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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   19763 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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"CRT" post-dated the use of "woke"

I'd say "CRT" came into the mainstream around the same time as "woke," but either way you're right it's not a predecessor. It also has other problems of comparison, in that it's an actual academic "theory" that has been around since at least the 1960s. I should have either excluded this from the list or expanded on the comparison. I see the phenomenon as being very similar, in that "CRT" is a label that was coined by its proponents and true believers that, once it made contact with the mainstream, very quickly took on a negative valence due to the underlying thing that the label was describing.

"SJW" and "identity politics" always were terms of derision from what I remember.

My guess is that you remember correctly, and your memory is reflective of the types of people you saw speaking, i.e. I'm guessing you weren't always surrounded by progressive leftists. I wasn't in the room when a progressive leftist uttered the phrase, "I am a social justice warrior" for the first time or anything, but I remember long before these terms entered anywhere close to the mainstream, they were simply ways people among my milieu described themselves and their politics, which was just having basic human decency and empathy. Like the other examples, once these terms became more well known, the general populace, reasonably, associated the terms with the underlying people and things that they were pointing at, and as a result the terms rapidly became derisive.

My guess is that you remember correctly, and your memory is reflective of the types of people you saw speaking, i.e. I'm guessing you weren't always surrounded by progressive leftists.

A safer bet would be that I remember wrong. I rarely vouch for my memory, and this was all a long time ago.

I started off libertarian, and there always was a healthy 50/50-ish woke/chud split. I spent the majority of the GamerGate drama on the feminist side.

"Social Justice" may have been the self a descriptive term that progressives used, but "Social Justice Warrior" was always derisive.

"Social Justice" may have been the self a descriptive term that progressives used, but "Social Justice Warrior" was always derisive.

The precise timelines on this thing is hard to nail down, obviously, but my memory is quite different. Leading up to that affair of reproductively viable worker ants (as a feminist, I didn't take a side, mainly just cringing at the utter nonsense spouted by fellow feminists like Sarkeesian. I did try to speak out against both falsely claiming and catastrophizing online death/rape threats, malicious Photoshopping and the like, but I quickly learned that well-meaning constructive criticism for the purpose of strengthening the movement is something SocJus considers evil when directed at themselves), there were plenty of people within my social group, including myself, who proudly called ourselves SJWs, because social justice is such an obviously and uniformly good ideology in the face of the pernicious social evils that permeate the world that behaving like warriors fighting for its favor is something anyone should be proud of. Some of it was performatively trying to fight against the (inevitably successful) attempts by outsiders to make it a term of denigration, and so perhaps my memory of the timeline is what's faulty.

"Social Justice Warrior" was always derisive.

Even Wikipedia admits that

From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, social-justice warrior was used as a neutral or complimentary phrase, as when a 1991 Montreal Gazette article describes union activist Michel Chartrand as a "Quebec nationalist and social-justice warrior".[1]

Katherine Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said in 2015 that "[a]ll of the examples I've seen until quite recently are lionizing the person"."

(after describing it as a "perjorative term and internet meme" in the first sentence, naturally)

A quick Google Books search by date (yeah, I know, but searching web pages by date is a lot more error-prone) also shows a positive use by the author of Doonesbury, a positive use describing a deceased activist, and a positive use in a book describing conflicts between different ideas of social justice, and only in 2015 does the perjorative use case appear in print.

And ... doesn't this make sense? "Social justice" is still used as a positive phrase by progressives. "Warrior" is much more mixed to the left, but it's not an utterly negative term there (e.g. the first two Wikipedia diambiguation hits are Native American groups), and it's a positive term in general: the Golden State Warriors were never in any danger of getting cancelled, the Wounded Warriors Project wasn't mocking its beneficiaries, and if you keep scrolling down that Wiki page you'll see dozens of proud self-applications of the word.

Personally, I thought the phrase SJW was pretty apt, because "applying attitudes extreme enough for war to social justice problems" isn't too far off from what the "No Justice, No Peace" crowd would admit to but is also a good summary of what I think was wrong with the movement. But IMHO the most typical right-wing perjorative use wasn't criticising extremism, it was just sarcastic about the juxtaposition of a violent-sounding name with the heavily keyboard-based "activism" it gets used to describe, so I can't say I'm upset that its use went out of fashion.

Personally, I thought the phrase SJW was pretty apt, because "applying attitudes extreme enough for war to social justice problems" isn't too far off from what the "No Justice, No Peace" crowd would admit to but is also a good summary of what I think was wrong with the movement.

This was almost explicitly the rationale for the people who called themselves "SJWs" back in the day, from my memory. It was that the position of Social Justice is so obviously and overwhelmingly correct compared to the mountains of social injustice that goes on every single day without people even noticing it that fighting for it as if you're a literal soldier in a literal war is not only justified, but virtuous.

From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, social-justice warrior was used as a neutral or complimentary phrase,

I suppose that fits since it covers the time when I wasn't aware of politics much / the tech to plug in to the American culture wasn't quite available to me yet. Though I'm not sure they're not picking up some extremely obscure examples here. I think I showed up on some New-Atheist forums in the early 2000's and that kind of language just wasn't there yet, and it was very noticable when these kind of people did finally show up (2008-ish by my reckoning).

but it's not an utterly negative term there, and it's a positive term in general:

Personally, I thought the phrase SJW was pretty apt, because "applying attitudes extreme enough for war to social justice problems"

Yeah, there's the problem - the compliment already contains the insult. "Warrior" will make you sound like someone who takes themselves way too seriously, to anyone who doesn't share your views on the importance of the problem you're fighting for.

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