Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means
“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.
Central to woke discourse is the substitution of older and less complicated versions of socially liberal perspectives with more willfully complex academic versions. So civil rights are out, “anti-racism” is in. Community is out, intersectionality is in. Equality is out, equity is in. Homelessness is out, unhousedness is in. Sexism is out, misogyny is in. Advantage is out, privilege is in
Well the things that are “in” certainly add, but I’m not sure those former things are actually “out,” even to “woke” people.
woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real
Woke politics are famously obsessive about language, developing literal language policies that are endlessly long and exacting. Utterances are mined for potential offense with pitiless focus, such that statements that were entirely anodyne a few years ago become unspeakable today.
The woke fixation on language and symbol makes sense when you realize that the developers of the ideology are almost entirely people whose profession involves the immaterial and the symbolic - professors, writers, reporters, artists, pundits.
Rather than calling for true mass movements (which you cannot create without the moderation and compromise the social justice set tends to abhor), woke politics typically treats all political struggle as a matter of the individual mastering themselves and behaving correctly
The structural problems (such as racism) are represented as fundamentally combated with individual moral correctness (such as articulated in White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which argues that racism is combated by white people interrogating their souls rather than with policy)
You combat homophobia by being gay-affirming. You combat misogyny by respecting women. You combat all social ills by relentlessly fixating on your own position in society and feeling bad about it. Nothing political can escape the gravity of personal psychodrama and no solutions exist but cleansing the self.
I’m sure many SJW-oriented people would disagree and argue that this is merely one of many tools that people need to employ to enact change. There seems to be an overemphasis on individual responsibility but that is likely because that feels more actionable than policy change. People are asking “what can *I* do to help?” Overreliance on this is faulty, yes, but I’m not sure I see anyone saying that personal responsibility and compromise/moderation/policy change are mutually exclusive
The fixation on emotions fits snugly in the assumption of the individual as the basic unit of politics. It also ensures that woke politics assume the possibility of a frictionless universe in which everyone feels good all the time.
Institutions are all corrupt and bigoted, so institutions cannot prompt change. Most people are irredeemably racist, and so the masses cannot create a just society.
Problems can’t be solved gradually through small steps over time, but only through revolutionary change, which itself will inevitably be blocked by the white-cis-male power structure. Everything sucks all the time, which incidentally justifies yelling all the time for people who enjoy yelling
Whether this is accurate or not I can’t deny that this is how the internet atmosphere feels, and it makes me feel bad/dismal about the state of things. I think the messaging behind Social Justice Politics needs to change and recognize how it looks to “the other side”
I’d rather woke politics win than conservatism. But I’d rather have a friendly forgiving plainspoken big tent civil libertarian socialist mass movement, personally. Trouble is, there is only woke and anti-woke. There is no escape.