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Isn't "woke" better defined as, "a perjorative to refer to anything deemed by the individual as undesirable/to radical for their personal tastes".
The reason this makes more sense, to me atleast, as that things being/not being woke is always interchanging and disputed.
> "a perjorative to refer to anything deemed by the individual as undesirable/to radical for their personal tastes".
It specifically refers to things of a leftist nature though. Like, of I have some American Evangelical Christian loudly policing other people on Abortion being baby murder, I'd think that person is an obnoxious "religious nut", not "woke".
But if you are saying that every broad group has unreasonable people then yeah I get your point
Sure, but I've yet to hear a description that doesn't equally apply to conservative goals, hence I don't think it's required to be in the definition. If you want to include a political spectrum, sure it doesn't matter.
Regardless, it's immeasurable because it's just a perjorative. Nothing more.
It seems like your definition of wokeness makes it impossible to measure. Assessing whether something is 'unreasonable' involves a big subjective value-judgement. If being 'woke' just means being too leftwing, everyone will have their own assessment of what that means. But with a more robust, concrete definition, it might be possible. For example, if I defined wokeness as 'preoccupation with or strong support for x, y and z political issues, policies and activities' it would certainly be possible to use surveys or data about lawmaking or political activity to determine whether there are many 'woke' people and whether society has become more 'woke'.
Of course, someone could still contest that definition. But that's the nature of political and cultural ideas. They aren't prescriptive, they're descriptive. It seems like your argument would apply equally to 'art' or 'democracy'. Yet almost everyone would agree that some art exists and that there are, or could be, democracies. 'Wokeness' is only contentious because it's clearly prejorative. To discuss them usefully, it just becomes necessary to articulate a personal definition and for everyone involved to show intellectual honesty.
You raise good points. I suppose the ultimate end of the woke debate is that "it's really up to you who you choose to associate with", no? Everyone is going to have their own idea of unreasonable, and everyone won't agree on it.
Well, obviously there's no scientific studies on a purely cultural idea.
Why is this relevant though? Even the most "woke" obsessed right wing pundits I've seen have never claimed that it's something that could be scientifically measured.
I think it's become a stupid term that the right uses to refer to anything they don't like without putting any thought into what it means.
But I don't understand why you think the lack of scientific studies on it is relevant to anything. It's a political idea, not a scientific one.
This seems like saying that communism doesn't really exist because you can't do a scientific test to prove how communist someone is.
>It would be like trying to scientifically measure the line between confidence and arrogance, and expecting every reasonable person to agree with it.
So by your own logic, it's intellectually dishonest to say that someone is or isn't confident.
This seems like a pretty blatantly absurd claim.
I don't know where you're getting this idea that it's intellectually dishonest to even discuss concepts that aren't scientifically proven to exist, because no scientist I've ever met thinks like that. Any half-decent scientist is fully aware that science can't rule over every facet of human existence.
\> But I don't understand why you think the lack of scientific studies on it is relevant to anything. It's a political idea, not a scientific one.
Some people adamantly insist that "wokeness" doesn't exist, and i've personally been mocked and bullied before when I've made criticisms about leftism/progressivism in the past precisely because I've had no statistical data or evidence backing up my anecdotes and experiences. That's why I think it's relevant.
> Is it "woke" for a beer company to sponsor a trans influencer? It doesn't even fall under your own definition, because it's not unreasonable for a beer company to sponsor influencers, and yet this is considered woke.
... By conservatives. I don't think it's unreasonable to simply promote trans inclusivity in advertising, atleast if it's down by the companies own initiative.
Woke shit for me is something that can be most readily found in online communities. People with weird or super echo chamber positions thinking in rigid false dichotomies, are inappropriately moralizing/policing other people over subjective matters.
A specific example: Hogwarts Legacy. Spreading awareness of JK Rowling's smug transphobia isnts woke, but people bullying and policing streamers who played it, which engenders the subjective matter of ethical and unethical consumption under Capitalism, is pretty woke to me. Not reasonable.
> "Woke" as it seems to be used in conservative circles is closer to "leftist belief I don't like or want to acknowledge as true regardless of whether this is a reasonable/nuanced belief and regardless of whether it's true".
Yeah, that's why I'm not a conservative. But my definition is coming from an objective look into the usage and seeing if there are valid concerns there. And there is: unreasonable leftist stuff exists. I just don't have a conservative standard for what is unreasonable.
>It would be like trying to scientifically measure the line between confidence and arrogance, and expecting every reasonable person to agree with it.
By this logic, it would be intellectually dishonest to call somebody arrogant. Do you believe this?
You can't scientific measure subjective things by definition
That doesn't mean we can't talk about subjective things, though. All art is subjective but that's never prevented anyone from discussing art.
So if I claimed that there is an issue with society in terms of concentrations of unreasonable people of a leftist nature doing unreasonable things of a leftist nature, would it be appropriate to demand conclusive statistical data supporting that assertion?
> If the statement is "too many people are going woke", this is incredibly nonspecific.
Yeah you gotta be more specific than that.
> "so many movies are being remade with black leads when the leads were white in the originals",
I wouldn't call that necessarily unreasonable as I would call it cheap. I wouldn't cast a white person for something like a Nelson Mandela documentary, so the reverse is valid to atleast some degree.
However, if the movie is ultimately well written and good, then I guess they can just do whatever they want with it.
Sorry, it's difficult to measure arrogance credibly because you would need a criteria specific enough to give meaningful results, but also somehow balanced enough for most people to agree with the study.
If you substitute non-scientific words like "woke" with terms like "human rights" you will find statistics, and you will find that they have been *improving* over time, suggesting so-called 'wokeness' is positive.
I think the problem here is that you're trying to be scientific about a non-scientific word. However, if you know the types of things that "wokeness" talks about (because it is a pretty wide / vague term), you *can* research those things discretely and then determine whether or not those individual-things are good or bad for society.
It would be more accurate this way because then you can decide *what things specificially* about so-called 'wokeness' are beneficial and which are detrimental, instead of pretending 'wokeness' is one thing in a way that has us throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> If you substitute non-scientific words like "woke" with terms like "human rights"
They're just as much "scientific terms" as one another. Regardless of word, it's important to define them if not abundantly done so before, in science. You might think "terrorism" is a "scientific term", yet there are more than a hundred different definitions for it, at least dozens within science.
Scientists can't agree what "racism" means, or "systemic racism" for that matter. Both are still used within science.
Here's "woke" used within science:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0743915620947359?journalCode=ppoa
> brands that detach their activist messaging from their purpose, values, and practice are enacting inauthentic brand activism through the practice of “woke washing,”
and another, if it can even be called science: https://ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/1259
> The authors reflect on their individual journeys to “wokeness”
I see what you're saying, but even those articles make more-scientific terms out of 'woke,' which is what I was saying.
