Honest question: Is 'woke' culture a problem?

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It’s time to let America’s amnesiac wokesters in on a secret: They embraced the term “woke.” They defined it, wrapped themselves in it, screamed it from the rooftops, and invested it with religious passion. The rest of us merely responded

The woke, having forgotten all this, are now charging conservatives with inventing or distorting the word and using it as a semi-racist right-wing bogeyman term. MSNBC’s Alex Wagner, for example, claims that conservatives know that woke ideas are “sensible” but don’t have to acknowledge as much if they don’t define the word. At the Washington Post, Philip Bump says, “‘Woke’ simply describes anything that is inherently alarming to the right.” Also at the Washington Post, Ashley Parker and Liz Goodwin write that “conservatives began using ‘woke’ in pejorative terms to undermine Black and liberal ideals,” and Candis Watts Smith, author of Stay Woke: A People’s Guide to Making All Black Lives Matter, says the that the word “evokes Black folks or Blackness” and “on other things [it] kind of spills over.” The association with race, she says, isn’t accidental?

There’s a lot of truth to these takes. But they’ve got the players all wrong. It’s the Left that believes woke policies are sensible. It’s the Left that has stretched the word to encompass a range of progressive ideas. And it’s the Left that warmed to the term in part because of its racial frisson.

In 2014, after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the #staywoke hashtag became a digital rallying cry around Black Lives Matter activism. Then, in the Trump years, progressives freed the slogan from its BLM context and deployed it wherever needed. Which is why you’d see pieces in the New York Times such as, “In Defense of ‘Woke,’” by Damon Young. In 2017, a photo of a baby wearing a “stay woke” sign at a Women’s March event went viral. Stacey Abrams spoke at something called the “stay woke” rally in 2018. When the pandemic hit in 2020, #stayhome #staywoke hashtags appeared on liberal Twitter. By the time George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, every white liberal interested in signaling his revolutionary sympathies was advertising his wokeness. As Aja Romano noted candidly in Vox in October 2020, “‘woke’ has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of ‘woke’ is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.”

That’s right. Back then, both sides understood that wokeness had become a leftist catch-all term. Conservatives still do, but the Left decided to erase its own role in this history. Why? Because soon after 2020, wokeness became an embarrassment and a political liability. The country started to reject the widespread radical project. In November 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia. At the time, Democratic strategist James Carville was asked what went wrong. “Well, what went wrong is this stupid wokeness,” he said. “Some of these people need to go to a woke detox center or something.”

But short of detox, there’s always wishful thinking. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to Carville by claiming that “woke” was “a term almost exclusively used by older people these days.” The Left has been trying to fight the term ever since, pretending that it’s something cooked up by racist right wingers to discredit their opponents.

Sorry, wokesters. Live by the hashtag, die by the hashtag. It’s not our fault that you made yourselves easy targets of parody and derision.

Damn.

If I had been put on the spot like this I would have said that woke describes a specific subset of social justice advocate who tends to be very angry, aggressive, sanctimonious, spiteful and vindictive in regards to how they treat people they disagree with on social issues.

I wouldn't have worded it that concisely when put on the spot but I don't think it's hard to define at all because whenever 'woke culture' is brought up this specific caricature tends to be highlighted.

Woke is defined by the DeSantis administration as "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."

I don't think that is toxic.

I think part of the problem is that right-wingers don't use it with that meaning, they basically use it to describe disagreeing with them.

People being vindictive and spiteful over disagreements on social issues isn't limited to the left despite that seeming to be the popular trope.

Call me crazy but I'm more worried about violent thugs than whatever threat 'woke' culture poses. Most of the threat posed by 'woke' culture is really just half of the result of the current polarization. Relatively speaking 'woke' culture is harmless.

Some people would define that as simply not having one's head in the sand/up one's backside.

Then again, to some portion of the population systemic injustice is a feature, not a bug.

Honest question: Is 'woke' culture a problem?

I'm asking this question not only hypothetically but also because it's a genuine question that's been on my mind. I myself am in the middle politically. I lean more towards the left, I suppose. I believe taxes should be distributed towards those who need help. I'm autistic myself and rely on support services to some extent because of my challenges. It would make no sense for me to support a right wing system which relies heavily on an unreliable charity system to support people like me. However on the opposite side, I do not feel like the left is anywhere near the movement that it should be ideally.

I wouldn't have worded it that concisely when put on the spot but I don't think it's hard to define at all because whenever 'woke culture' is brought up this specific caricature tends to be highlighted.

There are, of course, silly and outright wrong things that people advocate for in the name of social justice.

In practice it seems like the way the right use "woke" is to mean "anyone who disagrees with them about which things are bad or the extent of bad things".

As a centre-right liberal, personally I am much more concerned by the censorious, aggressive, anti-intellectual streak on the right than I am by its left-wing equivalent.

Woke culture isn't even the most concerning thing about the left. The far-left Stalin apologists are more concerning than the PC woke crowd.

In terms of it's modern definition, I think the problem of woke culture has obtained such an open-ended meaning due to characterisations on the vaccuous areas of social media that it could be linked to any trivial cultural tripe. However, the culture wars, and anything associated with it, is a means of getting people focused on the more trivial matters of society and divide people from more pressing concerns like climate change and economic inequality. Woke culture could be attributed to people who are bothered about economic inequality but it has acquired such a bad, lazy and hazy definition that it creases to mean very much.

Woken culture has always been something conservatives throw around. They seem to have found a way to use the postmodern style to promote their own political agenda of demonising anything that smacks of social justice as woke. There is such a thing as the postmodern right and the postmodern left, both of which are harmful due to their neo-romanticism and focus on emotive symbols hich undermines any attempt to argue in a rational way.

In reality, Postmodernism is not exclusive to any political ideology. Nevertheless, Marx certainly wouldn't have approved given that he was an individual that extolled rationality above meaningless neoromantic diatribes based style over substance. But people forget that due to the rise of post-marxism and post- this and that..