Ancient_Anemone
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User ID: 2728
I don't think so. In your previous comment you suggested two examples of people using "woke" as a mere sneer, when in fact those were both perfectly coherent criticisms of left wing identitarianism.
I suspect you might, and yet so far you have failed to even provide one clear example. In particular, I would be interested to see an example of someone using the word "woke" to describe something, anything, that is not at all plausibly left wing identitarianism. Like, someone taking a bite of pistachio ice cream and then saying, "ugh, disgusting, this ice cream is so woke." That would be pure pejorative, and is probably too much to ask, but so far the closest you've gotten is an example, not of someone using the term as a pure pejorative, but using it to describe left wing identitarianism without apparently knowing a better phrase than "woke" to describe it.
The term hasn't been particularly muddied in the last 5 years, it has just been used to accurately describe the ridiculous policies that result from left wing identitarianism. The absurd response (your response, here!) has been to try to argue that it doesn't mean anything in particular at all, and that it is just an empty smear. But it's not; it's a word that left wing identitarians used to describe themselves, and so it became a pejorative because left wing identitarianism is (it seems to me, and many others) objectively terrible. Here are a few I found here:
Federal Reserve Fox Business host Charles Payne criticized the “woke Fed” for failing to raise interest rates to curb inflation. [Fox News, Your World with Neil Cavuto, 1/14/22]
Silicon Valley Bank Asman claimed the Silicon Valley Bank failure “was caused by adherence to woke beliefs and policies. The woke belief that you can just print money without consequence.” [Fox News, The Story with Martha MacCallum, 3/13/23]
Kym Worthy During a report on a man accused of setting his girlfriend on fire, Shimkus mentioned that “the woke Democrat DA in Wayne County Kym Worthy” wanted a higher bond despite her support for bail reform. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 1/24/22]
There are many more in that source along that are used as as primarily a "sneer". Give me an example of it being used as a "sneer" before 2010--which I think you are going to have a lot harder time doing. Why? Because the definition has had significant "creep" since then, which is my point. What is more common us the use of the word as primarily a sneer, but a smaller amount of truth to deride that person, object, idea, or company. We even have beer companies self-styling as "anti-woke"
Furthermore, we have the labeling of green energy as "woke energy" when there is an 81 member Conservative Climate Caucus in the House of Representatives. How do you reconcile the two?
To be frank: I think your engagement on this issue is disingenuous. I think you are very much like a Nazi who is complaining about people misusing the word Nazi. Yes, there is a motte here: the word "Nazi" definitely gets used as a nebulous bogeyman! And yet when actual Nazis use that argument, I think it is reasonable to be very suspicious of their true motivations! Because the bailey is that it's more difficult to criticize a political coalition that is constantly shifting its identity in an attempt to evade accountability and criticism.
Wouldn't a political coalition be shifting for other reasons than just to evade accountability, but to adjust based on criticism, lack of performance or encountering unintended circumstances? I think
So it is with "woke." Are there problems with how the word gets used? Sure, that's reasonable. Does that mean that all or even most use of the word "woke" is just empty rhetoric? I have seen (and you have provided) no actual evidence of that.
Now you have evidence of that. All use cases? No, certainly not. But its primary use today (January 2025) is to tar and feather others, before finding out more about what is being described. It is shorthand for something, someone or some entity that deserves our ridicule and opposition. In some cases, maybe that is warranted. Increasingly in others, maybe not. And this last bit in your response is an excellent demonstration of what I am talking about, and it looks like the person getting the pejorative treatment is me.
Blank slatism in that it holds that everyone is identical but for incidental influences such as education, nutrition, and upbringing. There's no real fundamental psychological difference between any two people which can't be attributed to such influences. Racial differences are purely cosmetic and women are only weaker than men because society has taught them to be -- which leads to the next part.
Bioleninism in that, having 'established' that everyone is basically the same, anyone doing better than anyone else must be injustice. The only way it can happen under this rubric is that someone either got lucky through no fault of their own, in which case they'd better share, or else they got a leg up by taking advantage of someone else, in which case they'd better be punished.