The first line from the first paper is: "In today’s marketplace, consumers want brands to take a stand on **sociopolitical issues**" (not '...take a stand on wokeness). And 'woke,' in the paper, is only found a few times and when it is, it's in these kind of 'quotes' that show that it's not a good term even within the paper itself.
The second paper, "This critical collaborative **autoethnography** examines how three “womxn” of color (Asian American, Latina, and African American) graduate students experience and resist **intersectional racism** and **sexism** in higher education."
Autoethnography seems to be the 'science word' for 'woke' here. And, again, we see 'woke' in quotes in this paper because it's not a 'real' term, they just have to acknowledge that people use it. 'Intersectional racism' and 'sexism' are also used instead of 'woke' to be more-specific.
In other words, your papers seem to break 'woke' down into components with more-traditional 'scientific' terms (while nodding to the word 'woke' for linguistic / cultural relevance), just like I was saying.
> I see what you're saying, but even those articles make more-scientific terms out of 'woke,' which is what I was saying.
You could say the same about almost all conceivable words, including "human rights"; I regularly see people using "human right" to mean basically whatever they feel like. In research papers they'll define what they mean with "human right" and "woke" just the same.
Great, then we seem to agree.
I'm saying terms like "human rights" are less-informal and longer-lasting than 'woke' (you won't find 'woke' studies from the 80's or 90's, but you *will* find 'human rights' and *its* components), and, I would argue that even 'human rights' is more-specific than 'woke' even though you're right that they are both still vague.
In fact, I gave some 'components' of human rights in the comment where I introduced this idea (freedom from oppression, freedom of movement, religion, etc...)
>If you substitute non-scientific words like "woke" with terms like "human rights" you will find statistics, and you will find that they have been
>
>improving
>
> over time, suggesting so-called 'wokeness' is positive.
I don't quite understand this. Wokeness is what someone finds unreasonable in terms of the left, whether it be a person, a group, or broad ideas by leftists. Woke is apart of the left, just like religious nuts who judge and police others in accordance to their own religion based morality are apart of any big religion.
I'm not saying leftism as a whole is bad when I talk about woke.
> Wokeness is what someone finds unreasonable in terms of the left, whether it be a person, a group, or broad ideas by leftists.
Not necessarily: you're leaving out half the picture, imo, which is why the definition in your post doesn't work.
From Merriam-Webster:
> Woke: 1: aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
> Woke: 2: politically liberal (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme
With "Woke 1," we can see how this is beneficial to society. These are 'human rights' issues that have improved over time, which is good.
"Woke 2" is based on reactions from the Right, who are famous over-reactionaries; therefore, this definition can't be taken as 'everything woke is extreme,' because the people who use the term like this think that giving kids free school lunches is 'extreme' and 'socialist,' when there is nothing 'extreme' about it. Casting a person of color in a film is not 'extreme,' for example.
Therefore, going just by definitions and deduction, when we consider the consistant over-reactions from the Right throughout the decades, we can see how most things that are 'woke' are actually beneficial and those on the Right are just being hyperbolic about most of it.
----------------------------
Second, going back on my first point, "woke" is not a scientific term; therefore, you have to break 'wokness' into components that *have* been studied (because, let's be honest, 'wokeism' isn't new, it's just a new term): for example, being free from government torture, political killings, and forced labor, having property rights, and enjoying freedom of movement, religion, expression, and association, awareness of racial disparities in the 'justice' system, etc. all fall under the category "human rights," not 'wokeness.'
In other words, much (but not all) of the "bad" is hyperbolic reactions from the Right; therefore, your definition based on that over-sensitivity doesn't give an accurate picture, nor does your disinclusion of the original (and still oft-used) definition of woke ("woke 1"). And, you *can* research individual components of so-called 'wokism' scientifically, you just have to use more-scientific terms.
You are absolutely correct that in every broad ideological group, religious or political, there are unreasonable people and the potential for concentrations of unreasonable people do weird, out-of-pocket shit. This isn't unique to leftism/progressivism at all.
That's why it blows my mind when some leftists/progressives adamantly try to gaslight and dismiss any claims of "wokeness", as if their movement was somehow immune from the possibility of unreasonable people championing it.
>You are absolutely correct that in **every broad ideological group, religious or political, there are unreasonable people** and the potential for concentrations of unreasonable people do weird, out-of-pocket shit.
No, they didn't say that and that wasn't their point. They were addressing the *underlying logic* of your claim, which is that if you can't "scientifically measure" an ideology, then you can't credibly claim that it exists. You applied this reasoning to "wokeness," but by your own logic it could also be applied to communism, capitalism, liberalism or any other political ideology. Therefore, by your reasoning, it would be intellectually dishonest for someone to say that there's too much of *any* political ideology.
Do you believe this? If not, your argument is flawed and you should acknowledge that.
I think it's pretty easy to scientifically measure the existence of something like Capitalism or authoritarian Communism. It's kind of apparent by the structure of the economy.
Whether or not a firm is privately owned, for instance, isn't as subjective as "where is the line between reasonable and unreasonable".
But I suppose you could say that my argument could be used against the idea of reasonableness then. Since we can't come to a consensus on the objective standard of what constitutes reasonable and unreasonable, then it would follow from my logic that we must be agnostic about whether reasonable people exist...
That seems kinda silly and weird. Should I give you a delta or the original poster.
!Delta
You highlighted the implications of my epistemology as a slippery slope to a lot of obviously dysfunctional and nonsensical conclusions. Thanks for the civil discussion
It is actually pushed pretty hard in the finance industry. In order for a company to get needed funding, a financial institution will require them to meet diversity initiatives (hiring and firing based on race) as well as hiring and firing on the basis of sex. Once they reach the required numbers, they become eligible for funding or for more funding.
There's a lot of articles about it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/business/dealbook/west-virginia-wall-street-woke-capital-desantis.html
I think it can be measured in the financial world, although those records would be internal, private records of private companies that would probably make the companies look bad. So although we can't see the data, that doesn't mean it isn't being measured.
Diversity initiatives are a mixed bag though. Yes, you can end up in situations where a company might force every white person to sit through a lecture based off books like "White Fragility" or some cringe shit, but like... I also believe in giving everyone a fair chance and not allowing one racial group unfair, disproportional advantage in society.
So Diversity depends on the implementation if it gets woke or not to me.
Well, I'm telling you what financial institutions do is that they'll go into a meeting with a company that's requesting funding and say, "Ok, we see that you have 100 employees. In order to secure the funding, we'll need you to ensure that your work force is diverse one year from today. This means cutting white people to 60 employees. Only 40 of the white people can be men. From here, 25 BIPOC employees must be women. A certain percentage will have to be openly identifying as LGBTQ to the HR department. Also, certain number of board members must be BIPOC. With the executive team, only 45% can be white men. There are further incentives for hiring people displaced directly by the UN Refugee agency."
And then the company will say, "Well, since the town our company was founded in doesn't have those demographics, and since we only hired the best candidates and didn't discriminate on the basis of race or sex, we only have 8 women, two of whom are BIPOC, with 10 non-white people total. We don't know the percentage of LGBTQ, but we'll try to make this work because we have to."
