Are people who claim not to know what other people mean by “woke” just being disingenuous?
Woke is a pejorative term used by rightist liberals to cast an imaginary identity onto a cultural out-group. Asking someone to explain what it means when they use it will force them to confront the nature of the word i.e. it is mostly substanceless and is not associated with any real ideology so its definition can't be anything other than "LGBTQ people and people who cast black actors" and thus "wokeness" is benign
yucky article. his points of wokeness are just, silly.
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academic language. in an environment wgere a four letter word is being tossed around for everything. theres literally nothing wrong with adopting a more specific term to talk about specific thing 'anti-racism' is simply more specific than civil rights you goof.
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criticism of liberal culture war jockeying, this is fine but identifying this as quintessentially 'woke' belies the main issue with tge article
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more criticism of liberal praxis, thats fine
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"good political action makes people feel better" this is meant condescendingly, as though good political action should not make its constituents & architects happy about it :cat-confused: rings very 'serious politics is austere and serious' which is just (reactionary) aesthetics
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Fatalism he argues for incrementalism and pretends 'woke' people have come to universal conclusion of destroying all institutions everywhere but this is somehow no contradiction with 'woke' people being inserious layabouts with no agenda. that 'abolish the police' is a slogan he believes reveals an essential trait, not a considered and litigated political platform with theoretical weight and genuine support
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return of the aesthetic superiority of the brainy unemotional Statesman over the simplistic mob. no no see theres much complexity and nuance to be discussed in all situations all times
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:eyeroll: 'superiority of the oppressed' wow another extremely fringe belief painted as a fundamental tenet of 'woke'
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"Enabling people who aren’t Black or Southern to say “y’all” - this one is unforgivable" im in full agreement on this one :owl-wink:
so the issue is the author has identified a constellation of bad things and good things in the same term in order to lambast it all collectively. the frustration with liberals is palpable and correct, but rather than come at this as upset about liberal appropriation of the language created by radicals he seems to think engaging in any of this is equally reprehensible.
i mean wtf are you on about if you're yelling PICK ONE TERM at -who-? if you identify at all with social justice and progressive or left politics YOU should be choosing
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Shit article, why should anyone self identify with a pejorative? Why are leftists so fucking desperate to justify themselves using the language and ideology of the right?
i mean, i know what woke means, i just want chuds to acknowledge it aloud, because it's not quite as popular a rallying cry if not obfuscated
If there’s no such thing as the social justice politics movement, who made the protests and unrest of 2020 happen? The fucking Democrats?
It seemed to me like a lot of the "social justice politics movement" showed up after the unrest started to tell people how voting for Joe would solve everything, so maybe try again
I mean yeah, everyone knows that "woke" is social progressiveness or social justice, the only people who don't know what "woke" means are right wingers who think acknowledging racism = "woke".
I do think a lot of the people involved in social justice do treat it as some sort of secular religion, which explains the criticisms DeBoer has.
That's what it meant when the big thing was "SJWs" but that term pretty much evaporated when "woke" got gentrified by reaction. To say that right wingers don't know what it means is inaccurate - they've intentionally given it a new meaning. It's fascists playing with language the way they love to do.
how about this: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means?r=26hqyw
As I have said many times, I don’t like using the term “woke” myself, not without qualification or quotation marks. It’s too much of a culture war pinball and now deemed too pejorative to be useful. I much, much prefer the term “social justice politics” to refer to the school of politics that is typically referred to as woke, out of a desire to be neutral in terminology. However: there is such a school of politics, it’s absurd that so many people pretend not to know what woke means, and the problem could be easily solved if people who support woke politics would adopt a name for others to use. No to woke, no to identity politics, no to political correctness, fine: PICK SOMETHING. The fact that they steadfastly refuse to do so is a function of their feeling that they shouldn’t have to do politics like everyone else. But they do. And their resistance to doing politics is why, three years after a supposed “reckoning,” nothing has really changed. (If there’s no such thing as the social justice politics movement, who made the protests and unrest of 2020 happen? The fucking Democrats?)
Okay, so, I'm not really sure who he's yelling at, specifically. Just the general mass of people who believe in Woke stuff and did BLM protests in 2020, I guess, but do all of them even fit the kind of thing he's describing? I'm not sure who this is even arguing against.
He also has to be aware that Republicans have come to use "woke" as essentially a shorthand for every cultural grievance that pisses them off (see them referring to SVB as the woke bank), so I'm not sure that it's really unreasonable to be confused or dismissive when confronted with the term. I think he's maybe responding to some twitter discourse that happened when Briahnna Joy Grey asked that right wing lady what she meant by Woke and she got all flustered and couldn't define it, but I feel like "what do you mean by woke" is a perfectly reasonable thing to ask someone who seemingly bases their political rhetoric on being against it.
“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.
I agree with this description of the problems of a certain strand of cultural left politics, and I find them very annoying. But I also find this whole discussion annoying, which is why I ain't reading all that where he goes off on eight attributes. I guess I don't disagree with everything he says, but I find the whole tenor of the arguments around "wokeness" tiring. How long can we keep going over the same goddamn arguments about cancelling college students or whatever?
I think he (the author) doesn't like getting lumped in with "the bad leftists" that go in cringe compilations and the like, so he wants to make it clear that he agrees entirely with the right that wokeness is a real thing and that it's leftist politics but for whiney losers, not him.
He also has to be aware that Republicans have come to use “woke” as essentially a shorthand for every cultural grievance that pisses them off (see them referring to SVB as the woke bank), so I’m not sure that it’s really unreasonable to be confused or dismissive when confronted with the term.
I think you’re right about this, and this is the most important thing that DeBoer is missing. He is right that since roughly 2010 there has developed a certain type of left-liberal politics that is very performative and moralistic, and that “woke” could potentially be a useful term to refer to that. But “woke” cannot be a useful term if conservatives continue to use it every time a movie has a black lead character or a corporation pays lip service to diversity.
the terminology of woke politics is an academic terminology, which is unsurprising given its origins in humanities departments of elite universities
Lmao dude doesn't even know what he's talking about he's just slapping at his keyboard.
There's so many well-researched, interesting and insightful thinkers publishing there is no reason to be spending your life reading the ramblings of a bird-brain
There are a few worthy criticisms here of a real "kind of guy". But I don't think "anti-woke" is nearly so specific about what it actually opposes, rather it uses the mask of being frustrated with constantly shifting language requirements, political immaterialism, etc. to weld more normal people to the real project of dismantling any attempt at changing our material reality toward a more just and equitable one, of reinforcing hierarchy, punishing the other, and using them as an example and as a locus for hatred.
To answer your question.
No. This guy is the whiny academic bitch that he claims to hate.
“I’m an old school Marxist, one that always looks after the white mortgage holders of American Empire. The real proletariat”
- Smooth brain De Boer
I'd only ever seen this guy's name referenced in BMF posts and assumed he was author from like 100 years ago for some reason
