Why is woke a dirty word now?

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Because it irritates people

It takes something most people agree with and adds on crazy elements that disinfranchise would be supporters

Take BLM, most people agree with the anti racism part, but abolish the family and de fund the police?

Don’t black people become victims of crime do black kids not want a father?

The kneeling element has worn thin too, yes we know the association with what happened.

But there is another obvious association that makes people uncomfortable of lowering yourself to another person or group like to royalty.

Which is not appropriate

Unfortunately most of these groups have a crazy element that seems to have a disproportionate influence on things so they end up shooting themselves in the foot losing potential supporters

Because it's cringe.

You can be woke but if you actually describe yourself as 'woke', it's cringe.

It's been overused, it's been parodied and it's been applied so broadly that you align yourself to an open-ended interpretation of progressivism which may differ from your actual views. It's also far too common to see people who espouse wokeness while being hypocritical.


It's at the stage now where you feel the presence of wokeness in your daily life, but it's still very notable and kind of jarring to see aspects of culture promoted to general awareness where they would otherwise be in the background. This is where some people lash out negatively against it. It'll take a while for society to adjust, but if you think of it in generational terms, it won't be long until people who needed to get woke are gone, or pretending they were always progressive, and people who grew up already awake to these things won't know what it was to be asleep to them. Wokeness, as a term, is kind of writing its own obsolescence in that sense. Society doesn't generally like to hark back to a time when we were ignorant of something.


An example of wokeness coming in/slight tangent:

My brother asked why there are so many questions on University Challenge these days about black people and women, particularly women of colour. The question should really be why they weren't writing questions about these figures before.

Personally I like it when they do a picture round of 3 black authors or musicians or whatever. If they were white people in the pictures and the contestants didn't know, they'd make a guess based on context clues, but they just don't do this for POC in the same way. I don't know if it's because they aren't aware of enough famous POC to even guess the names, or because they don't want to seem racist for just guessing that every black jazz musician is Louis Armstrong lmao. Either way it's funny. How is no-one on your team able identify a Basquiat, or even a f*****g description of Jay Z? Give it a few seasons and they'll be woke to these answers either by nature or by coaching. Honestly whatever it takes for them to get there. And this'll mostly be the same for society as a whole.*


*maybe not in the USA lol, sorry

At my previous job at a large university, there was a small, very vocal student faction that was woke. They started demanding to defund the campus police, abolish their police stations, wanting “safe zones” whereby they could not be caught doing illegal things by the police, “Special bathrooms” only for their use (ie no whites allowed), etc., etc. etc. it became more raced based as time went on. Their original demand on having someone police the campus police had some merit to it and that I supported. But, they decided to keep moving the football over and over again, targeting certain groups that they did not like. I am glad I left there. It can go to h#ll from what I see, as that is what they want. The campus is now very unsafe to just walk across anymore. People are openly mugged. Their push for wokeness created a destabilizing effect.

I would not go out there and describe myself as 'woke'. However if someone said to me 'oi, you! You're a woke, lefty, PC snowflake' I'd say 'Yes I am and proud of it.'

For eaxample: they might not vote for certain candidates because of their hateful policies, but they won't hesitate to vote for that person regardless. Their support enables those policies.

A funny example was the recent soccer World Cup.

The England manager demanded all the players kneel at the beginning of every game.

There was an African team England played where the black opponent players stood with puzzled looks on their faces as the English players got on their knees in front of them while they stood awaiting the referee to start the game.

When England played USA not one US player kneeled ( the country whee the issue and BLM came from ) they just stood there embarrassed for them.

Yip this is what people often mean by woke. Find a "problem" with often zero evidence backing it up and apply a solution that harms everyone.

That seems like a bit of a presumption.

If these safe zones are intended to be sanctuaries from the authorities which judging by the contexts of his post, they were, then I imagine they were for the purposes of crime.

A "safe zone" seems like it has a much different intent compared to a "safe space" which is what you might be confusing it with. Sounds like a type of stateless jurisdiction which actually puts anyone in such a place in danger from the authorities or anyone for the matter, sort of like being a modern pirate and effectively outlawing yourself.

Actually it is not a presumption, as it was stated for that purpose by the students in question. At one of the campus town halls, students from that organization said that they wanted a safe area to use drugs, both legal and illegal, without any oversight. (Remember that universities risk losing their federal funding if they support any drug usage, including research, that is not federally allowed.) This demand was stated from the student organizers directly to the faculty senate when asked to clarify what the safe zones were for. The faculty senate voted against their safe zones due to that. If they would have asked for them for a reasonable reason, they likely would have gotten what they wanted.

Exactly. Students were after safe zones, not safe spaces. They wanted a “no police area” even if an emergency happened. Catch fire? Tough luck. Firemen would not go there if the police cannot go there. The students somehow thought that it would be a good idea. Great place to get mugged or murdered, but hey the students would stop it from happening there right?

Oh right, there's still backwards areas where cannabis use is illegal.

You make it sound like they want to run a chopshop and a brothel.

I never said anything about sex, so you are being presumptuous on that statement. Mugging/thefts do happen there quite often, so I will give you that one.

Yes, there are places where that drug is still illegal in the US. For example, my old home state of Kansas is one of them. It is nice to not smell the stink of cheap pot whenever I visit there.

Legalization has weeded out the cheap stuff, at least from what I've seen.

But hey, let's ignore the social costs of prohibition because you don't like smelling it occasionally (even though that probably occurs even with it being illegal).

Such places could easily drift into being used as such.

Best way to think of them is as a stateless ship. Jumping on one every day from the US and sailing into international waters and coming back a few hours later will rightly draw a lot of attention especially if done so to dodge US legislation.

It puts the people onboard the ship in danger and get the neighbours angry.

I will reiterate:
All too often being "woke" is a means of intimidation and dominance.
THAT is what gives it a bad name.