Hello to all good comrades on this blessed website.
Something that has been bugging me for a while is how liberals use "woke" language to justify their neoliberalism. I'm the son of two Iraqi immigrants to this cursed country, and due to both cultural and physical factors, I think it is fair that I consider myself a PoC. I try to do my best with stuff like LGBTQ+ affairs and other leftist causes that are usually outside the cultural sphere of conservative Arab culture.
As part of maturing and becoming a more dedicated communist, I'm starting to be more active in activism both online and offline. But coming from a complicated background and quickly entering more serious activism since the Floyd protests started, I'm becoming more and more shocked about how many supposedly leftist spaces and ideas are just neoliberalism dressed up in woke language. I first noticed it with Arab Americans that are firmly entrenched in the professional middle class of this country, with their children only retaining fringe elements of Arab culture and weaponizing their cultural background while completely being just plain liberals.
The most obvious oh shit moment for me was meeting some of the organizers of the local Floyd protests. One (white) dude kept screaming about how police were our brothers and sisters, and did a thing where black people marched in front of everyone else. My inner monologue was something like "Jesus dude you're just making black people human shields for your own wokeness". Reading the experiences of a lot of people here and elsewhere, lib grifting seems to be a major problem everywhere. Every online brained liberal seems to just cover up their inhumanity towards the working class by co-opting the surface level identity crises of working class people. Everything online seems to be a competition to completely dismantle any reasonable criticism of liberalism by instantly jumping to the woke arguments. The rise of Liberal Zionism and Arab Zionism are good examples of that phenomenon I think, with both ideas being mostly repeated by young good looking people that do the "we're young Jewish/Arab peace loving hippies that love genociding Palestinians" shtick
How do we counter this annoying trend comrades? This mostly worries me because the real experiences of PoC, LGBTQ+ people and other repressed minorities are being misrepresented and weaponized by the bourgeois libs to further exploit the working class by offering surface level platitudes.
I think the most important thing I've learned from it is to reject the idea that identity takes importance over content. People can be wrong, even if they have 'right' lived experiences. Their ideas must be judged, as cynical and lib it is to say, on their ability to improve more people's life – on merit. I understand that gatekeepers have historically invalidated marginalised groups and it's incredibly hard to get this right, but it has to be done.
There are far too many Candace Owens, Bobby Jindals, Rishi Sunak's pulling up the ladder. Our movements need to be inoculated against Obama and Pete Buttegieg and Warren .