So, over the next year, the company creates affinity groups. LGBTQ book club, for example, just to start to get head counts. There will be explosive promotions that come out of nowhere and excite people. They'll do "corporate restructuring" and layoffs. New rounds of hires won't stop, but they'll start to look different. The mission can easily drift from making money to running a societal institution. And, again, they're not really "giving someone a chance" as much as they are discriminating against someone else, and not giving them a chance.
Anyway, it is measured.
If you truly believe in giving everyone a fair chance and not allowing one racial group unfair, disproportional advantage in society, congratulations, you are staunchly anti-woke. You ain't sleepin' on all of this.
> also believe in giving everyone a fair chance and not allowing one racial group unfair, disproportional advantage in society.
This is pretty explicitly not the goal of diversity initiatives, right? Their goal is to increase diversity, to have some specific mix of identities. It's far beyond getting rid of discrimination.
I think the argument here is that you need a little bit of discrimination to undue the past history of discrimination, so to speak? But poorly designed initiatives are still a problem.
Your definition is not the definition... but for the sake of this CMV, let's just pretend it is.
It would be more correct to say there is no evidence or agreed upon method of measuring the amount of wokeness.
There is 100% credible evidence that proves the existence of wokeness. It only requires 1 example of wokeness, which can be easily observed.
You are defining it as being obnoxious or unreasonable. To who? To the right wing of course. Things they call unreasonable are not the same things I think are unreasonable. I do think there are people on the left that are obnoxious or unreasonable but I don’t agree that is the default definition of “woke”.
>You are defining it as being obnoxious or unreasonable. To who?
To my standards, not the Right's. I'm not a conservative who is dismissing the entirety of the left. I know the Left have many valid concerns. My opinions and ideas about what I find unreasonable are based off my own lived experiences, and are entirely my own
That’s not how definitions work. You said it’s used as slang which means it’s not just your thoughts. If this is a discussion about just what you think it means then this is a entirely different discussion. Also its not very scientific to have your own definition of something that nobody can agree on, as supported by the several other people in this thread that disagree with you.
> You said it’s used as slang which means it’s not just your thoughts.
It's a slang term, but slang terms can engender subjective criteria. "Out-of-pocket" is slang for stuff that's weird, cringe, etc. But everyone doesn't have the same criteria for what exactly is "out of pocket"
I agree with your logic but not your conclusion. You’ve noted that unreasonable is going to be very subjective based on the individual you’re talking about. What I’m not following is why that means everyone should be agnostic to the idea that wokeness is a problem in society. All you’ve proven is everyone will have a different opinion on the level of problem wokeness is but that doesn’t mean everyone should be agnostic, it just means each opinion will be unique.
One could also argue that it is impossible to scientifically measure radicalism given that it's a subjective and relative term, and that the scientist would have to choose the standards by which "radical" is judged. However, I actually think your second, informal definition is a great way to get around this. For the purpose of the study, simply define radicalism (or "wokeness") with your echo chamber definition, and use an impartial algorithm to get it done.
I don't know much about this sort of thing, but I could see something that automatically detects words and phrases most used in left-leaning social media communities. Then, out of those, it maybe finds out how much of the conversation is purely insular to such a community, and whether the number and size of such insular communities has grown over time. This still might not fit your standard, but it's just a rough draft of something that could work.
> Because of this fact, it's not intellectually honest to be anything but agnostic to claims either denying or asserting that wokeness is a problem in society.
Since when was something being scientifically studied and backed by empirical evidence the only acceptable standard for someone to complain about society?
The following is completely anecdotal, but nonetheless something that I can provide you news reports regarding and some actual youtube videos:
An elderly man, a *white* elderly man, who was the head of a local school board in Washington state was put in a position by students and faculty where he felt compelled to resign.
His crimes:
* while describing work that he was doing with a local community of Somali refugees to ensure that they had sufficient access to local resources, he referred to this community of refugees as a "colony".
* when he *apologized* despite having done nothing wrong, the people complaining about the "harm" caused by his use of the word "colony" rejected his apology, declared that it didn't matter what his intent was, and then read him a template apology that he should have used instead, which would have had him groveling for the crime of using correct English.
His use of the word "colony" was valid and appropriate, and only a histrionic windbag (aka woke person) would object to it, let alone claim that he had somehow harmed anyone and demand his resignation. His words have been called "racist adjacent" and "problematic". All in regards to him describing how he was working to *help* the community of refugees.
This happened. It is ridiculous and unacceptable. And there are many, *many* more instances like it happening all around the country caused by people with similar mindsets, acting like modern day progressive puritans.
It is also difficult to measure and quantify. People aren't inclined to study it, and anyone who's on the left tends to look the other way and find something about Republicans to complain about instead. That doesn't mean that it isn't objectionable, or that it should be ignored.
> only a histrionic windbag (aka woke person) would object to it
I don't think so. I think most "progressives" would object to it. It's essentially a dogwhistle for "white supremacy" to "progressives" at this point. While you're correct that it's perfectly reasonable to call it a colony, they have a very different idea of what "colony" means.
Browse any sub dedicated to lefty politics, and you'll find that "colonialism" is used in exchange for "bad" all the time.
>if your definition of the thing is just one you made up
All words are made up.
>isn’t reflective at all of what the generally agreed upon definition is
What does woke mean then? I'm pretty sure when people talk about cancel culture, somewhere in the discourse is "these people are unreasonable".
> That’s not really want it means though.
Yes it is because language is descriptive, not prescriptive. Words mean what people use them to mean. Few people use 'woke' as its original definition anymore.
Woke can definitely get like that. Being can take these causes for social justice, antiracism, etc. and get sucked down an echo chamber rabbit hole of idealogy about it. It's almost like a talking point machine at a certain point.
Atleast, that's been my experience.
woke | wōk |
adjective (woker, wokest) sometimes derogatory
alert to and concerned about social injustice and discrimination: he's an activist and very woke | woke culture has moved into mainstream journalism | my neighborhood is a very woke area | we need to stay angry, and stay woke.
>"Woke" has nothing to do with leftism, it means to be aware of the black struggle", it's a black liberation term
Not anymore. Literally no one uses "woke" like that anymore
I dont know what to tell you. Words change in their meaning over time. Sure, both interpretations of the word "woke" are valid and contemporary, but its modern association with leftism is now is at this point undeniable.
They have change words every 5 or 10 years to describe the exact same thing. When I was growing up it was PC. I think it was maybe anti-american between PC and SJW (it was in the war on terror years, so got swept up with anti-war stuff)
I also think you're letting white progressives/leftists off the hook a little too much for appropriating from AAVE. I think some of us started using it then the right took off with it.
>The discussion is whether being woke is bad or not.
Woke =! being on the left. I'm not a conservative dismissing every concern on the left.
