Why does 'wokeness' annoy people so much?

[twwindow]

Isn't it just trying to make the world a better place but making people feel accepted no matter their race, gender etc?

It seems to wind some people up so bad - and it's usually those that are part of a majority group that gets wound up most by it (usually white/men) - is it because they feel threatened?

Whenever anyone stands up for a cause they are automatically called woke - and it's now as if it's a bad thing.

It's sad, I see people fed up with 'wokeness' as code for 'we can't get away with our racist, sexist BS anymore as people are calling us out'.

What is the definition of "crime"? Hate crime such as "transphobia" or "misgendering" isn't quite the same as an actual crime so it would be interesting to see a breakdown.

Without a breakdown, I'll be taking any such claim with a pinch of salt, as I did the "trans lifespan of 35" claim and "50% of trans kids commit suicide" claim.

should someone be living as a woman

The only way you can live as a woman is to be born female.

@JohnHuffam1812

I agree.

I don't find any people who are discussing injustice classing themselves as woke. It's more used a derogatory term.

There are people who do class themselves as woke even if you haven't come across them

Sone seem to get more worked up about the word being used as an insult than actual actions to counter racism etc

Actually interesting ( to me ) observation- how it's the way the word is used is used the insult is , not in the word itself

Wish we could apply this logic to those who think "holding the fort" demonstrates racist actions

Isn't it just trying to make the world a better place but making people feel accepted no matter their race, gender etc?

Anyway, I hope you feel your question has been answered, OP. No, it isn't.

Again, why not ask men to be less violent?

How would we go about this? Post millions of letters to all the men?

@EightWheelGirl

Again, why not ask men to be less violent?

How would we go about this? Post millions of letters to all the men?

I was hoping John would ask that question so I could point out the blindingly obvious.

It is as sensible and doable to ask men to stop being violent as it is to ask women to accept their rights being dismantled to assuage some men.

It takes being able to discuss it openly, to be willing to see the issues as they really are and to start social changes from birth.

Yet, somehow, women are still expected to just shut up and move over.

@Ereshkigalangcleg

should someone be living as a woman

The only way you can live as a woman is to be born female.

This. And the term Woke has just become another label umbrella term which can "mean whatever you want it to mean" in the words of Humpty Dumpty. Probably has more meaning in the US in relation to BLM. Fighting against predjudice is great. Fighting in order to oppress other marginal groups in order to further your own aims, isnt

@Ereshkigalangcleg

should someone be living as a woman

The only way you can live as a woman is to be born female.

Yes indeed. It's demeaning to women to suggest otherwise. We are not some hive mind of people who like make up and high heels.

Getting back to the main topic, I differentiate between “woke” meaning the awareness how much of society and culture is set up to work for certain demographics, the belief that is unfair, and a willingness to also look inwards and accept one is at times perpetuating these structures (I mean, that’s pretty much the basis of my Feminism, so of course I accept the same mechanisms exist to limit people due to race, class and indeed gender expression.) Under that definition I absolutely consider myself woke.

But “woke” without that inward interrogation, when it’s become simply another social power construct that allows one group to feel legitimately entitled to impose its own values on everyone else and where different needs clash become the judge of whose need is “valid” and whose voice is silenced despite having so skin in the game…well that is not so good and that I utterly reject.

I am no longer young. In my youth I was a firebrand, convinced of my own moral rightness. I have learned more since then. Three observations I think are especially relevant for the second type of Woke:

Young people are more passionate and dogmatic not because they are the brave fresh future, but because without experience to lean on yet they need the world to be black and white as a framework to guide them. Compromise, tolerance and trying to understand the others’ viewpoint is the more radical act of thought that comes with age and experience.

Be very careful when you take up someone’s cause as your own even though it does not directly affect you. A person directly affected can consider changes and compromise but you cannot to do that for them. Without your own skin in the game you only have second or third hand information to guide you, and that means you are locked into preset views and your involvement therefore is a force acting towards rigidity and polarisation. So the more of a movement that is made up allies rather than the directly affected, the more extreme it will become. This is not to say “don’t be an ally”, it is saying “be very careful that in being an ally you are not speaking over the people you believe you are supporting and taking away their power to negotiate their own solutions”.

