[quote NecessaryScene]They are desperate to be anti-racist, to be understanding to the poor gender-confused people who have been hiding for so long, and the rest. They have no clue that their assumptions about non-white people are often quite stereotyped and a little patronizing, or that they don't get gender theory and some of their ideas are actually considered transphobic.
I always thought this was kind of more of a US thing, but I guess it happens elsewhere.
Was watching John McWhorter yesterday, and he's quite fed up with this - his new book is "Woke Racism".
JM: Woke racism is that there's a certain kind of Woke person who feels that it's not only about being leftistly informed, but that there's this basic proposition that we must be primarily focused on overturning power differentials, and especially what they call white supremacy. That that must be the focus of intellectual, artistic and moral endeavour, and if you're not doing that then you are evil and you should be chased out of the public square; you should lose your job; you should be shamed.
That's a kind of Woke person. With that kind of person they're so committed to this basic display that they know what racism is, that it's become the heartbeat of a religion. Very much a religion. That has become so important that even when they do things and stick up for things that hurt black people, they don't pay attention and they don't care, because what they really care about is showing that they know racism exists, because that shows that they're good people.
So it ends up being unintentional, but it is a Woke racism, and this book has been written to blow the whistle on it.
Interviewer: It seems like there's an inherent connection with virtue signalling there, if the reason that people are prepared to take a narrative over the top of its actual impacts, the reason for that is that they're concerned with how they're signalling to the world at large.
JM: I would even put it as the virtue signalling has become a religion instead of just something that people do idly, and it's really scary to see because people will fiercely virtue signal and claim that what they're doing is creating social justice. They're claiming that it's for other people, but they're much less concerned with the other people than they really would be if we hadn't gone from politics to a religion.
(You see similar dynamics for TRAs - and that's possibly the dominant form of that behaviour in the UK, rather than using race)
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Joan Didion wrote a brilliant and concise article about morality back in 1965 that calls out virtual signally, I read it as a teen. The line ‘the ethic of conscience is inherently insidious’ always stuck with me.