What is “woke” anyway?
This is about as tidy a definition as I’v found:
“Woke”, in fact, is a meaningless term — a floating signifier you can stuff with whatever you want. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian: “a hate figure has been created, a shibboleth, a means by which bigots can identify one another and give voice to their prejudice, without fear of censure.”
But though woke may be a senseless term, it’s a highly convenient one. Even puce-faced old buffers in Pall Mall clubs are now aware that it isn’t permissible to be openly racist or sexist, so “woke” acts as a useful displacement. You can’t be anti-women, but you can be anti-woke, which means speaking up for good old-fashioned public-school values. Shut up whining, take your punishment like a man, stop picking over your fine feelings and if your head is reeling with confusion stick it under the shower.
It is very British, coming from Terry Eagleton and Zoe Williams, but gets there.
A federal judge asked Governor DeSantis’ lawyer to define Woke in a recent legal proceeding. DeSantis’ general counsel, Ryan Newman, responded that the term means “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”
So woke means being anti-discrimination and anti-injustice. Being anti-woke means you are for discrimination and injustice. There, that’s settled.
Feature, not bug. It’s like telling a Nazi he’s an anti-Semite. Yeah, and?
Woke is a slur used by bigots who don’t have the courage to say “uppity.”
Woke is yet another term, a buzz word, for the slack jaws of the Republicans to mumble to express an assortment of hatreds. At this point the Republican base is so dumbed down that the meaning of the word matters not, all that matters is the DeSantis is against it.
People on the left used “woke” as kind of a catch-all for having progressive values. The MAGAts are using it basically the same way, except they don’t like those values.
Woke is a dumbed-down way of describing an amalgam of marxist dialectics/social praxis that have been cherry picked to advance a particular need. “Woke” is Starbucks letting homeless people use their bathrooms without a fundamental understanding of its own corporate structure. “Wokeness” is superficial cultural awareness that is designed to keep a lid on the simmering unrest that exploded after the Floyd murder.