Similar to the point above, something I realised back in the “political correctness gorn mad” days (and just as I consider myself sympathetic to woke views today but not the way they are being enacted, I was sympathetic to the motivations behind the calls for politically correct language and representation) is that what it often boiled down to was one group of privileged, empowered people telling another group of privileged, empowered people “this is what the disempowered and unprivileged minority groups would be saying if we had any of them here” and thinking they were on the right side for doing it while still being the ones benefitting from the power systems set up in their favour. That is exactly the same dynamic playing out with the Wokeratti today.

Interesting thread.

There’s one thing that really stands out in this thread. That proponents of ‘woke’ will bring out the old ‘yours is a strawman argument’, ‘you are mis-representing what I said’, ‘you frame your question in a way that you get the answer you want’. Basically anything to avoid the debate and subtle tricks to dismiss what the other person said. Oh the irony that a proponent of ‘woke’ should do this.
It’s like the old argument when asked why socialism always fails, ‘but but but socialism has never been tried properly anywhere’

@sst1234

Those are not tricks, they are part of critical thinking and used in a debate. There were several occasions here when people's arguments were misrepresented or strawmen built.

Although my response to anyone asking where socialism has been tried is to ask where has capitalism too.

If we are being purist about it hasn't been tried properly either.

[quote JohnHuffam1812]@sst1234

Those are not tricks, they are part of critical thinking and used in a debate. There were several occasions here when people's arguments were misrepresented or strawmen built.[/quote]
Could you identify one or two of those so we can discuss them?

[quote JohnHuffam1812]@ForagingForMullberries I didn't dismiss third spaces, I said there may be risks involved in this.

I don't know what the solution is but it's evident that both camps are utterly entrenched and not willing to find a solution[/quote]
So you just named a solution given by one of the ‘camps’ (presumably meaning women) and in the same breath say that women are not willing to find a solution. What you mean is that women (generally) are not prepared to accept an infringement that men want to place upon them. How illiberal and discriminatory of women to not want to have their rights infringed upon and of course any solution they suggest is just not a solution, right?

@JohnHuffam1812

There have been people here who identify all transwomen as potential sex offenders.

I agree that the situation is difficult, is there a compromise, should someone be living as a woman for a certain length of time before they can use female spaces, a third space?

I wonder if you are misunderstanding what we mean by “potential sex offenders”

If you read it has “every individual trans woman has the potential within them to be a sex offender” then no, I don’t think anyone believes that.

The point is that some males are sex offenders and we can’t tell from the outside which they are, so when women are vulnerable we need to treat all males, including trans women, as potential sex offenders. Not because we think they all are but because we don’t know which are.

Not that trans women are particularly more a risk than any other male, but because as males they introduce additional risk to the hitherto female-only group they wish to have membership of.

(That said, there is perhaps an argument that a male who, in rejecting female people’s desire for single sex spaces as less important than their own need to be seen as interchangeable with said female people, should be met with more wariness than the average male because they have already demonstrated they value female needs as less important than their own.)

It's ineffably sad when we have to explain that in such simple terms. Sadder that it is in the probably vain hope that we have misunderstood the reasoning behind a poster's posts

Still trying to see the good, being nice, etc

Sorry blibby I'm just so very jaded and angry with all the "women, you are being unreasonable and no, I shan't listen to your explanation" posters we have had to deal with this year.

It's bad enough having to dodge such shite in real life. That we can't even have a single small corner of the internet to discuss our thoughts without being 'robustly challenged' in such a repetitive and uninformed manner is so bloody irritating.

@twwindow

Ok I don't think I explained myself in my OP correctly.

And example - the SATC reboot has been slated for being woke. Purely because the storylines are highlighting issues around race/gender etc.

Another example, if I was to call out say and instance if someone saying something racially inappropriate people would probably eye rolls and say woke - purely for calling out NOT cancelling them.

Cancel culture is another issue - I'm merely talking about highlighting injustices bow leads to some people getting angry and saying people are being too woke.

My examples are probably not the greatest but I hope it makes my point a bit clearer. I'm not talking about woke gone extreme (cancel culture) I'm talking about merely highlighting issues these days to do with race, inequality gets some people flamed. And it's not cool.

That reboot, rather like the current incarnation of Dr Who - is deeply annoying because instead of good stories, or humour, you have the show lecturing the audience on social issues. Not with any finesse or real understanding of them, but in an extraordinarily self-righteous priggish way.

