Please help me define 'wokeism'

[BlessingKalmly]

This isn't a thread for making jokes, or at least that isn't my intention...

I just can't seem to totally pinpoint the definition, so that is comprehensive...

What is woke?

Personally, I find 'Woke' can be quite a useful short-hand way to describe certain contemporary american 'progressive' articles of faith/items; namely the politics of 'Intersectionality' with its emphais on oppressed/oppressor groupings and 'identities'; Critical Race Theory - which postulates whiteness itself ( amongst other aretefacts) as an oppressive force - leading to DEI policies and practices/Defund the Police etc; and 'Queer Theory - from which the concept of Gender Identity arose

It used to have a meaning, now it's nothing more than an expression of the user's contempt for the person/people they're talking about. I recently saw groyper racists being described as "woke" by a RW Christian Republican.🙄

That's a thing now, and might fall with the concept of the Woke Right:

How the Woke Right Replaced the Woke Left

https://archive.ph/yeAG8

Briefly, if you look at the list of harmful manifestations in my post above, they can apply equally to the Right and to the Left. No one side has a monopoly on being an arse.

Thanks @nauticant.

I would define woke as a word said with degree of scorn, describing something that previously would have been quite liberal , but has now been a victim of overuse or hyper inflated language

Previous it might have been used to describe progressive things like black rights and gay rights. Now the people who describe themselves as woke are pushing a racist anti-white ideology, and a homophobic anti-LGB ideology. And a pro-men anti-women ideology as well.

The left used to say "we believe in class struggle, in other words we want to reduce economic inequality. We also want equal rights for minorities".

The woke left now says "We need to uplift the most oppressed, and that can be done by stomping on their oppressors. Black rights means reparations and positive discrimination (ie anti-white racism). Transgender people are the most oppressed therefore a straight man's right to date a lesbian trump LGB or women's rights. Meanwhile we kinda want a bit more economic equality, but trans rights aare more important."

If I was rich and selfish and thought the left were utter morons I would have invented woke in order to destroy any hope of reducing inequality.

The idea that someone with a penis can be a lesbian is a woke idea. I am not sure that any time in 1960 to 2015 the idea that someone with a penis can be a lesbian would have been regarded as liberal. I think it would have been regarded as utterly insane (and maybe also regressive and bigoted if anyone could have been persuaded to take the idea seriously enough to actually deconstruct it properly).

I am not sure that any time in 1960 to 2015 the idea that someone with a penis can be a lesbian would have been regarded as liberal.

It was, in fact, the domain of extremely sexist and homophobic men claiming that a lesbian would actually enjoy sex with the right man, or people stating this ironically to take the piss out of the idea.

When I looked in t up on the OED I was quite surprised the definition didn’t have the pejorative sense, which I think has definitely gained more traction

If I was rich and selfish and thought the left were utter morons I would have invented woke in order to destroy any hope of reducing inequality.

Some of us suspect this is exactly what has happened.

This is what I've come up with: "Wokeism is an obsession with identity politics to the exclusion of all other issues, and is characterised by an obsession with symbols (eg taking the knee, rainbow crossings, remembrance days) rather than material change, and a vicious intolerance towards those who dissent from its orthodoxies."

One conspiracy theory I rather like is that big business was rattled by the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the in-roads it was making, and the pivot to enthusiastically embrace many "woke" ideas was in response to being painted as the bad guys and to "woke-wash" their activities and branding.

It means whatever the “you can’t say anything nowadays” people think it means. Not a word anyone with half a brain would use.

I like that but not sure it covers everything. (Not saying I can do better).

What I don;t understand is why "working class" or "poor" or "ordinary" or "average or below income" aren't regarded as "identities", and why someone woke does not say "people suffering in an unequal society are the biggest identity group, and being poor is worse than being a woman or black or Jewish or gay, so as people obsessesed with identity politics why don't we focus on economically underprivileged people as the most important identity group?"

The answer has to be something to do with it being imposed by the rich, or perhaps the fact that the people pushing woke are simply relatively privileged middle class people, or utter grifters, and they all care about individual rights and freedoms much more than they do left wing politics.