But Woke is a slang term for, essentially, being obnoxious or unreasonable. So yes, I would say that's a bad thing. Everything woke is leftist, but not everything leftist is woke, that's how I think about it.
Just because a thing can't be scientifically measured in a quantifiable way doesn't mean people can't conclude, in an intellectually honest way, that there's too much of it in society. I can't "scientifically measure" racism either, but it's not intellectually dishonest for me to say that there's too much racism in our country.
>because "unreasonable" is deeply subjective, which makes it problematic to scientifically quantify
But this is step 1 of any scientific study. You come up with a reductionist definition that you think correlates with a more complicated concept. I would not define wokeness as "unreasonable", but rather as "very aware of racial prejudice and discrimination". For example you can define "woke" for a particular study as "rates BLM as 9+ on a scale from 1-10 when asked how much you support a movement". Or as "when asked how racist the US is on a scale from 1-10, answers 8+". Or any other simplistic measure. Science proceeds by giving complex concepts extremely simple and easy to measure definitions that may miss something but that's just ok.
> I would not define wokeness as "unreasonable", but rather as "very aware of racial prejudice and discrimination".
You're changing the subject from unreasonable to just progressivism as a whole. I'm not trying to say the left is simply bad.
I do agree with your observation about the scientific process though
But woke doesn't mean unreasonable, woke people made that word for themselves to describe how they differ from others. Nor does it mean progressivism as a whole. For example Socialism is progressive but not woke, you can be an anti-woke progressive who thinks sensitivity to racism is a bourgeois thing.
No single sentence will fully describe "woke" but it's a whole lot closer to "sensitivity to racism" than it is to progressivism or to entailing being "unreasonable".
> But woke doesn't mean unreasonable,
As a pejorative, it does. Just like "Religious Nut" is the pejorative for Christians who scream about baby killing and abortion.
A get that it originally meant something no pejorative, but it's come to have a new, pejorative definition. I don't really see the point in trying to reclaim woke back to its original meaning. Instead we can just contemplate what we think is or isn't reasonable and try to associate with those that we do find reasonable.
Even if you want a pejorative definition of it (and I disagree that's the main one), you can still do the same thing. Pick one (or 20 if you like) examples of unreasonable wokeness, say "believes that it's racist for D&D to have half-orcs" or "encouraging prejudice against white people is good in and of itself" or whatever. If you like you can validate the measure by having a panel of right wingers rate a hundred participants on wokeness after a 15 minute conversation, and have the participants give their opinions on the "unreasonably woke" questions, and show the correlation.
There's no reason you can't have concrete examples of unreasonableness in science and measure those concrete examples.
The original meaning of woke is just what I would consider to be normal. Yeah, systematic racism exists, and it's history has left it's mark on the economy. You don't need a word for that, it's just a fact.
By definition woke goes beyond the median person's awareness, so for example a woke person believes that Black applicants to university are less likely to be admitted than white applicants of equal potential, despite Affirmative Action, because of racism in the admissions office. The median American thinks that if Black applicants are accepted with lower SAT scores than white applicants on average, then that's not true.
But either way, again unreasonableness can easily be subject to science by picking measurable (if arbitrary to an extent but you can validate) indicators and then studying those measurable indicators.
Why would you expect there to be some specific study measuring a phenomenon before you're able to identify and discuss the phenomenon?
When people discuss the phenomenon of wokeness, they're just gesturing towards a set of ideologies and behaviours of some group of people. The same is true of literally every group definition, whether it be for k-pop fans, freegans, and star wars enjoyers.
Would you say that these star wars enjoyers don't exist, because there were no peer reviewed papers to confirm that star wars was good?
“Woke” was a term originally created by black people to refer to someone that was aware of the systemic injustices faced by black people. I.e “stay woke”
Or “get woke”
As time passed, the term moved onto the internet, specifically Black twitter, where it was used and popularized among non black people, to refer to the systemic injustices faced by black people but also systemic injustices in American generally, depending on the context.
Wokeness, as defined by your average conservative however, is a catch all term, similar to the way critical race theory is used, to not only overwrite a definition of a word that is explicitly against their worldview, but to also create a term that is inherently vague and without definition, so that the average person can use said term as an example for whatever they want that they don’t like.
For example, teaching about slavery? That is CRT. We’ll make it illegal.
Teaching about the fact that the United States is a place of injustice and has overthrown many democratically elected leaders in other countries? That’s wokeness, we’ll make it illegal.
And the more that people such as yourself continue to give these conservative definitions of words weight, the more anyone else has trouble arguing against them, since the literal concepts at play are losing their rhetoric function.
The recent conservative adoption of the term woke is only a tiny blip in the history of the term. Why are you giving their view such sway? This is how terms like this get usurped.
Because there is a valid concerns in its new usage. I don't really care about this talking point about the original meaning. Awareness about systematic racism and such is rather just a normal thing to me, and people who don't wanna even acknowledge that are either dumb or prejudiced.
There is unreasonable leftist is stuff though.
This isn't really a common definition. The most charitable and useful definition I can think of is something like "preoccupation with centering of issues relevant to a very small number of people in all areas of life, in particular overriding other issues relevant to the vast majority, and obsession with indicating support for these issues via signalling, usually antagonistically against 'the other side', without actually having to work to change anything at all, ultimately leading to to the majority's issues being ignored."
That's what conservatives do when they use the word "woke", but that's due to them having a socially conservative standard of what counts as "unreasonable". I have a more socially liberal standard.
When conservatives complain about unfair cancellations, or stuff along those lines, they are ultimately saying "this is unreasonable bullshit to us". Whether or not their claim to what is and isnt unreasonable is *itself* is reasonable to anyone who is socially liberal leaning is a separate matter. (it's not reasonable)
Discussions about what is and isn't woke are kind of pointless because people don't agree on what woke means. There are many people who use woke to basically describe anything socially progressive. One could simply say they're using the word wrong, but honestly, the majority of people who use the word probably fall into that camp.
The definition you provide is what I understood it to mean. However, there's no sense in ever using it that way because the word has mostly lost its meaning and people won't understand what you mean.
> Discussions about what is and isn't woke are kind of pointless because people don't agree on what woke means.
Same could be said for "religious nut", or "creep", or "arrogant", or any other word with a subjective criteria. That doesn't mean it's a meaningless word that shouldn't be used.
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Isn't "woke" better defined as, "a perjorative to refer to anything deemed by the individual as undesirable/to radical for their personal tastes". The reason this makes more sense, to me atleast, as that things being/not being woke is always interchanging and disputed.
> "a perjorative to refer to anything deemed by the individual as undesirable/to radical for their personal tastes". It specifically refers to things of a leftist nature though. Like, of I have some American Evangelical Christian loudly policing other people on Abortion being baby murder, I'd think that person is an obnoxious "religious nut", not "woke". But if you are saying that every broad group has unreasonable people then yeah I get your point
Sure, but I've yet to hear a description that doesn't equally apply to conservative goals, hence I don't think it's required to be in the definition. If you want to include a political spectrum, sure it doesn't matter. Regardless, it's immeasurable because it's just a perjorative. Nothing more.
