The Fundamentals of Being “Woke”, Good or Bad, Why? (1 Viewer)

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    Huntn

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    To be "woke" politically in the Black community means that someone is informed, educated and conscious of social injustice and racial inequality, Merriam-Webster Dictionary states



    By definition “Woke” means awareness, awareness of social injustice and racial inequality. More importantly in my mind as a fiscally moderate Caucasian who leans liberal on social issues, it is vital that we live up to the standards as put into place by our Founding Fathers, equality before the law, equal rights, and equal opportunity, in essence a level playing field for all, the right not to be discriminated against in the public market place or in public education. Btw, by standing by these principles, does this make me a conservative or a liberal? :)

    So why are Conservatives at war against being woke And why ban it in the classroom? How can being educated about our past and social injustice be bad? Is it because:
    • This stuff is all made up?
    • Well it happened but don’t feel comfortable acknowledging it?
    • It is still happening?
    • I don’t want to be blamed for it?
    • It will be used to take away personal advantages?
    • Or it is going to cost me money?
    Imo, the real issue here racial inequality and injustice is that not only is it not made up, it’s not in our past either. It is ongoing and we need face this responsibly.
     
    I've said this before but the right are masters at taking a term and completely perverting and intentionally misconstruing and abusing the meaning of it, to the point where what once was a positive is now a negative and people no longer use the term in it's intended way

    It happened with Political Correctness

    It happened with Social Justice Warrior

    It happened with Critical Race Theory

    It happened to Woke

    I'm sure there are other terms it happened to in the past and have no doubt it will happen again in the future

    and not surprisingly, what do they all have in common?

    They are all about awareness, compassion, understanding, realization of marginalized people

    and the flip side of this, the far right giving negative connotations to terms that should be positive

    I've posted before but if there is a group calling itself the "Patriotic Freedom Group for Liberty & Justice" I know that's a group I want no part of

    When someone says "I believe in freedom" I'll admit that I make some assumptions, namely that they mean either:

    A. "Freedom to say and do whatever I want regardless of rules, regulations or common decency with zero consequences"

    and/or

    B. Freedom to deny others their freedom to live their lives in peace
     
    The recent implosion of Silicon Valley Bank escalated culture war arguments, as some conservative politicians who were already targeting certain investing approaches blamed the bank’s downfall on “woke” practices.


    House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) called SVB “one of the most woke banks” because of its “ESG-type” policies — a reference to environmental, social and corporate governance-driven investing that has been embraced by billion-dollar asset managers and scorned by conservatives of late.


    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, widely believed to be gearing up for a 2024 presidential bid, said Sunday that Silicon Valley Bank’s diversity, equity and inclusion requirements “diverted from them focusing on their core mission.”

    And Monday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson said diversity and inclusion standards are why “big banks are now increasingly incompetent.”……

    The latest in right wing smoke screens, just apply their nonsensical logic to argue that awareness of racial inequality is a great reason to blame a bank for its failure. They’ve turned “awareness” into an exclusive liberal term and have tried to hang an all inclusive evil meaning onto it, in an effort undermine legitimate criticisms of historical racial injustice.

     
    Finally, someone asked the question.

    During a Tuesday interview on The Hill’s online program Rising, conservative author Bethany Mandel was stumped when co-host Briahna Joy Gray pressed her to give a definition of the word “woke,” which has been used incessantly by the right to criticize all things vaguely liberal.

    Mandel spent much of her chat with Gray and libertarian co-host Robby Soave promoting her new book Stolen Youth, which she co-wrote with fellow right-wing columnist (and Ron DeSantis superfan) Karol Markowicz. The book’s premise largely centers on the belief that the far-left has indoctrinated today’s youth with racial ideology, a “victimhood” culture, and “gender madness.”

    Gray, a left-leaning commentator and former Bernie Sanders adviser, argued that there is indeed a recent movement which posits there’s a “cultural cache that’s emerged of hierarchies of oppression” within the education system. At the same time, Gray said she’s seen “frustration” with that language across the political spectrum, and wondered how Mandel sees this solely as “a war” being waged by the left on conservatives.