I suppose mostly it is the new twenties answer to ‘political correctness gone mad’ but with an extra dimension of exploitation? I think some people when describing media works as woke (eg dr who under Chris chibnalls tenure) are using it in that sense.

i certainly use it as an insult, if I say that someone is so woke they’re positively an insomniac I mean that they want to be regarded as right thinking so much they’ve forgotten how to think critically and there is so much virtue signalling there is no room for anything else .

its a shame it’s moved away from the meaning of being aware of and awake to social injustice

But it's more than that. Some part of 'woke' seems to require a limitation of freedom of speech. (This is where the feelings > logic part comes in). You can't say something factual because it might hurt someones feelings.

This is more projection of 'hurt feelings' on the 'news' of white culpability in terms of the historical facts of systemic racism, colonialism & Imperialism. There are none so hurt as those 'learning' about their ancestral 'shortcomings' & its long lasting damaging consequences on modern society so much so they actively have engaged in state censorship of educational institutions teaching it like Florida…no doubt a first amendment violation of government censorship of academic freedom of speech.

'Hurt feelings' is simply a right wing political rhetorical device weaponised to delegitimise the real world harms from hate speech. It's a strawman designed to diminish consequences to one of 'offense'.

I think it just means recognising social injustice and seeking to redress it. Obviously, people have different ideas about what is just in society, and what, if any, action should be taken, and on who's behalf.
People who think that others are seeing injustice where none exists, or disagree with what they want to do to address it, or the group/s they support, tend to label those people as 'woke'.
You will never find a consensus of definition of 'woke' because it varies dependent on the stance of the person using the term.

'Hurt feelings' is simply a right wing political rhetorical device weaponised to delegitimise the real world harms from hate speech. It's a strawman designed to diminish consequences to one of 'offense'.

I disagree, you seem to be saying that as a deliberate mechanism of DARVO intended to police the language of those who just disagree with
you.
Same as “Right Wing” is a rhetorical device to signal or should I say “dog whistle” that the content of someone’s speech is to be ignored and preferably not read or engaged with in good faith.

None of the woke people I know ever seek to redress social injustice. They just go on marches as a hobby- they don’t ever want to actually engage with the political system and certainly have no desire stand for election or do the hard work. Much prefer to stand on the sidelines and whinge about how awful “they”’are.

The difference is I'm speaking factually. Harms do occur & the Right do employ this device for the purposes of diminishing that harms occur.

Why do you want to define it? If it’s because you’ve been challenged to define it as part of an argument, do not under any circumstances get sucked into trying to do so. You will get nowhere – that challenge is always a tactic either to gotcha by identifying exceptions, or to portray you as stupid by refusing to understand simple concepts. Stick with ‘I know it when I see it’.

If it’s in good faith, some of the definitions on this thread are pretty good. Personally I’d favour ‘adherence to current progressive causes, whatever those may be from time to time’. Nominally it’s about achieving equality at group levels, but the key thing imo is that it mutates as convenience demands.

They may well believe the marches are doing something. Just as people throughout history have marched in protest against something or in the hopes of gaining something. Including women, for the vote and for our employment rights and today, to protect sex based rights.
You are dismissing as doing it for a hobby and stereotyping as 'whingers' those marching for causes you disagree with. Which was entirely my point. The only difference between being 'woke' or 'a bigot' is whether the person labelling you agrees with you.

I think there it's not that systematic, but it includes a lot of beliefs that have a kind of broad relation.

The term itself did, as previously said, have a differernt meaning. But it's now being used in what is essentially an ironic way, for people who think they see the truth more than others, but are in fact blinkered and blind.

So things I would put together:
They have a kind of neo-marxist hierarchy of oppression. The most oppressed are always correct about their perceptions. Or at least they are always to be given priority.
They are usually race essentialists to some degree.
They have a very unsophisticated approach to advantage and disadvantage, and human psychology more generally.
The struggle with correlation vs causation in social sciences.
They believe people's identity is constructed, but also what makes them real, and can only be defined internally.

Is the use of Left Wing in discussion also a rhetorical device to signal or should I say “dog whistle” that the content of someone’s speech is to be ignored and preferably not read or engaged with in good faith?

Authoritarian virtue signalling