Prof Stock in The Times today

[JoyousAsOtters]

Share Token:
Turn of the woke tide will leave many stranded

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5e1c3d76-e78d-44de-8305-422e04192356?shareToken=b54e3055ae593d8b7887aa1ad9beca8c

For those considering Stock's use of "Woke", I find a definition that has reasonable utility would be "intersectional Marxist praxis", i.e. taking the class struggle of Marxism and applying it to the various categories of identity politics.

@MarieDeGournay

I too worry about criticising racism et al in the same breath as gender ID, but overall I worry that Woke IDPol is inherently divisive, and the "class struggle" requires the adherents to be in conflict in order to benefit their class.

We would be better working together for equality, not equity.

I agree with her point that it’ll all disappear as quickly as it appeared in workplaces.
anecdotally we have gone from celebrating every day of whatever however obscure on the staff intranet to a more corporate looking one with just work themed related items promoted and that has been in the last couple of months.
also I agree pronounces are disappearing on emails. I haven’t seen one in the wild for a while now and I always notice.

Let's destroy a brilliant article with nit picking, designed to dilute the message

I think for my workplace the peak was the fuss over the Wembley arch and the back track of the FA , that was brought up in an all staff meeting and staff suggested we should be as neutral as possible too with lots of general agreeing.

And we have a very very sensible CEO

100% agreement from me, MariedeGournay.

Racism is real, not made up, for one thing.
And it's the footballers who take the decision, reviewed at the start of every season, to take the knee. It isn't a corporate gesture that's forced on them. It's a personal matter for a lot of them - run-ins with the police as youngsters and having friends who have been badly treated - these are part of their lives.
The women take the knee too - initially it was "anti-LGBT (wince) discrimination". That was of course also a very personal matter as most of them have been victims of homophobia as well as sexism. It's something that they want to do and feel very strongly about. More recently, taking the knee has become a protest against "all forms of discrimination", which is a bit woolly but I think they wanted to include racism and sexism as well as homophobia. I wish the women would wake up about the T, but I can't fault either the men or women footballers for making this gesture, political or not.

Edited for clarity

But it’s regressive to throw out all discourse associated with non-normative identities/sexualities, or frame them all as categorically useless/empty. Their foundations are gay rights and women’s rights, and intersectional feminism.

I'm not sure about this. I think framing sexual orientation or race as identities is where it all started to go wrong. Being a woman, or Asian, or homosexual or disabled or a child is what you are, not who you are.
You can say for example that being British and having Irish roots is part of your identity, but "identity" in the way it's used for special identities falls into a different category. Whatever your reasons for adopting an identity, it's something that isn't you. It's who you are not what you are. We already accepted identities in the first sense - but in the second sense we have moved away from reality and objectivity. And then the identity politics label (identity in the second sense) got slapped onto real axes of oppression. It's a bit like the forced teaming of LGB with T.

So gay rights, women's rights and intersectional feminism meetings and discussions were probably where this started, but I think adopted identities are a different animal altogether. Now, I'm not a philosopher or a gender studies graduate or anything so I hope I've been able to make myself understood here.

Racism is real, sexism is real, homophobia is real, etc. However the neat, geometric analytic model of intersecting oppressions is crass. Reality doesn’t work like that.

For example, it takes binaries female/male, black/white, poor/rich, etc and starts to apply maths to it to create hierarchies. Just like 2x2=4.

So white x male = double oppressor points.
Black x gay = double oppressed points.

Belle Hooks (I’m not going to entertain her nonsense of avoiding capital letters to avoid their oppressing the lower case ones) talked about these kinds of nodes where a person can oppress someone according to sex in one situation but oppress them in another situation according to race. It’s hard to get to the bottom of, but she had a dynamic model, rather than the static, geometric one.

The problem is, most things aren’t binary are they? Sex really is the only binary.

People who identify as ‘Black’ might have a white parent, for example.

Some things can be concealed, for example someone might be a closeted homosexual, so no one could know enough to oppress them for their sexual orientation.

That’s the problem with ‘woke’ it is too neat an idea, which doesn’t actually map onto reality.

What a brilliant, well written coherent article.

Love Prof Stock.

She stood up and out early on. As a result she got kicked out of her job at the uni, and ‘cancelled’ by hundreds if not thousands of utterly moronic people, who were incapable of critical and logical thinking.

Fab article.

Quite. 🙄

My extensive reading of spy stories tells me that spooks always have a few spare identities for professional purposes, so a varied range of pronouns would seem fitting.

That's not what Stock is saying. She's saying there's something wrong with HR departments.

I didn't see any nit picking. I saw a lot of admiration for the article and respect for the writer, and a small number of sincere questioning comments. Didn't see any nit-picking, though. Did I miss something?

Probably