Why is woke a dirty word now?

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Besides the merits it is often the sneering, condescending attitude by “wokes” in videos such as this that has helped create the anti woke backlash.

But people like the youtuber do not want to see that. Oppose some of the ideas as outlined by me earlier in this thread it can not be because I have problems some of the illiberalism, and over emphasis on groups in “wokeism”. She just knows this is because I want to go to back to the 1950s where I can avoid seeing a black person and do not have to be triggered by learning about slavery.

I have a lot of problems with the illiberalism and overcorrection of the anti woke laws. None of them I have seen prohibit the teaching about slavery.

An about those DEI training sessions. It can be a lot more then an innocuous four hours where you learn to be considerate and empathetic and you don’t have to agree. When they are paying you don’t have to agree but you better damn well pretend that you do. If they say that you are automatically privileged, and maybe racist because you and probably most things you do are racist even though you don’t realize it, if you want to feed your family you had better go along.

Speculation=mine:
A lot of woke capitalism is really about age discrimination. What age group is most likely have problems with “woke” ideas? What age group is most likely to slip and use a dated word that “makes people uncomfortable”? The age group with the highest salary.

Oversimplifying the video
The 62 percent of Americans who fear sharing their political views are being bamboozled, there is nothing to fear there. This comes off as gaslighting.

Cultural Marxism does not define the left because todays emphasis is on identity not class. He has a point there. The similarities between identity based wokeism and traditional class based Marxists is in tactics used to undermine the institutions both groups believe to be fundamentally wrong. In this way I empathize with the youtuber’s frustration. His traditional class based leftism has been hijacked first by the identity based wokes and now the identity based anti wokes. I feel the the same way about my anti wokeism which is based on their illiberalism being hijacked by the more illiberal anti wokes.

As happens all to often but not as badly as most the specter of Nazi Germany was brought up. It is not Hitler most leading anti wokes want to emulate but Vicktor Orban. There is a significant isolationist streak in this group compared to Hitler‘s desire of world conquest. While machoism and racism define both Nazism and racism and the anti woke backlash, it is identity that animates the anti woke movement. Critical Race theory animated the anti woke movement a year ago, opposing transgenders has put the anti woke movement to a whole different level. Both macho men and many feminists feel threatened.

It's just calling a hysteria what it is. You're entitled to disagree but I don't think it's unreasonable to view much of the anti-woke backlash as hysterical in nature. Just because you can make a coherent point doesn't mean most of them can. Even the so called thinkers regularly struggle to define what it is they mean by woke.

If wokeness involves the killing of anybody from the womb to the tomb, you can count me out. I feel that every life is worth living no matter how disabled a person is. I do not wish to debate this.

And the Truth be damned.

It's also worth noting that assistive technology has come a long way and there are plenty of resources to allow everybody in the world to live a dignified life. It's just that the resources aren't being allocated with that in mind.

I think it's going to be cool when wheelchairs are replaced with sedan chairs on wheels that roll around most of the time, but then stand up to climb stairs or over rough surfaces.

It gets a bit iffy though with respect to mind reading technology as that's so easily abused by authoritarian regimes.

I'm all for equality if it means building people up rather than tearing people down

You do wander it patches of air ...that are thick with marajuana smoke when walk through the streets of downtown DC these days, and in the underground Metro stations too. In broad daylight in the middle of the day. MUCH more than when it was illegal. When it hits your nostrils you stop and turn in the direction of the smell expecting to see a huddled group of young folks furtively passing around a joint and looking over their shoulders like we would do back in the day, but there is never anyone around- but a few other briskly walking pedestrians like yourself. The users are long gone but the smell remains. Definitely a major change. Either you walk through the scent laden lump of air, or the breeze carries it away. Usually its a pleasant smell though. Cant complain about the smell itself per se. Noticed it on my last two commutes to different worksites in the city. I am sure if I were a regular commuter to downtown I would be blase to it now. But its still a mindblowing curiousity of a whole new era to me.

That's a very long explanation and im not sure if anyone here will care.

Which post are you referring to?

As you say, it's a "loose term.... "

IMO, we really shouldn't be using "loose terms" at all when discussing politics, because "loose terms" inevitably have very different meanings to different people.

If one is going to try to communicate across a political divide, it is necessary to use the clearest, most precise, and most literal terminology that one possibly can, NOT terms whose meanings rely more on connotations than on literal meaning, because connotations necessarily will vary widely depending on a person's political viewpoint.

"Loose terms" are handy for partisan propagandists rallying their own troops, but much less useful for people trying to encourage independent critical thinking.

What terms are you going use to describe a broad way of viewing the world? By this standard, we should not use the term "Autism" because as far as the general public is concerned it is as loose if not looser than "woke". For WP purposes most regular PPR users know what I mean by "woke" even when they disagree with me. And for those that don't, I will explain it.
Back to politics, nobody seems to have a problem with the term "MAGA". It also had a specific beginning but now has a much much more broad meaning. Very few political terms be it "socialist" or "right-wing" do not have broad meanings because people have common ground but do not agree on everything or agree and have different emphases.

"Autism" is a broad category, but at least it is a category with an authoritative, canonical definition, to be found in the DSM 5.

There is no similarly authoritative, canonical definition of the word "woke."


An important difference between "wokeism" and the other political terms you mentioned is that there does not exist -- and never existed -- a broad movement of people calling themselves "wokeists," nor an organization calling itself the "Turtle Island Wokeist Association," or whatever. No one ever wrote a manifesto containing a specific set of principles that they themselves defined as "wokeism."

Unlike "socialist" or "right wing," "woke" as a term seems to have originated, within the African-American community, more as a subjective value judgment than than as label for a specific set of beliefs. Calling oneself "woke," before that term got appropriated by opponents, essentially just meant calling oneself "enlightened" or "in touch with reality." But almost everyone thinks their own views are enlightened/realistic and that those who disagree are ignorant in some way.

The term "woke" was then picked up by right-wingers who used it in a sarcastic way. Once that happened, the term "woke" was pretty much dropped by many of the people who had been using it to describe themselves or people they agreed with.

In short, the term "woke," in a political context, began as a semantically non-specific self-compliment and ended up as a similarly non-specific snarl-word.

Last edited by Mona Pereth on 13 May 2023, 11:12 pm, edited 6 times in total.

P.S.: Thinking about this some more, similar semantically non-specific terms have been used as labels for other social movements in the past, be they political, religious, or philosophical, e.g. "The Enlightenment" and the "Great Awakenings."

But most of these refer to movements that are safely enough in the past that hardly anyone today would have a dog in any fight over precisely what those terms referred to.

One big exception I can think of offhand: "The Illuminati," who still haunt the fevered imaginations of a lot of people living today. But at least the Illuminati had a good excuse for their vagueness (and secrecy): being atheists in a Europe with neither freedom of religion nor freedom of speech.

That is why I wrote as far as the general public is concerned. "Idiot" at one time had an authoritative definition and became a slur.



"Woke" predated BLM and was originally defined as being hyper-aware of racism, to recognize it when it is not obvious. BLM helped popularize it. The left was expanding the term before the right hijacked it. The wokes probably would have had their Port Huron Statement if given time but who knows? In the social media age one wonders if any movement will ever have time.