The terminology 'woke' indicates that the woke person is now 'awake' to the universality of oppressor/oppressee dynamics and the necessity of Doing Something About It.
Wokism is a totalizing, corrosive ideology which cannot rest until all hierarchies have been leveled.
Thank you for this definition. So in your mind it is the necessity of doing something about it/coercing others that delineates wokeness from other definitions under the umbrella of social justice, or do you see it as something they all share.
I guess a more clear way to ask this is (borrowing from @narabums definition), is left wing identitarianism divorced from coercion/coerced action still woke?
Ancient_Anemone
30d ago
I can't speak for others, but the motivation for me was the constant use of the word "woke" in legacy media and with the incoming administration, with an ever broadening definition of the term. I also heard the word come up quite a bit over the holidays from right leaning family members who had trouble defining what it was other than it was something they didn't care for and wanted gone.
Admittedly, I am somewhere in the no mans land between libertarianism and progressivism, but don't have right leaning friends or family that are particularly thoughtful when it comes to culture war topics. I knew I could get a few good definitions here from those who are a bit more intellectual and y'all delivered. I appreciate the thoughtful responses and the efforts put into them.
Ancient_Anemone
30d ago
Woke is intersectionality. I may be cheating a bit in that people who came up with that term aren't among the most brief and clear writers, but at list euphemism treadmill didn't advance far enough for it to not be a term of self-identification anymore.
Is there a difference between one that is socially conscious and someone who is woke?
Yes, and the answer is pretty obvious if you first ask your self "what is socially conscious"? Is it possible to be socially conscious and think black people aren't being arrested more due to discrimination, or the system being set against them? Is it possible to be socially conscious that women don't go into tech as much as men because they don't enjoy the subject matter of the field as much, rather than because they're being discriminated against, or because the system is set against them? Is it possible to be socially conscious and think that trans women aren't women, and it's a bad idea to send them into women's sports, changing rooms, prisons, and domestic abuse shelters? If the answer to these questions was "yes", then you have you example of a difference between being socially conscious and being woke. If the answer was "no" then you have smuggled an ideology into the term "socially conscious", and that ideology is Woke.
This is an excellent distinction between the two and a fair appraisal. How do you explain the field of sociology consistently turning out socially conscious, but leftist graduates at a rate much, much higher than other fields of study?
Do you mind if I turn the whole thing on you, and ask you to elaborate on this claim? What do you think gets unfairly branded as "woke"? Can you show that it got to the point that no one knows what "woke" originally meant anymore? If it's increasingly a nebulous boogieman, would you say there was once a point it was not nebulous and not a boogieman?
No, I am happy to oblige. Considering that the term woke is now being used to describe civil rights era executive orders, I do think that this term has had a significant meaning creep since the early 2010's. In essence, when it was seldomly used as a self-descriptor for elements of the progressive left it had a much more firm meaning, as opposed to now, when right wing media uses it to describe just about anything from beer to green energy. Fox News alone has ~50 articles written in the last week about the topic. Almost all use in the last month of the word when broadening the search to all news sources brings up hundreds of results, almost all of them from right wing news sources or describing actions by the right.
Ancient_Anemone
30d ago
This is a very fair critique, as there is always an asymmetric amount of effort put for by those looking to define a term versus one providing a critique. That being said, how does one ensure that a discussion is not two people talking past one another without defining terms?
This effort discrepancy isn't lost on me, in next week's thread I will put forward a definition of fascism for you and others to critique in the spirit of fairness and to continue the dialogue.
Ancient_Anemone
30d ago
I think this is a very insightful post. In particular, the research you conducted and the use of the Nolan Chart to define different political values and where they fall in the grid. If I am understanding you correctly, if one is left of center, tender minded/idealistic, but libertarian, in they would not be defined as woke, correct?
But if I'm also allowed to speculate with everybody else, I'd say what makes the woke so terrifying is that they have an uncompromising moral vision that no one is really allowed to attack. "Fairness is good, racism is bad" is a blank check America has spent the last several decades writing the woke that allows them to drive civilization to complete bankruptcy. (Where "bankruptcy" here is a metaphor for whatever you think it is, including, heck, not having any money.)