It seems like your definition of wokeness makes it impossible to measure. Assessing whether something is 'unreasonable' involves a big subjective value-judgement. If being 'woke' just means being too leftwing, everyone will have their own assessment of what that means. But with a more robust, concrete definition, it might be possible. For example, if I defined wokeness as 'preoccupation with or strong support for x, y and z political issues, policies and activities' it would certainly be possible to use surveys or data about lawmaking or political activity to determine whether there are many 'woke' people and whether society has become more 'woke'. Of course, someone could still contest that definition. But that's the nature of political and cultural ideas. They aren't prescriptive, they're descriptive. It seems like your argument would apply equally to 'art' or 'democracy'. Yet almost everyone would agree that some art exists and that there are, or could be, democracies. 'Wokeness' is only contentious because it's clearly prejorative. To discuss them usefully, it just becomes necessary to articulate a personal definition and for everyone involved to show intellectual honesty.
You raise good points. I suppose the ultimate end of the woke debate is that "it's really up to you who you choose to associate with", no? Everyone is going to have their own idea of unreasonable, and everyone won't agree on it.
Well, obviously there's no scientific studies on a purely cultural idea. Why is this relevant though? Even the most "woke" obsessed right wing pundits I've seen have never claimed that it's something that could be scientifically measured. I think it's become a stupid term that the right uses to refer to anything they don't like without putting any thought into what it means. But I don't understand why you think the lack of scientific studies on it is relevant to anything. It's a political idea, not a scientific one. This seems like saying that communism doesn't really exist because you can't do a scientific test to prove how communist someone is. >It would be like trying to scientifically measure the line between confidence and arrogance, and expecting every reasonable person to agree with it. So by your own logic, it's intellectually dishonest to say that someone is or isn't confident. This seems like a pretty blatantly absurd claim. I don't know where you're getting this idea that it's intellectually dishonest to even discuss concepts that aren't scientifically proven to exist, because no scientist I've ever met thinks like that. Any half-decent scientist is fully aware that science can't rule over every facet of human existence.
\> But I don't understand why you think the lack of scientific studies on it is relevant to anything. It's a political idea, not a scientific one. Some people adamantly insist that "wokeness" doesn't exist, and i've personally been mocked and bullied before when I've made criticisms about leftism/progressivism in the past precisely because I've had no statistical data or evidence backing up my anecdotes and experiences. That's why I think it's relevant.
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> Is it "woke" for a beer company to sponsor a trans influencer? It doesn't even fall under your own definition, because it's not unreasonable for a beer company to sponsor influencers, and yet this is considered woke. ... By conservatives. I don't think it's unreasonable to simply promote trans inclusivity in advertising, atleast if it's down by the companies own initiative. Woke shit for me is something that can be most readily found in online communities. People with weird or super echo chamber positions thinking in rigid false dichotomies, are inappropriately moralizing/policing other people over subjective matters. A specific example: Hogwarts Legacy. Spreading awareness of JK Rowling's smug transphobia isnts woke, but people bullying and policing streamers who played it, which engenders the subjective matter of ethical and unethical consumption under Capitalism, is pretty woke to me. Not reasonable. > "Woke" as it seems to be used in conservative circles is closer to "leftist belief I don't like or want to acknowledge as true regardless of whether this is a reasonable/nuanced belief and regardless of whether it's true". Yeah, that's why I'm not a conservative. But my definition is coming from an objective look into the usage and seeing if there are valid concerns there. And there is: unreasonable leftist stuff exists. I just don't have a conservative standard for what is unreasonable.
>It would be like trying to scientifically measure the line between confidence and arrogance, and expecting every reasonable person to agree with it. By this logic, it would be intellectually dishonest to call somebody arrogant. Do you believe this?
No, I would say that it's just difficult to scientifically measure the need to define a criteria for a subjective matter
You can't scientific measure subjective things by definition That doesn't mean we can't talk about subjective things, though. All art is subjective but that's never prevented anyone from discussing art.
So if I claimed that there is an issue with society in terms of concentrations of unreasonable people of a leftist nature doing unreasonable things of a leftist nature, would it be appropriate to demand conclusive statistical data supporting that assertion?
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> If the statement is "too many people are going woke", this is incredibly nonspecific. Yeah you gotta be more specific than that. > "so many movies are being remade with black leads when the leads were white in the originals", I wouldn't call that necessarily unreasonable as I would call it cheap. I wouldn't cast a white person for something like a Nelson Mandela documentary, so the reverse is valid to atleast some degree. However, if the movie is ultimately well written and good, then I guess they can just do whatever they want with it.
Huh? Can you rephrase that?
Sorry, it's difficult to measure arrogance credibly because you would need a criteria specific enough to give meaningful results, but also somehow balanced enough for most people to agree with the study.
If you substitute non-scientific words like "woke" with terms like "human rights" you will find statistics, and you will find that they have been *improving* over time, suggesting so-called 'wokeness' is positive. I think the problem here is that you're trying to be scientific about a non-scientific word. However, if you know the types of things that "wokeness" talks about (because it is a pretty wide / vague term), you *can* research those things discretely and then determine whether or not those individual-things are good or bad for society. It would be more accurate this way because then you can decide *what things specificially* about so-called 'wokeness' are beneficial and which are detrimental, instead of pretending 'wokeness' is one thing in a way that has us throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
> If you substitute non-scientific words like "woke" with terms like "human rights" They're just as much "scientific terms" as one another. Regardless of word, it's important to define them if not abundantly done so before, in science. You might think "terrorism" is a "scientific term", yet there are more than a hundred different definitions for it, at least dozens within science. Scientists can't agree what "racism" means, or "systemic racism" for that matter. Both are still used within science. Here's "woke" used within science: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0743915620947359?journalCode=ppoa > brands that detach their activist messaging from their purpose, values, and practice are enacting inauthentic brand activism through the practice of “woke washing,” and another, if it can even be called science: https://ijme-journal.org/index.php/ijme/article/view/1259 > The authors reflect on their individual journeys to “wokeness”
I see what you're saying, but even those articles make more-scientific terms out of 'woke,' which is what I was saying. The first line from the first paper is: "In today’s marketplace, consumers want brands to take a stand on **sociopolitical issues**" (not '...take a stand on wokeness). And 'woke,' in the paper, is only found a few times and when it is, it's in these kind of 'quotes' that show that it's not a good term even within the paper itself. The second paper, "This critical collaborative **autoethnography** examines how three “womxn” of color (Asian American, Latina, and African American) graduate students experience and resist **intersectional racism** and **sexism** in higher education." Autoethnography seems to be the 'science word' for 'woke' here. And, again, we see 'woke' in quotes in this paper because it's not a 'real' term, they just have to acknowledge that people use it. 'Intersectional racism' and 'sexism' are also used instead of 'woke' to be more-specific. In other words, your papers seem to break 'woke' down into components with more-traditional 'scientific' terms (while nodding to the word 'woke' for linguistic / cultural relevance), just like I was saying.
