What it Means to be “Woke”

The term "woke" refers to something real. It is important to get clear on what that thing is because we are in the throes of a powerful social movement that is working very hard to evade criticism by refusing to allow us to utter its name.

I have used "woke" for the past few years and I'm not giving up on this perfectly adequate term. There are other almost synonymous terms such as "social justice movement," but nothing quite captures Wokeness like Woke. I'm sticking with "woke," even though the Woke now accuse those who use this term of being insulting or bigoted. The "woke" will be insulted no matter how far down we go down the line of cascading euphemisms, however. This succession is sometimes referred to as a "euphemism treadmill."  Another example of the euphemism treadmill can be found with the history of the word "retarded."  At its core, "retarded" means slow thinking.

Many people have used the term "retarded" to describe a real life phenomenon that can be plainly seen in some people, unfortunately. Others have used it as an explicative and a pejorative, to hurt someone's feelings, often directing this insult at people who are not diagnosably slow in their ability to think.  The fact that the word "retarded" can be used to both describe a real phenomenon and as an insult has resulted in the concoction of a comically long list of synonyms. Every time a new euphemism is invented, someone uses the newly created euphemism as an insult and then people go back to the blackboard to create a new synonym for slow thinking.  

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Jonathan Haidt’s Recently Expressed Doom and Gloom

Excerpt from The Australian --

"'I am now very pessimistic,' Haidt said. 'I think there is a very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy.'"

Why would Jonathan Haidt be so full of doom and Gloom. Maybe because of the dozens of cases of Woke malfeasance in the science departments of universities, as described by Lawrence Krauss:

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Dishonest Diversity

Irshad Manji (in a discussion with Tara Henley):

Dishonest diversity right now is the mainstream version of diversity. It slices and dices individuals into categories and then leaves them there. Now, I acknowledge in my book that labels can be starting points for further discovery, but they should never be finish lines, because labels can lie. They flatten each of us to one dimension, and vaporize all the rest that makes us, as I put it in the book, plurals.

By that I mean that all of us — the so-called white straight guy, as much as the queer Muslim — all of us are so much more than meets the eye.

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More on Dividing People into Colors

Many universities and their affiliates are now dividing people by color with regard to scholarships and grants. They see no problem with this, even though it is the opposite of what we figured out during the Civil Rights Movement.

"It's as if they think the law no longer applies to them," said Heriot, who also sits on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. "What worries me is that with the present administration, they may be right."

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Freddie DeBoer: About Good Students and False Hopes

If we tweak (or totally revamp) education, can we turn lackluster students into excellent students? Freddie DeBoer claims that, with some exceptions, no. The answer to this question bears substantially and harshly on many public policy issues. First, an excerpt from DeBoer's essay, "Education Doesn't Work 2.0: a comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps":

The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another. Mobility of individual students in quantitative academic metrics relative to their peers over time is far lower than popularly believed. The children identified as the smart kids early in elementary school will, with surprising regularity, maintain that position throughout schooling. Do some kids transcend (or fall from) their early positions? Sure. But the system as a whole is quite static. Most everybody stays in about the same place relative to peers over academic careers. The consequences of this are immense, as it is this relative position, not learning itself, which is rewarded economically and socially in our society.

This phenomenon is relevant to the question of genetic influence on intelligence, but this post is not about that. The evidence of such influence appears strong to me, and opposition to it seems to rely on a kind of Cartesian dualism. However, one need not believe in genetic influence on academic outcomes to recognize the phenomenon I’m describing today. Entirely separate from the debate about genetic influences on academic performance, we cannot dismiss the summative reality of limited educational plasticity and its potentially immense social repercussions. What I’m here to argue today is not about a genetic influence on academic outcomes. I’m here to argue that regardless of the reasons why, most students stay in the same relative academic performance band throughout life, defying all manner of life changes and schooling and policy interventions. We need to work to provide an accounting of this fact, and we need to do so without falling into endorsing a naïve environmentalism that is demonstrably false. And people in education and politics, particularly those who insist education will save us, need to start acknowledging this simple reality. Without communal acceptance that there is such a thing as an individual’s natural level of ability, we cannot have sensible educational policy. . .

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