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.
They're getting trained to do that. I can't recall where I saw it but I did read that a white lib tried to get people to separate and self-segregate; stuff like "if you're white you shouldn't march with them, let it be their movement! We'll have a separate march for white people" and when someone shot her down she was apparently shocked and said that's how they're being trained.
When the multi-racial working class is united the bourgeoisie tremble. We know the overt ways they can back up white supremacy and kkk and lynch mobs and all that. But they can also back these "woke" libs and fill their heads with nonsense (like when they filled BLM hastags with black screens and prevented activists from reaching people and with the white-guilt industrial complex right now).
All of it is false consciousness.
With true class consciousness that simultaneously recognizes the intersectional ways that racism affects racialized people but is also unafraid to march along side their comrades arm in arm and is unafraid to use their privileges, such as they are, to speak up for marginalized voices. There is no better cure than solidarity - it can erase all boundaries and wipe out false consciousness. When you participate in a protest against the police and are arm-in-arm with black, asian, white all people together and you succeed in pushing back the pigs all that guilt can be burned out of libs minds and they can recognize that the only way to accomplish their class policy goals is not "wokeness" but solidarity.