    “Because framing it that way when I think this is a broad concern that a lot of folks have a problem does also recreate this kind of victim paradigm, where you have people saying we're being under attack by the left instead of kind of coming together and trying to resolve what I think is a broadly understood phenomenon.” the Rising host added.

    While saying she hoped that “parents of all political stripes” would pick up her book, Mandel claimed that “this is sort of a woke reimagining that is very, very, far-left.” Additionally, she asserted that “only seven percent of Americans consider themselves very liberal, and probably fewer of them consider themselves woke.” Gray, however, wasn’t going to just leave it there.

    “What does that mean to you? Would you mind defining woke?” Gray pressed. “It’s come up a couple of times. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.”

    Mandel, unfortunately, was unable to get on that same page.

    “So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um,” the conservative writer stammered before presciently adding: “This is going to be one of those moments that goes viral.”

    A struggling Mandel continued: “I mean, woke is something that's very hard to define, and we've spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and reduce society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. Um, sorry, I—it's hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite.”

    While Gray told Mandel to “take your time,” Soave jumped in to offer his guest a bit of assistance.

    “I mean, everybody is weighing in against wokeness,” Soave declared. “Like we do some of it on this show as well. It’s definitely something you know what it is when you see it.”............


     
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    ……The reason that Mandel and Soave seem to have such a hard time defining “woke” is because the right’s use of the word is amorphous by design. It’s not meant to have a precise meaning, it’s meant to be a loaded catch-all for things they don’t like and a stand-in for slurs they can’t say in public.

    Half the time it’s used, “woke” seems to be a synonym for “black person” or “gay person”. See, for example, the Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler’s recent opinion pieceinsinuating that Silicon Valley Bank collapsed because they had “‘1 Black’, ‘1 LGBTQ+’ and ‘2 Veterans’” on the board.

    Kessler wrote: “I’m not saying 12 white men would have avoided this mess, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.” I wish someone would ask Kessler to define “woke” for us all because he seems happy saying the quiet part out loud.

    The right’s co-opting of the word “woke” and the way it uses it to distort debate and camouflage bigotry is nothing new.

    Conservatives always been very good at wringing words dry of their meaning and repurposing them strategically.

    “The elite”, for example, now means anyone with an education and not billionaires like Donald Trump.

    “Pro-life” means forcing women to give birth. Teaching kids about slavery has been rebranded as “critical race theory”.

    Far too often liberals don’t push back on these phrases and start using them themselves.

    Gray’s interaction with Mandel shows that simply asking conservatives to be clear about what on earth they’re talking about can be surprisingly effective……

     
    Far too often liberals don’t push back on these phrases and start using them themselves.

    This right here! The right wings obsession with anti-woke, CRT, anti-trans, etc. all come from the same place. This was obvious from the very beginning of them popularizing these obsession with repetition. But time after time, liberals have not only taken these right wing obsessions seriously, they've used the terminologies themselves and have gone on their own crusades against it. It's extremely disappointing, because you'd think after so many past instances of the same thing, liberals would learn their playbook. But they keep falling into the same traps.

    I don't understand why so many liberals are scared of actually being liberal.
     
    I don't think the terms in of themselves are relevant at all. It's all about the transformation and narratives behind the terms and how political and social phrases become super-charged in a negative or positive way. We've seen evidence on this board, re: defining or (mis)defining CRT. Over and Over again, the meaning and definition of the term comes up discussion.

    I think CRT, Political Correctness, and now Woke have been successfully warped into meaning things supporters never intended. Woke is just another term for being aware of the history and plight of minority groups. A good example is CRT. The two biggest myths is that CRT is a movement to dismantle the nuclear family and make white people feel guilty about black oppression.

    The key question, therefore, is why the right seeks to change, warp, or otherwise transform the meaning and interpretation of these terms?