I would argue that the financial bankruptcy is thanks to modern monetary policy and the Triffin Dilemna, but I digress. We can agree that fairness is good and racism is bad, but the devil is in the details, no?
Ancient_Anemone
30d ago
It does sometimes get used that way, but I don't know why you would elect to espouse the least clear and useful version of the word as the archetype of the concept. Most people, right or left, are kind of stupid, and when they say political things they are mostly just signaling virtue by parroting something they heard somewhere. Children use words they can't define, sometimes properly, sometimes not; this does not actually muddy the underlying concepts.
I defined it that way, simply because that is the way it is most commonly used. The most common usage of any idea would be by definition archetypal, would it not? But yes, that usage would be "dumbing down" any sort of academic understanding of the word being used.
So I can't figure out why you're in one breath complaining about people using the word in vague or merely pejorative ways, and in the next breath saying that, to you, that actually is what "woke" means. Any time you see the word in the wild, just substitute "left wing identitarianism" and it should be pretty easy to see whether the person speaking is using the word meaningfully, or just as an empty sneer. In the examples you pulled for me, I don't see any use of the word "woke" as a "nebulous bogeyman." The first two are pretty clear and direct criticisms of left wing identitarianism and the political activities of left wing identitarians. The third is just one person admitting that they aren't sure what "woke" means, precisely, but they can see what it has accomplished.
That is why I appreciate your definition of "left wing identitarianism" as a suitable replacement for "woke". It is much more descriptive and is less likely to be misused, mainly because multi word descriptors are harder to massage into extraneous meanings.
Then you haven't been paying attention (or maybe you're just late to the party). "#StayWoke" was a pretty early example of hashtag activism, circa 2012. The Wikipedia entry on "Woke" has a 2018 picture of former U.S. Representative Marcia Fudge holding a shirt that says "Stay Woke: Vote." The term itself originated back in the mid-20th century and was very much tied to the identity politics of black Americans, and its circuitous path to "viral hashtag meme" generalized rapidly to leftist identity politics generally. None of this is mysterious, and every news article out there complaining about the vagueness of "woke" ignores the well-established history of the meme in an attempt to muddy the waters of discourse, exactly as the political left has always done with words that capture its essence and expose its ridiculousness.
Those are good examples, but I can provide hundreds if not thousands of counter examples where it is folks right of center using the term to describe progressive or anti-racist ideas, policies, goals or activities. Furthermore, if we look in the last 5 years or so, this is almost exclusively the case. If there has been a muddying of the waters of the term since the mid-20th century or even 2018 to now, would that not be by the folks who are constantly referencing, writing and talking about it and not those who have nearly ceased using the term?
If that is your definition, then no, "woke" does not mean "socially conscious." To be "woke" requires a particular political attitude toward those differences; the ability to identify them is not sufficient, for the reasons I already outlined. Specifically, the identitarian right is definitely able to identify such differences, and is definitely not "woke."
Fair. I think you have made a good point here.
I appreciate your thoughtful response. As others have mentioned, a similar, but less pointed question came up last week, and several of the responses seemed to be incredibly open ended, as these discussions tend to go, (ex communism is when the government does stuff I don't particularly care for). That is my primary intention for asking this question more directly. To answer your question of some instances of this occurring previously here, here are a few quotes from last week's thread:
Michael Reinoehl was enforcing wokeness when he murdered a Trump supporter in cold blood on the streets of Portland following a pro-trump demonstration. His allies were enforcing wokeness when they publicly celebrated their ally's murder later that evening. Would you agree that these two examples are, in fact, people enforcing wokeness? If not, what would be your disagreement with that framing?
Here is the next one:
Broadly the biggest issue with wokeness is the introduction of thought terminating cliches that only require self-invocation to exercise, as opposed to collective consensus. Terms have been assigned significant valence without need for review, and at peak wokeness it was necessary to grovel in advance at the mere prospect of a new term being theoretically introduced at an unspecified future date, leading to pre-emptive self-abasement and outgroup preference signaling to convey ideological purity. The keystone logic allowing this subversion of logical order is the attribution of all disparate outcomes to external factors, placing the burden of responsibility on others who are presumed able to exercise power. This incentivizes weakening of self to force others to exercise their power and resources for yourself, and this is the defining presentation of wokeness.