Why should anyone want to sit down to someone who has such one dimensional thinking to lecture them? Why do these show writers imagine they have any moral or intellectual high ground to give these lectures? If they can't even write a good compelling story, where do they get their confidence about all this preaching?

The issue about calling people out gets to the heart of it really. You know it's not that common in the lives of most people to see really egregious racist statements and slurs being used. The kind of supposedly racist statements that people feel they should call out are often much less clearly racist. Usually they have crossed some line that has been set up by some self-declared arbiter of what is right but may not be at all what is felt to be racist by the people in question, or there may be significant disagreement about certain issues within a given community. So you have to ask, what gives you or anyone the right to tell someone in such cases to call someone out?

It's possible and often a good thing to talk about these issues, but it's worth being aware of the setting and whether or not it's really a discussion.

I did some workplace training recently that was a good example of how not to do this, and yet it's a really common format. Everyone was obliged to attend, a certain way of thinking about many complex issues was assumed to be correct by the trainer and presumably the organisational leaders, and a "discussion" of the issues followed. In reality, only those who were totally on board with the views of the trainers were really able to discuss - others remained silent or tried to find something non-controversial to say when called upon. None of it was tied directly to problems in our specific workplace that had been observed or problems serving the public we are meant to be helping, or even concrete ways we could better do our jobs.

This creates tremendous resentment because basically it appears to be a sort of quasi-religious workplace indoctrination.

And I'll just not again - a lot of these "woke" ideas - which are basically identity politics based approaches, are not even wholly supported by the communities they supposedly represent. This is what is so maddening, if you listened to these people you would think, for example, that BLM style "antiracism" is the only way to not be a racist - that's simply not true. It is one way to think about racism, and lots of people disagree with it.

You might try reading something like Woke Racism by John McWhorter if you feel like you don't quite understand why some people object to this type of approach to race - he has a lot of interviews on youtube at the moment talking about it too as it's a new book.

@VladmirsPoutine

A truly enlightened person can listen to both sides of an argument and accept there are rights and wrongs and different interpretations to every subject.

No they can't. I cannot see any circumstance in which racism is justified. I can't see how it's a debate. Or why we're still having discussions in the media along the lines of 'Does racism still exist in the UK' etc

Ok, you are doing something here that is actually a logical fallacy, and it's the kind of thing that gets people very upset.

Two people are having a disagreement over the question of a certain action or situation or statement being racist.

You think that it is racist, and the other person thinks it is not racist and is a justifiable perspective.

The normal response would be to discuss the merits of both possitions, perhaps to disagree but understand that there may be different viewpoints that are held in good faith.

What you are doing is assuming your own viewpoint, that it is racist, is without question the correct one. It's called "assuming the antecedent" if you want to be technical about it.

What makes you think that your viewpoint is automatically the correct one? Do you not understand that you are as likely to be incorrect as the other person in the discussion? Or that maybe it's your own perspective that's limited?

How can you, when many good people, activists, scholars, members of minority or oppressed communities, disagree with you, that perhaps your assumption that in every case your view of antiracism is right is the worst sort of hubris?

This is what gives people the rage about wokeness, and why the term wokeness took off in the first place - it's these people who seem to be convinced that their perspective is the guiding light of Truth and anyone who disagrees is living in the Darkness.

I don't know what the solution is but it's evident that both camps are utterly entrenched and not willing to find a solution

That simply is not true.

John, I get the feeling you’ve not really got involved with this before and have come in assuming you are looking at two groups who are too passionate to see reason and just need a cool head involved. That’s not an unusual reaction from white middle class men. (I don’t know if that describes you or not, but I’m guessing you are neither female nor trans, so you are, if not that ideal of (ahem, sarcasm alert) neutral, dispassionate and objective observer that is the white middle class male, certainly a person with no skin in the game.)

That, I’m afraid, is not the case here. The background is that, in adopting the position that trans women are women, and therefore that anything female people face due to being female-bodied in a sexist society is not a significant consideration when considering what women need, the woke/TRA side has made any solution other than complete capitulation to the belief that womanhood is a state of mind that must encompass male bodies, male socialisation, male sexual norms and male offending patterns simply impossible, because any solution that differentiates in any way between women with female bodies and women with male bodies breaks the cardinal rule that trans women are women. And this is, of course, where we see the lie of the ideology laid bare, because despite redefining the meaning of “woman” entirely, it yet insists that everything set up under the old, sex-based definition is without change entirely appropriate for a mixed sex group under the new definition.

