What does “Woke” mean? Here are two recent posts worth considering. First, Matt Orfalea posed the question on Twitter, which launched a worthy thread:

Here are a few of the offerings, among the many in the thread:

Excessive, shallow and myopic focus on social justice

Woke people are special, they feel they are above constitutional principles like equality and free speech.

A toolbox full of identity-based attacks you can use to target people you already don’t like

Second, Freddie deBoer offered a detailed description of the meaning of “woke” in his article, “Of Course You Know What “Woke” Means: I’d rather use any other term at this point, but can we get real please? Here’s the basic definition:

The conceit is that “woke” has even shaggier or vaguer boundaries than “liberal,” “fascist,” “conservative,” or “moderate.” And I just don’t think that’s true.

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene – woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.

DeBoer then offered a list of attributes:

Academic – the terminology of woke politics is an academic terminology, which is unsurprising given its origins in humanities departments of elite universities…

Immaterial – woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real…

Structural in analysis, individual in action – the woke perspective is one that tends to see the world’s problems as structural in nature rather than the product of individual actors or actions…

Emotionalist – “emotionalist” rather than emotional, meaning not necessarily inappropriately emotional but concerned fundamentally with emotions as the currency of politics…

Fatalistic – woke politics tend towards extreme fatalism regarding solutions and the possibility of gradual positive political change…

Insistent that all political questions are easy – woke people speak and act as though there are no hard political questions and no such thing as a moral dilemma…

Possessed of belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed – what was assumed by Bertrand Russel to be obviously misguided is now assumed to be true without evaluation: virtue is not just common among the oppressed, virtue is a function of oppression…

Enabling people who aren’t Black or Southern to say “y’all” – this one is unforgivable…

I could go on. And some will disagree with this or that…

This is an excellent read and I would urge those interested to read Freddie’s entire article.

[added March 17, 2023]

Definition offered by Aaron Sibarium:

Wokeness is a political and social movement characterized by the following:

-A strong and in practice unrebuttable presumption that certain salient group disparities are due entirely to oppression.
-A willingness to jettison longstanding legal, political, and social norms in order to eliminate those disparities.
-A belief that oppression operates through both impersonal power structures and unconscious attitudes.
-A hyper-sensitivity to the feelings, both real and imagined, of members of marginalized groups.
-An expansive, almost mystical conception of the self, which is inherited from the liberal tradition that wokeness seeks to overthrow.
-Distrust—and in many cases demonization—of straight, white, cisgendered males.
-A belief that oppression, while pervasive, is also concealed.
– A sense that unmasking oppression requires the special insight of those with “lived experience,” which can be partially imparted through trainings and experts.

[March 24, 2023]

At National Review, Dan McLaughlin wrote “It’s Not Hard to Define Wokeness If You’re Honest.” He offers five essential characteristics of “wokeness,” what it means to be woke:

• Woke ideology elevates immutable identity-group membership over the individual.
• Woke ideology obsesses over hierarchies among identity groups.
• Woke ideology is all-encompassing in interpreting human interactions through the lens of identity-group hierarchy.
• Woke ideology is revolutionary in arguing that its preferred hierarchies must supplant current hierarchies.
• Woke ideology aims to be constantly evolving rather than a fixed doctrine.McLaughlin unpacks all five. Here are excerpts describing the first three core characteristics:

Identity group collectivism: The core of woke ideology is its intensive focus on a person’s membership in certain identity groups based on immutable characteristics such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity. These are frequently treated as the defining features of a person’s identity, to which more individual characteristics are subordinate. Being black or gay is not just part of your life experience; it is who you are. You are expected to show solidarity with others who share your identity, and to share similar thinking. Identity-group membership determines whether you are worthy of opportunities, what topics you should be heard to speak upon, and how much weight or credibility is to be given to your views. Your identity is, like some pagan god, treated as a source of your success or failure in various endeavors.By its very nature as a group-based classification, a focus on identity tends to obliterate the individual in favor of the collective. If a job requires “representation” by a South Asian person, then any South Asian person will do.. . .

Identity group hierarchy: If woke ideology was truly individualistic and egalitarian, it could acknowledge the existence of past tendencies to classify people in groups, but it would do so only in order to object to giving so much importance to those classifications. This was the appeal made by black American leaders such as Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King Jr.: Their desired end state was one in which racial classifications would not matter, and even when they considered it unrealistic to pursue a completely color-blind policy in the short term, they maintained a consistent theme that reducing the importance of group identity was a goal to be pursued. . . . Woke ideology, by contrast, divides people into groups with the explicit aim of elevating some groups over others….

Wokeness treats the personal as political: All aspects of life are to be analyzed through a political lens, and all behavior should be aimed at political ends, from how you speak to what you eat or buy. Wokeness also treats the political as personal: Because woke politics sees politics as a struggle between identity groups rather than a contest of ideas, any political disagreement must be treated as an attack on your identity, which must be taken personally.

