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.
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.
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.
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.