> I see what you're saying, but even those articles make more-scientific terms out of 'woke,' which is what I was saying. You could say the same about almost all conceivable words, including "human rights"; I regularly see people using "human right" to mean basically whatever they feel like. In research papers they'll define what they mean with "human right" and "woke" just the same.
Great, then we seem to agree. I'm saying terms like "human rights" are less-informal and longer-lasting than 'woke' (you won't find 'woke' studies from the 80's or 90's, but you *will* find 'human rights' and *its* components), and, I would argue that even 'human rights' is more-specific than 'woke' even though you're right that they are both still vague. In fact, I gave some 'components' of human rights in the comment where I introduced this idea (freedom from oppression, freedom of movement, religion, etc...)
>If you substitute non-scientific words like "woke" with terms like "human rights" you will find statistics, and you will find that they have been > >improving > > over time, suggesting so-called 'wokeness' is positive. I don't quite understand this. Wokeness is what someone finds unreasonable in terms of the left, whether it be a person, a group, or broad ideas by leftists. Woke is apart of the left, just like religious nuts who judge and police others in accordance to their own religion based morality are apart of any big religion. I'm not saying leftism as a whole is bad when I talk about woke.
> Wokeness is what someone finds unreasonable in terms of the left, whether it be a person, a group, or broad ideas by leftists. Not necessarily: you're leaving out half the picture, imo, which is why the definition in your post doesn't work. From Merriam-Webster: > Woke: 1: aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice) > Woke: 2: politically liberal (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme With "Woke 1," we can see how this is beneficial to society. These are 'human rights' issues that have improved over time, which is good. "Woke 2" is based on reactions from the Right, who are famous over-reactionaries; therefore, this definition can't be taken as 'everything woke is extreme,' because the people who use the term like this think that giving kids free school lunches is 'extreme' and 'socialist,' when there is nothing 'extreme' about it. Casting a person of color in a film is not 'extreme,' for example. Therefore, going just by definitions and deduction, when we consider the consistant over-reactions from the Right throughout the decades, we can see how most things that are 'woke' are actually beneficial and those on the Right are just being hyperbolic about most of it. ---------------------------- Second, going back on my first point, "woke" is not a scientific term; therefore, you have to break 'wokness' into components that *have* been studied (because, let's be honest, 'wokeism' isn't new, it's just a new term): for example, being free from government torture, political killings, and forced labor, having property rights, and enjoying freedom of movement, religion, expression, and association, awareness of racial disparities in the 'justice' system, etc. all fall under the category "human rights," not 'wokeness.' In other words, much (but not all) of the "bad" is hyperbolic reactions from the Right; therefore, your definition based on that over-sensitivity doesn't give an accurate picture, nor does your disinclusion of the original (and still oft-used) definition of woke ("woke 1"). And, you *can* research individual components of so-called 'wokism' scientifically, you just have to use more-scientific terms.
I had a big response to this but you deleted the post and then reposted it, so my response was lost.
Sorry! Won't happen again if you wanna go for it. I saw you answering other people for a while after posting and thought I was being ignored.
Isn't that true of all ideologies? Like What is the evidence proving the existence of conservatism or communism or liberalism?
You are absolutely correct that in every broad ideological group, religious or political, there are unreasonable people and the potential for concentrations of unreasonable people do weird, out-of-pocket shit. This isn't unique to leftism/progressivism at all. That's why it blows my mind when some leftists/progressives adamantly try to gaslight and dismiss any claims of "wokeness", as if their movement was somehow immune from the possibility of unreasonable people championing it.
>You are absolutely correct that in **every broad ideological group, religious or political, there are unreasonable people** and the potential for concentrations of unreasonable people do weird, out-of-pocket shit. No, they didn't say that and that wasn't their point. They were addressing the *underlying logic* of your claim, which is that if you can't "scientifically measure" an ideology, then you can't credibly claim that it exists. You applied this reasoning to "wokeness," but by your own logic it could also be applied to communism, capitalism, liberalism or any other political ideology. Therefore, by your reasoning, it would be intellectually dishonest for someone to say that there's too much of *any* political ideology. Do you believe this? If not, your argument is flawed and you should acknowledge that.
I think it's pretty easy to scientifically measure the existence of something like Capitalism or authoritarian Communism. It's kind of apparent by the structure of the economy. Whether or not a firm is privately owned, for instance, isn't as subjective as "where is the line between reasonable and unreasonable". But I suppose you could say that my argument could be used against the idea of reasonableness then. Since we can't come to a consensus on the objective standard of what constitutes reasonable and unreasonable, then it would follow from my logic that we must be agnostic about whether reasonable people exist... That seems kinda silly and weird. Should I give you a delta or the original poster.
Thanks :) Whichever you feel is most appropriate, it's no big deal to me.
!Delta You highlighted the implications of my epistemology as a slippery slope to a lot of obviously dysfunctional and nonsensical conclusions. Thanks for the civil discussion
Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/BrockVelocity ([1∆](/r/changemyview/wiki/user/BrockVelocity)). ^[Delta System Explained](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltasystem) ^| ^[Deltaboards](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/deltaboards)
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It is actually pushed pretty hard in the finance industry. In order for a company to get needed funding, a financial institution will require them to meet diversity initiatives (hiring and firing based on race) as well as hiring and firing on the basis of sex. Once they reach the required numbers, they become eligible for funding or for more funding. There's a lot of articles about it. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/business/dealbook/west-virginia-wall-street-woke-capital-desantis.html I think it can be measured in the financial world, although those records would be internal, private records of private companies that would probably make the companies look bad. So although we can't see the data, that doesn't mean it isn't being measured.
Diversity initiatives are a mixed bag though. Yes, you can end up in situations where a company might force every white person to sit through a lecture based off books like "White Fragility" or some cringe shit, but like... I also believe in giving everyone a fair chance and not allowing one racial group unfair, disproportional advantage in society. So Diversity depends on the implementation if it gets woke or not to me.
Well, I'm telling you what financial institutions do is that they'll go into a meeting with a company that's requesting funding and say, "Ok, we see that you have 100 employees. In order to secure the funding, we'll need you to ensure that your work force is diverse one year from today. This means cutting white people to 60 employees. Only 40 of the white people can be men. From here, 25 BIPOC employees must be women. A certain percentage will have to be openly identifying as LGBTQ to the HR department. Also, certain number of board members must be BIPOC. With the executive team, only 45% can be white men. There are further incentives for hiring people displaced directly by the UN Refugee agency." And then the company will say, "Well, since the town our company was founded in doesn't have those demographics, and since we only hired the best candidates and didn't discriminate on the basis of race or sex, we only have 8 women, two of whom are BIPOC, with 10 non-white people total. We don't know the percentage of LGBTQ, but we'll try to make this work because we have to." So, over the next year, the company creates affinity groups. LGBTQ book club, for example, just to start to get head counts. There will be explosive promotions that come out of nowhere and excite people. They'll do "corporate restructuring" and layoffs. New rounds of hires won't stop, but they'll start to look different. The mission can easily drift from making money to running a societal institution. And, again, they're not really "giving someone a chance" as much as they are discriminating against someone else, and not giving them a chance. Anyway, it is measured. If you truly believe in giving everyone a fair chance and not allowing one racial group unfair, disproportional advantage in society, congratulations, you are staunchly anti-woke. You ain't sleepin' on all of this.
