own definitions, not everyone will agree with every idea, and there will frequently be disagreements, but there is nonetheless observably a group of people who share overlapping sets of beliefs.
You can also see in the study I linked to that words describing different types of prejudice all saw a drastic increase - not at exactly the same time, but within just a few years of each other. The change was not confined to one area of activism, it affected all.
Absolutely it is. It has been spreading here to the UK, but is still far less influential, and sometimes an awkward fit for conditions in this country. For better and worse, America has huge cultural influence around the world, and doubly so in English-speaking nations.
What???
There has been a Catholic Social Justice movement since 1891.
15 May 1891
The publication of Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum novarum, on 15 May 1891 began the development of a body of social teaching in the Catholic Church.
[image]
https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › C…
Catholic social teaching - Wikipedia
I became aware of Catholic social justice teachings in 1968, initially in opposition to the draft and the war in Vietnam.
Sorry to bug you. But, would you mind clarifying this post
It could have a few different meanings. Or was it as DemonTree said ‘obviously not a serious response’?
Cite?
I will respond to the rest of your post later, but I want to clear up one thing quickly, if I can, regarding this:
Did you actually read the link? The reason I ask is that Discourse usually shows the number of times a link has been opened by others, and I don’t see that, which leads me to think no one has followed it. I could be misunderstanding the way this works as I am new to posting. But I will not be looking your cites until I am sure you have looked at mine – I think that’s fair, don’t you?