One poster even had the self-awareness to state the following:
I fear I am succumbing to a temptation to label anything bad as woke, and related yet good ideas as something else. But that is pretty much my stance on the word: while there are positive contributions to be made to the world in the name of social justice, much of what has happened in the last 10 years has been major, predictable failure modes instead, and that collection of failure modes is "wokeness."
The left wing identitarianism and the definition you provided is good and concrete, as I am more interested in what wokeness is, rather than what wokeness does. Once we get into the latter, I feel that we get caught up into identity politics in a way that is not that dissimilar to the thing that that is being derided in the first place. After all, in a banal sense, wokeness is to the right what capitalism is to the left: the source of bad things and an object of scorn.
To me, wokism or calling things woke is a catch all term that someone right of center calls a social activity or value that someone left of center espouses. For instance, I don't think I have ever heard in person or seen online someone left of center that uses it to describe an action or an ideology. When the term is used, it does the following things in the process:
- It identifies a value, idea or activity that one disagrees with.
- It is always used as a pejorative to what is being described.
- It is a virtue signal to those right of center and also identifies one as a right wing ideologue to other right wing ideologues.
I would define socially conscious as the ability to identify differences in race/ethnicity, class, religion, etc, in addition to individual differences. Generally in the last 20+ years, that generally results in moving toward left wing ideology. The field of sociology being probably the most prescient example. How many right of center sociologists do you know?
Ancient_Anemone
1mo ago
I am a longtime lurker on the site and wanted to pose a question to those that commonly post on the evils of wokeism. I have noticed that many posts seem to point to an increasingly nebulous boogeyman--one that could really use to be defined.
What is woke? What do you define as woke? Is there a difference between one that is socially conscious and someone who is woke?
Ancient_Anemone
1mo ago
Is this really that surprising? They are too busy fighting imaginary antisemitism--criticism of a democratically elected government of a country and probably see the need to not alienate the owner of one of the largest social media companies.
I think you are being overly charitable here by calling it writ-large. The Fed and/or monetary policy has never been a part of the Social Justice movement, DEI or left wing itentitarianism. The purpose of the use of the word "woke" is to cause the audience to write off the Fed's actions and to spur anger and outrage. Despite the fact the fed has been a bipartisan neokeynesian entity since the end of Bretton-Woods. So it is being used as pejorative in a use case that doesn't match a single definition that has been provided on this thread. Which is my point--there was a time when the word meant something, but now it is used . In an earlier post, you mentioned the word Nazi being used in the same way. And I absolutely agree. In fact, when it is used today, it is most likely not being used to describe a literal Nazi.
Fair, but the term "social justice warriors" never saw the meaning creep that "woke" has seen. In my opinion, SJW is a pretty apt description of the movement. Cultural marxism also saw some meaning creep, but it did not get the traction in broader culture that "woke" did. Is this because it has more than two syllables and is more specific? I think that is likely.
We could, and if you made that case I would completely agree with you. The word Nazi is overgeneralized to the point that its most common use today is "someone I don't like on the internet". Is that the official definition of the word? No it is not, there are incredibly few nazis today, and even those few on the far right in western countries largely do not fit the bill. But that is its most common use case and that is the point I am making with "woke". In your words, it is rapidly developing so it has not quite lost its luster yet, but we are closer to that point than we are to the start of it.
Fair, and I expected some grief since I picked "the" hot button topic as my first post and asked for definitions to start with instead of leading with my own. Hopefully my willingness to converse on this and other topics over time will build trust. I appreciate the dialogue on this, as I learn much more when I am in the fray versus others. In full transparency, I am somewhere between a libertarian (this is been my political ideology most of my adult life, but I have been drifting a bit as of late) and a progressive (which I share many social goals with, but disagree on means). I got accused of being "woke" over the holidays by some right leaning family members and figured y'all would better be able to define what that meant. And you (and others), provided some excellent and useful definitions, which I appreciate.
I'll define fascism in next week's culture war thread to continue the dialogue.
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