Two people are having a disagreement over the question of a certain action or situation or statement being racist.

It's almost always white people and tap dancers who want to discuss the rights and wrongs of a racist situation. Take for example Amy Cooper and whether or not Boris Johnson has said racist things. People will argue relentlessly why it wasn't racist, meant something else etc etc. One of my lecturers at uni quoted someone - can't remember who but it goes along the lines of 'the very goal of racism is to keep you from doing your work' in other words it helps white people enormously to keep having these debates because in that time they can waste not only yours, exhaust you, make you doubt yourself but more crucially avoid having to do anything. That's why liberals love this sort of 'debate'. Because they can use their hashtags but know ultimately nothing will change.

To put it very succinctly, any solution to how our differing needs can be met must start with the recognition that we are different, and that that is ok.

@VladmirsPoutine

Two people are having a disagreement over the question of a certain action or situation or statement being racist.

It's almost always white people and tap dancers who want to discuss the rights and wrongs of a racist situation. Take for example Amy Cooper and whether or not Boris Johnson has said racist things. People will argue relentlessly why it wasn't racist, meant something else etc etc. One of my lecturers at uni quoted someone - can't remember who but it goes along the lines of 'the very goal of racism is to keep you from doing your work' in other words it helps white people enormously to keep having these debates because in that time they can waste not only yours, exhaust you, make you doubt yourself but more crucially avoid having to do anything. That's why liberals love this sort of 'debate'. Because they can use their hashtags but know ultimately nothing will change.

This is just untrue. There are plenty os disagreements about the nature of racism among non-white, involved people, and they are often very pertinent to situations where people are being accused of racism by the woke.

Look at the way Ibram Kendi's views on racism have been really repudiated and even seen as themselves deeply racist by other black writers and academics. Kendi's ideas about race are very often the viewpoint that people who agree with identity politics narrative are trying to claim are the only correct ones so it's not even some abstract discussion, it's exactly what people are talking about here.

Or look at the way words to describe groups are called out when there is in fact no consensus within communities about them. I've seen this with several communities where there is significant differences among members about what words to use and which ought to be used, and yet some individuals, often not themselves members, feel that they can call out others as racists for holding precisely the same range of views, or even using the language that is preferred in the community around them.

I've seen people "called out" for arguing that lack of two parent families is an issue behind disparities in African-American families, a position held by a number of prominent black activists, but apparently not ok for any one else to mention even in discussions about disparate outcomes.

There are lots of examples of this kind of thing. And you could turn it around too - look who is often making the claims - people like Robin DeAngelo, a white woman who makes a bundle off or doing workshops, telling other white people that if they don't admit to being a racist they must be a racist.

@SantaClawsServiette

Well put. Woke people consider themselves the spokespeople for the ‘oppressed’. It may be well intentioned, but often the so called disadvantaged do not subscribe to or vote for this vocal minority to represent them. It’s just a political power play on part of the woke. They think they are standing up against injustice, yet they are just creating more problems in then name of social justice but it makes them feel good about themselves.

Or look at the way words to describe groups are called out when there is in fact no consensus within communities about them. I've seen this with several communities where there is significant differences among members about what words to use and which ought to be used

Yes. I'm always suspicious of these people. To simplify it it's like 1000 black people could tell you that non-black people using the n-word is racist. But one black person will tell you their white best friend calls them the n-word all the time and it's a sign of love. Much like Robin DA - there's alot of money to be made for people who position themselves strategically. I don't doubt that there are some Black people who believe racism doesn't exist or that it hasn't had an adverse affect on them - it then however becomes an issue when they invariably get fast tracked to prominent positions and get media slots to proudly proclaim how the UK is a beacon of tolerance. On a side note I have a friend who I went to uni with who's now very popular among certain right-wing circles because she parrots their schtick but more importantly she's a single Black mother so basically their golden goose. Only one of us owns a house, a holiday apartment and 2 range rovers yet we both studied the same thing and had similar career trajectories. I should have been more savvy. I'm going off on a tangent but the problem with doing that is that much like Shaun Bailey found, you'll inevitably be the sacrificial lamb to keep the ship afloat.