What Does “Woke” Mean?

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.

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Canadian Language Police Legislate How We Talk

An excerpt from Heather Heying article today:

This week, the Canadian province of British Columbia announced its fealty to a naked emperor, when it introduced new modernizing legislation to correct outdated language by amending more than 2,300 instances of outdated gendered and binary terms from 21 ministries across 210 provincial statutes.

The reason for this is that:

Trans and non-binary people, particularly youth, can be erased by laws that use only he and she…[and] this change signals to those people that they are important, and that they are included and protected by the law.

Nope. In fact, this legislative change signals to women that we shall continue to lose protections under the law, to children that the adults are missing in action, and to everyone that the government has utterly lost the plot.

Sex is binary and fixed, “non-binary” is a fiction that serves nobody, and claiming that “he and she” are outdated terms reveals deep confusion about reality. Rigid adherence to these new rules and causes comes hand-in-hand with the belief that this is the newest civil rights crusade, and that if you don’t follow along you have outed yourself as being one of them—one of those people who are neither fundamentally decent nor caring.

This misses the point, or rather several points, among them:

- Pronouns are about sex, not gender.

- It is neither kind nor respectful to cater to the fantasies of the very young or very confused.

- Language doesn’t change by brute force.

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“White Supremacy” and Concept Creep

Wilfred Reilly points out one of the many recent examples of concept creep. According to the laptop class, the meaning of "White Supremacy" barely resembles what it meant only a few years ago.

Here are other examples: Dangerous Conversion Therapy Woman. Man. Phobia Healthy Vaccine Science Freedom Pandemic Insurrection Vaccine Racism and Racist Gain of Function Public health expert Gender Misinformation Left Wing and Right Wing, Liberal and Conservative Peaceful Violence Fact-Checker Truth Equality Fascist Conspiracy Theory Safe & Safety Trusted Freedom Infrastructure Progressive Fact Anti-vaxxer Inclusion Diversity News Reporting Tolerance

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FIRE Comments on the Forbidden Words of Stanford University

Excerpt from an Article by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression):

By now, much has been written about the words and phrases Stanford removed from its website for their potential to cause harm. “That was insane!” isn’t palatable, because “This term trivializes the experiences of people living with mental health conditions.” What to do when referring to a whitelisted or blacklisted IP address? Try “allowlist/denylist,” because the former terms “[a]ssign value connotations based on color (white = good and black = bad), an act which is subconsciously racialized.” You get the idea. “American,” “dumb,” and “lame” are out, too . . . .

Last week, after the list became public and backlash mounted, Stanford announced it would conduct a review of the guide. The statement from Chief Information Officer Steve Gallagher clarified the website does not represent Stanford University policy. “It also does not represent mandates or requirements,” Gallagher wrote. The list simply provides “suggested alternatives.” “But, we clearly missed the mark,” Gallagher concedes. “We value the input we have been hearing, from a variety of perspectives, and will be reviewing it thoroughly and making adjustments to the guide.”

While FIRE is, of course, relieved to hear these alternatives are not required, the inherent infantilization of steering adults away from words and phrases like “tone deaf” and “mailman” is troubling. By prematurely wading into conversations and deeming words and phrases offensive on behalf of its adult students, Stanford deprives its community members the chance to build resilience and talk through the issues of the day without having to constantly worry about stepping on rakes.

We think institutions of higher education better serve students by not inserting themselves in language debates that are almost certain to produce a “Streisand effect,” occurring when more attention is brought to forbidden words and phrases in the effort to silence them. FIRE recommends a culture of trust, not coddling....

In 2016, Nick Haslam coined the term “concept creep” to describe the tendency for the semantic range of harm-related concepts to expand over time. In other words, the meaning of concepts such as “trauma,” “bullying,” and “violence” has broadened to include ever milder, subtler phenomena.

[More . . . ]

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