McLaughlin urges us to ignore efforts by wokesters to stop us using the word “woke.” This is an attempt to keep us from discussing these fucked-up ideas: Essentially dividing us based on arbitrary, often immutable characteristics, thus pitting us against each other. This is a strategy for destroying our institutions and lives and replacing a functioning world with chaos, a path for turning everything into Evergreen State. McGlaughlin urges us to keep using the word “woke” to keep the focus on the havoc it wreaks:

But we still use words to describe ideas. Wokeness is an idea, which has power in our society and menaces that society’s fundamental precepts. We should not fear to name it.

What do we do about Wokeness? Author “Wokal Distance” argues that ordinary conversation is futile because of additional core beliefs of Wokeness:

First off, the postmodern theorist denies the possibility of objectivity. On a postmodern view, no one can have an objective perspective on anything. All viewpoints are just that—a view from a point. Postmodern thinkers don’t believe it’s possible for anyone to get outside of their cultural upbringing and the way they were socialized. As such, the biases, interests, and prejudices of each person inevitably influence any judgment, decision, appraisal, analysis, observation, or evaluation that occurs. This means that no one can arrive at a truly objective account of anything…

The alloy of Critical Theory and postmodernism that we typically call wokeness posits that power dynamics are at play in every social interaction, and that no social structure, convention, institution, or arrangement is exempt from these dynamics. Once Critical Theory and postmodernism become fused, it creates a worldview that deconstructs, dismantles, and subverts everything it touches.

What can we do? Wokal Distance offers this:

Firstly, familiarize yourself with the linguistic, social, and rhetorical tactics of wokeness so that you can spot and disarm them when you see them. Wokeness does not seek to win through logical argumentation or by providing evidence for its assertions. Rather, wokeness aims to win socially by attacking the legitimacy, moral authority, credibility, social status, and public standing of their opponents. They gain control of the public conversation by placing themselves in the position of being perceived as the person who is to be taken seriously, believed, differed to, listened to, and seen as a good person. If you can learn how to combat these tactics, you can neutralize them and redirect the conversation towards facts, reason, evidence, logic, and argumentation.

Secondly, reject the underlying assumptions and premises of postmodernism that they use to dissolve everything. By exposing flaws, errors, and mistakes in these underlying assumptions, you can demonstrate that its conclusions is not based on solid ground. Rather than attacking the credibility of woke individuals, focus on their assumptions, presuppositions, and underlying premises, and show that they are deeply flawed and should be rejected for intellectual reasons. Refocusing the conversation back to truth is essential.

[Added April 12, 2023]

Chris Rufo argues that many people who are woke are trying to suppress any meaningful discussion of their way of thinking by making the word “woke” (or any other word we might use to discuss the dysfunctions of that way of thinking) as taboo. They are trying to convince us that the word “woke” is a synonym for the N-word, thus shielding them for any meaningful criticism of the woke way of thinking. An excerpt:

[By] arguing that “woke” is a dog whistle for the n-word, they’re creating a technique that can be applied to any critique of their ideology at all. They can vacuum in any potential signifiers that could be used to construct a critique—even their own words, even their own direct phrases, even if you quote them verbatim—to say, “We’re going to pass this through this great mechanism to create what would be a universal n-word.” They can turn any descriptor into a taboo. That’s the linguistic machine that they’re trying to build. And let’s be clear, once again: the n-word has an ugly history. It should be a taboo. But what they’re doing here is hijacking the moral sentiment and the moral outrage around the n-word and applying it indiscriminately to legitimate critiques of their ideology and seeking to turn normal discourse into a forbidden discourse.

They’re devaluing the rightful taboo on the n-word and conflating it with a whole series of normal terms. In practice, they’re destroying a well-deserved moral agreement. Virtually nobody in the United States thinks that using the full form of the n-word is okay. This is good. This is a form of progress. We all agree on this, but they’re consciously degrading it, much in the same way that they degraded words such as “racist,” “white supremacist,” and “fascist.” And this movement toward creating a “universal n-word” is the end of the line. It is the most taboo word in the English language, certainly in the American context. And they’ve used up the power surrounding the other words—”racist,” “white supremacist,” “fascist”—and this is really the final word.

The Endgame Is Speech Suppression. What are they actually trying to do with the dog whistle maneuver and the universalization of the n-word? The ultimate goal is speech suppression . . .

But there is an upside, too. By trying to forbid even naming their ideology, the Left has made a tacit, or implicit, admission of weakness. They don’t want to defend their ideology on its merits. They don’t want to defend their political movement out in the open. They want to hide it. They want to shame people. They want to shut down open discourse because they know that their ideology is fundamentally weak and would have little public support if it were subject to rational debate. And so, we have to oppose this without reservation. We have to attack this head-on. We have to be fearless. We can’t submit to these incursions on language, even when they’re trying to use highly-charged words that are really dangerous to even discuss in public.