Does “woke” have a meaningful impact on your life?

Context: I’m outside the Traditional West for lack of a better term and all of my engagement of woke/PC/cancel culture/whatever (pick your favorite) is pretty much voluntary.

To me, it’s pretty much the same as bar banter. Like talking about the weather or baseball.

Does it matter to you?

 

Yes, because people who use the term “woke” are frequently deploying it as a euphemism to refer to my increased visibility and all the ways they think that visibility is harming society and destroying their culture. And consequently they feel they need to address this harm by making it harder for me to get the drugs I need to survive if they’re political, or else by shooting up a school if they aren’t.

 

Other than the occasional bout of annoyance I have to experience when someone starts whining about it IRL, not really. I chalk this up to my uncanny ability to get through a work day without using a racial, ethnic, or misogynist slur to refer to any of my coworkers.

 

What schlaufuchs said.

The people who denounce "woke" see the simple fact of my existence as wokeism, and part of fighting wokeism to them is making people like me stop being part of their life.

Anti-wokeism is a direct threat to me, whether from Stalinists on the left or Fascists on the right, or even just hardcore centrist who think my existence rock their boat too much,

 

Evie, is it okay to denounce deliberate confusion? This use of a perfectly ordinary word confuses the hell out of me because the other thread went on and on and on and I never did understand it.

Your existence is fine. I value you as an acquaintance with whom I can argue about politics and history, then have a good conversation about music and wish each other well. The rest of your life is your business and has no impact on mine. Labels get in the way, especially the ones that seem to have whatever definition the speaker decides it has.

I woke up this afternoon, after having slept more hours than usual. That's my definition.

And in the other thread, every instance of "wokery" I saw made me think of the study of woks. As in stir-fry.

 

It doesn't affect me beyond needing to deal with older people raging against it in the context of my work. Granted, this is only the case because I closely guard my seclusion and curate my environment, and have the ability to do so.

Anti-woke people would put me and everyone I care about on the chopping block either because we're directly in their lines of sight or ardent allies, so in that way, the concept is extremely meaningful. However, my ability to "wage battle" is limited, so I compartmentalize as required to maintain my sanity.

 

Two very different things. I'm talking about the people who denounce what they perceive as a "woke" ideology. If you want to denounce the confusion over what woke actually means (which these people are often deliberately entertaining by lumping a lot of unrelated things they don't like together), that's a whole other thing and I have no problem with that.

 

Thread winner

Don't forget having fun with the little things.
There are countless depressing topics "available" to pick up every day, especially with everything being just one click away now.
Thinking don't ruin my mood with this has become a valuable trait.

 

What is the question really?

Does me being awake to the inequality and injustice in the world have a meaningful impact on my life?

I am tempted to say of course, but actually on a day to day level I am not sure. I do not actually do much these days and I am pushed to think of an actual occasion in the last year or so when I would have acted differently. It is such a "what I am" thing it is hard to say though.

Does other people being awake to the inequality and injustice in the world have a meaningful impact on my life?

What are we talking about here? The existence of the left wing of politics? The actual enacted laws that attempt to tackle inequality and injustice? I am not sure, but I am sure the world would be different if everyone from Marx to Chomsky had not existed.

Does the right labeling complaints about the inequality and injustice in the world as "woke" have a meaningful impact on my life?

While it seems that the right is preoccupied with the demonisation of "woke", I have not doubt that in the absence of that particular label to rally around they would find some equivalent terror to rant about and the actual label has no effect. So I think no on this one.

 

i don't know anyone in real life or online who has used this word in years, so no

 

I don’t think it has that much impact on me. I go back and forth between Kurdistan - which is very unwoke and New York - which varies a lot. I don’t normally get in conversations about politics with people and right now I’m in a working class mostly black and Latino neighborhood.

And even though I work in the news media we cover Middle East politics mostly where this doesn’t come up as much.

I worry about the effects of political correctness in stifling free speech and the current trend of over-emphasizing people’s “marginalized” identities. The people I know who are the most marginalized struggle with drug addiction and a felony record but they never call themselves that. But it’s also easy enough for me just to ignore the culture wars if I want to.

Also, why isn’t it wokism? Doesn’t the -e get removed before an -ism? Like racism.

 

@Samson I would say I’m defining it within the scope of the “culture wars,” so it’s meant as a more open than closed question. What comedians think they can say onstage, backlash, however it’s framed, I don’t see it being something that really matters to me.

There are no goon squads of brownshirts going around and bonking people on the head for being un-PC.

 

Really not clear how to begin answering this lol

I don't spend a lot of time with weirdo right wing Americans who use this AAVE slang as the latest code for those views, so I very rarely hear the term in normal world.

 

So weird that yet again its an AAVE term that's under scrutiny, it really is just another front in the cyclical culture war against anyone who isn't straight, white, male, cis, Christian etc

 

In this case I guess it comes to "compared to what"? Would my life be different if media was presented with the challenges faced by say Charlie Chaplin for his views, or that faced by Life of Brian? I think people are more free these days to say stuff, but I would like to see some objective research into the matter.

 

Wokeism bothers me because I normally see it used as a bludgeon by ardent overzealous authoritarian left wing keyboard warriors (aka *SJWs, Tumblrinas, etc). Saying that I’m evil and a problematic oppressor just because I’m a white straight male.

The last time I’ve seen moral overzealous busybodies we’re from the right Christian fundamentalists during the saitanic panic of the 80s and 90s claiming video games are the tools of the Devil. Now I see it coming from the left (largely from what most term as wokesters/*SJWs/Tumblrinas) decrying video games as problematic as illustrated in the comic below:



Presently, I only denounce woke/wokery/wokeism/wokeness in the context of people displaying a cultisth behavior that advocates for social vengeance at the expense of straight white males and anyone that doesn’t kowtow to the ideology. I view SVWs doing more harm and hampering the efforts of people who are reasonable and civil, advocating for equal treatment for our fellow people and that SVWs are a boon to the right (as illustrated on YouTube with SJW Cringe Compilation #1433 or Ben Shapiro OWNS SJW with FACTS and LOGIC!).

*To be Frank. The overzealous Social Justice Warriors/SJWs, should really be called Social Vengeance Warriors.

 

In my experience (as a straight white male) this is a right-wing stereotype of more nuanced criticism. It's hard to take seriously from the offset (as someone who's been on Twitter for a depressing number of years), because in the few cases it can be evidenced (in my anecdotal experience, vs. yours) a) it's often the result of an interaction, i.e. the person being called it would've said some stuff first, and b) it's nearly always actually something else that's being said.

So, assuming good faith and your written experience, I have to ask: to what extent is your anecdotal experience reflective of reality as a whole, do you think? For example, my experience is just as anecdotal, but I exist in that space. "SJWs" or whatever other cute names you want to assign them. So arguably if I was an evil and problematic oppressor just because I'm straight, white and a cis male . . . why would I be tolerated? And why has nobody told me that?

tl;dr: "woke" doesn't have a meaningful impact on my life outside of the Internet, but given my politics and left-leaning position on subjects I find myself unfairly characterised (as something like an "SJW", for example) for simply existing. Which is a very minor annoyance in the grand scheme of things considering the very real impact on marginalised demographics who often find themselves the actual target of this modern backlash against anything remotely progressive.