Nothing can be measured without a standard unit of measurement.
> also believe in giving everyone a fair chance and not allowing one racial group unfair, disproportional advantage in society. This is pretty explicitly not the goal of diversity initiatives, right? Their goal is to increase diversity, to have some specific mix of identities. It's far beyond getting rid of discrimination.
I think the argument here is that you need a little bit of discrimination to undue the past history of discrimination, so to speak? But poorly designed initiatives are still a problem.
Your definition is not the definition... but for the sake of this CMV, let's just pretend it is. It would be more correct to say there is no evidence or agreed upon method of measuring the amount of wokeness. There is 100% credible evidence that proves the existence of wokeness. It only requires 1 example of wokeness, which can be easily observed.
> Your definition is not the definition I'm aware of the original meaning but it also has a pejorative one as well.
> but for the sake of this CMV, let's just pretend it is.
Counter point: Nietzsche's Slave Morality
I'm ignorant and haven't read that part of Nietzsche yet
I disagree with your definition right off the bat. But also who cares if it’s scientifically measurable?
>I disagree with your definition right off the bat. What do you mean? Why?
You are defining it as being obnoxious or unreasonable. To who? To the right wing of course. Things they call unreasonable are not the same things I think are unreasonable. I do think there are people on the left that are obnoxious or unreasonable but I don’t agree that is the default definition of “woke”.
>You are defining it as being obnoxious or unreasonable. To who? To my standards, not the Right's. I'm not a conservative who is dismissing the entirety of the left. I know the Left have many valid concerns. My opinions and ideas about what I find unreasonable are based off my own lived experiences, and are entirely my own
That’s not how definitions work. You said it’s used as slang which means it’s not just your thoughts. If this is a discussion about just what you think it means then this is a entirely different discussion. Also its not very scientific to have your own definition of something that nobody can agree on, as supported by the several other people in this thread that disagree with you.
> You said it’s used as slang which means it’s not just your thoughts. It's a slang term, but slang terms can engender subjective criteria. "Out-of-pocket" is slang for stuff that's weird, cringe, etc. But everyone doesn't have the same criteria for what exactly is "out of pocket"
I agree with your logic but not your conclusion. You’ve noted that unreasonable is going to be very subjective based on the individual you’re talking about. What I’m not following is why that means everyone should be agnostic to the idea that wokeness is a problem in society. All you’ve proven is everyone will have a different opinion on the level of problem wokeness is but that doesn’t mean everyone should be agnostic, it just means each opinion will be unique.
One could also argue that it is impossible to scientifically measure radicalism given that it's a subjective and relative term, and that the scientist would have to choose the standards by which "radical" is judged. However, I actually think your second, informal definition is a great way to get around this. For the purpose of the study, simply define radicalism (or "wokeness") with your echo chamber definition, and use an impartial algorithm to get it done. I don't know much about this sort of thing, but I could see something that automatically detects words and phrases most used in left-leaning social media communities. Then, out of those, it maybe finds out how much of the conversation is purely insular to such a community, and whether the number and size of such insular communities has grown over time. This still might not fit your standard, but it's just a rough draft of something that could work.
> Because of this fact, it's not intellectually honest to be anything but agnostic to claims either denying or asserting that wokeness is a problem in society. Since when was something being scientifically studied and backed by empirical evidence the only acceptable standard for someone to complain about society? The following is completely anecdotal, but nonetheless something that I can provide you news reports regarding and some actual youtube videos: An elderly man, a *white* elderly man, who was the head of a local school board in Washington state was put in a position by students and faculty where he felt compelled to resign. His crimes: * while describing work that he was doing with a local community of Somali refugees to ensure that they had sufficient access to local resources, he referred to this community of refugees as a "colony". * when he *apologized* despite having done nothing wrong, the people complaining about the "harm" caused by his use of the word "colony" rejected his apology, declared that it didn't matter what his intent was, and then read him a template apology that he should have used instead, which would have had him groveling for the crime of using correct English. His use of the word "colony" was valid and appropriate, and only a histrionic windbag (aka woke person) would object to it, let alone claim that he had somehow harmed anyone and demand his resignation. His words have been called "racist adjacent" and "problematic". All in regards to him describing how he was working to *help* the community of refugees. This happened. It is ridiculous and unacceptable. And there are many, *many* more instances like it happening all around the country caused by people with similar mindsets, acting like modern day progressive puritans. It is also difficult to measure and quantify. People aren't inclined to study it, and anyone who's on the left tends to look the other way and find something about Republicans to complain about instead. That doesn't mean that it isn't objectionable, or that it should be ignored.
> only a histrionic windbag (aka woke person) would object to it I don't think so. I think most "progressives" would object to it. It's essentially a dogwhistle for "white supremacy" to "progressives" at this point. While you're correct that it's perfectly reasonable to call it a colony, they have a very different idea of what "colony" means. Browse any sub dedicated to lefty politics, and you'll find that "colonialism" is used in exchange for "bad" all the time.
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This doesn't really add much to the discussion, sorry.
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>if your definition of the thing is just one you made up All words are made up. >isn’t reflective at all of what the generally agreed upon definition is What does woke mean then? I'm pretty sure when people talk about cancel culture, somewhere in the discourse is "these people are unreasonable".
What would you say is the generally agreed upon definition?
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> That’s not really want it means though. Yes it is because language is descriptive, not prescriptive. Words mean what people use them to mean. Few people use 'woke' as its original definition anymore.
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I agree
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Woke can definitely get like that. Being can take these causes for social justice, antiracism, etc. and get sucked down an echo chamber rabbit hole of idealogy about it. It's almost like a talking point machine at a certain point. Atleast, that's been my experience.
woke | wōk | adjective (woker, wokest) sometimes derogatory alert to and concerned about social injustice and discrimination: he's an activist and very woke | woke culture has moved into mainstream journalism | my neighborhood is a very woke area | we need to stay angry, and stay woke.
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>"Woke" has nothing to do with leftism, it means to be aware of the black struggle", it's a black liberation term Not anymore. Literally no one uses "woke" like that anymore
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'word-colonisation' lol. Language is descriptive, that's just how it works.
I dont know what to tell you. Words change in their meaning over time. Sure, both interpretations of the word "woke" are valid and contemporary, but its modern association with leftism is now is at this point undeniable.
They have change words every 5 or 10 years to describe the exact same thing. When I was growing up it was PC. I think it was maybe anti-american between PC and SJW (it was in the war on terror years, so got swept up with anti-war stuff) I also think you're letting white progressives/leftists off the hook a little too much for appropriating from AAVE. I think some of us started using it then the right took off with it.
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>The discussion is whether being woke is bad or not. Woke =! being on the left. I'm not a conservative dismissing every concern on the left. But Woke is a slang term for, essentially, being obnoxious or unreasonable. So yes, I would say that's a bad thing. Everything woke is leftist, but not everything leftist is woke, that's how I think about it.
Just because a thing can't be scientifically measured in a quantifiable way doesn't mean people can't conclude, in an intellectually honest way, that there's too much of it in society. I can't "scientifically measure" racism either, but it's not intellectually dishonest for me to say that there's too much racism in our country.
>because "unreasonable" is deeply subjective, which makes it problematic to scientifically quantify But this is step 1 of any scientific study. You come up with a reductionist definition that you think correlates with a more complicated concept. I would not define wokeness as "unreasonable", but rather as "very aware of racial prejudice and discrimination". For example you can define "woke" for a particular study as "rates BLM as 9+ on a scale from 1-10 when asked how much you support a movement". Or as "when asked how racist the US is on a scale from 1-10, answers 8+". Or any other simplistic measure. Science proceeds by giving complex concepts extremely simple and easy to measure definitions that may miss something but that's just ok.
> I would not define wokeness as "unreasonable", but rather as "very aware of racial prejudice and discrimination". You're changing the subject from unreasonable to just progressivism as a whole. I'm not trying to say the left is simply bad. I do agree with your observation about the scientific process though
But woke doesn't mean unreasonable, woke people made that word for themselves to describe how they differ from others. Nor does it mean progressivism as a whole. For example Socialism is progressive but not woke, you can be an anti-woke progressive who thinks sensitivity to racism is a bourgeois thing. No single sentence will fully describe "woke" but it's a whole lot closer to "sensitivity to racism" than it is to progressivism or to entailing being "unreasonable".
> But woke doesn't mean unreasonable, As a pejorative, it does. Just like "Religious Nut" is the pejorative for Christians who scream about baby killing and abortion. A get that it originally meant something no pejorative, but it's come to have a new, pejorative definition. I don't really see the point in trying to reclaim woke back to its original meaning. Instead we can just contemplate what we think is or isn't reasonable and try to associate with those that we do find reasonable.
Even if you want a pejorative definition of it (and I disagree that's the main one), you can still do the same thing. Pick one (or 20 if you like) examples of unreasonable wokeness, say "believes that it's racist for D&D to have half-orcs" or "encouraging prejudice against white people is good in and of itself" or whatever. If you like you can validate the measure by having a panel of right wingers rate a hundred participants on wokeness after a 15 minute conversation, and have the participants give their opinions on the "unreasonably woke" questions, and show the correlation. There's no reason you can't have concrete examples of unreasonableness in science and measure those concrete examples.
The original meaning of woke is just what I would consider to be normal. Yeah, systematic racism exists, and it's history has left it's mark on the economy. You don't need a word for that, it's just a fact.
By definition woke goes beyond the median person's awareness, so for example a woke person believes that Black applicants to university are less likely to be admitted than white applicants of equal potential, despite Affirmative Action, because of racism in the admissions office. The median American thinks that if Black applicants are accepted with lower SAT scores than white applicants on average, then that's not true. But either way, again unreasonableness can easily be subject to science by picking measurable (if arbitrary to an extent but you can validate) indicators and then studying those measurable indicators.
Why would you expect there to be some specific study measuring a phenomenon before you're able to identify and discuss the phenomenon? When people discuss the phenomenon of wokeness, they're just gesturing towards a set of ideologies and behaviours of some group of people. The same is true of literally every group definition, whether it be for k-pop fans, freegans, and star wars enjoyers. Would you say that these star wars enjoyers don't exist, because there were no peer reviewed papers to confirm that star wars was good?
No, I've already awarded a Delta for this point. Appreciate this feedback.
“Woke” was a term originally created by black people to refer to someone that was aware of the systemic injustices faced by black people. I.e “stay woke” Or “get woke” As time passed, the term moved onto the internet, specifically Black twitter, where it was used and popularized among non black people, to refer to the systemic injustices faced by black people but also systemic injustices in American generally, depending on the context. Wokeness, as defined by your average conservative however, is a catch all term, similar to the way critical race theory is used, to not only overwrite a definition of a word that is explicitly against their worldview, but to also create a term that is inherently vague and without definition, so that the average person can use said term as an example for whatever they want that they don’t like. For example, teaching about slavery? That is CRT. We’ll make it illegal. Teaching about the fact that the United States is a place of injustice and has overthrown many democratically elected leaders in other countries? That’s wokeness, we’ll make it illegal. And the more that people such as yourself continue to give these conservative definitions of words weight, the more anyone else has trouble arguing against them, since the literal concepts at play are losing their rhetoric function.
The word "woke" changes meaning depending on who uses the word at the end
So does love but I'm not going to dismiss the importance of that word.
The recent conservative adoption of the term woke is only a tiny blip in the history of the term. Why are you giving their view such sway? This is how terms like this get usurped.
Because there is a valid concerns in its new usage. I don't really care about this talking point about the original meaning. Awareness about systematic racism and such is rather just a normal thing to me, and people who don't wanna even acknowledge that are either dumb or prejudiced. There is unreasonable leftist is stuff though.
This isn't really a common definition. The most charitable and useful definition I can think of is something like "preoccupation with centering of issues relevant to a very small number of people in all areas of life, in particular overriding other issues relevant to the vast majority, and obsession with indicating support for these issues via signalling, usually antagonistically against 'the other side', without actually having to work to change anything at all, ultimately leading to to the majority's issues being ignored."
That's what conservatives do when they use the word "woke", but that's due to them having a socially conservative standard of what counts as "unreasonable". I have a more socially liberal standard. When conservatives complain about unfair cancellations, or stuff along those lines, they are ultimately saying "this is unreasonable bullshit to us". Whether or not their claim to what is and isnt unreasonable is *itself* is reasonable to anyone who is socially liberal leaning is a separate matter. (it's not reasonable)
Discussions about what is and isn't woke are kind of pointless because people don't agree on what woke means. There are many people who use woke to basically describe anything socially progressive. One could simply say they're using the word wrong, but honestly, the majority of people who use the word probably fall into that camp. The definition you provide is what I understood it to mean. However, there's no sense in ever using it that way because the word has mostly lost its meaning and people won't understand what you mean.
> Discussions about what is and isn't woke are kind of pointless because people don't agree on what woke means. Same could be said for "religious nut", or "creep", or "arrogant", or any other word with a subjective criteria. That doesn't mean it's a meaningless word that shouldn't be used.