    I think the answer is obvious: they oppose what might result in more people being aware, empathetic, or even sympathetic to such groups.

    I'm not sure if there's a connection, but "woke" may have an historical connection to the Wide Awakes. Waking, up or being awake has been a central feature of a few political/social movements.

     
    I don't understand why so many liberals are scared of actually being liberal.
    Posted this a decade ago on PDB
    ======================
    This is not an ideology thread (please don't thread jack it into one)

    This isn't about who's right, who's wrong, who's better or who's worse.

    This is just a question I've wondered about for quite awhile.

    Republican politicians seem to embrace the term "conservative". They revel it. During primaries the candidates have contests over who is the most conservative. Call a republican politician a moderate and you'll get a bunch of denials "Oh no, not me, I'm conservative to the bone"

    On the other hand democrats seem to flee just as much from the label "liberal". It seems to be the kiss of death. They seem to run, hide and deny. Republican gleefully try to paint their opposing party opponents as liberal, who try to excuse and explain that they are nowhere near as liberal as people say they are.

    My question is, why is that? has it always been that way?

    If there is no higher compliment to a republican to be considered conservative, why isn't the same true for Democrats and liberal?

     
    When Republicans use the word "woke," it's a deliberate bit of obfuscation, a way to signal bigotry to their fellow travelers while pretending it's something else to those who call them out for it. But it's also pretty hard to ignore the bullhorn levels of racism that are often embedded in complaints about "woke" culture. When Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., complains that it's "woke" to let Black women sing at the Super Bowl, for example, the only rational conclusion is that it's their skin color that offends her.

    After the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the Republican obsession with blaming everything on "woke" hit a ridiculous new level, as the biggest clowns in the party — who happen to be the agenda-setters for the GOP — rushed forward to say that it was because the bank was "woke." This was met with a cacophony of laughter. How on Earth is a bank "woke" and how would "wokeness" force them to, as happened with SVB, invest too much in bonds that created a liquidation crisis when interest rates rose?

    Even the dunderheads who think Tucker Carlson is a moral authority struggle to buy that one. But rather than abandon this dumb-as-nails talking point, right-wing media has been working overtime trying to backfill the "woke banks" gambit with post hoc rationalizations.

    So far, the efforts to make "woke banks" make sense have been underwhelming. The first pass at it, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal and Donald Trump Jr. was to point to a small handful of bank executives who aren't white men as evidence of "woke." But even for the Fox News crowd, it's hard to pretend that "only white men can bank" isn't straight-up bigotry.

    Rather than abandon this dumb-as-nails talking point, right-wing media has been working overtime trying to backfill the "woke banks" gambit with post hoc rationalizations.
    So pass number two to put some lipstick on this pig was to argue that SVB was "woke" because they supposedly gave money to "Black Lives Matter."

    Jesse Watters of Fox News breathlessly claimed that SVB "donated $74 million to Black Lives Matter." It was a lie that was immediately replicated throughout the right-wing media and by trolling Republicans like Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.

    Obviously, to people outside of the Republican media bubble, this still is a wildly racist argument. But to the right-wing audience, trained by years of disinformation campaigns to believe "Black Lives Matter" is a well-financed group of professional rioters, this was good enough to satisfy their desire to be racist while also denying they're racist.

    It was also a total lie: The amount of money given to "Black Lives Matter" by SVB is zero dollars.

    That Watters and his compatriots are dishonest is self-evident to anyone not living in the Fox News Cinematic Universe. People who live in reality know both that the Black Lives Matter protests were overwhelmingly peaceful and the handful of people who did riot were not funded by any outside groups, much less corporate America...........

     
    It seems to me that the words do not have equal weight
    Posted this a decade ago on PDB
    ======================
    This is not an ideology thread (please don't thread jack it into one)

    This isn't about who's right, who's wrong, who's better or who's worse.

    This is just a question I've wondered about for quite awhile.

    Republican politicians seem to embrace the term "conservative". They revel it. During primaries the candidates have contests over who is the most conservative. Call a republican politician a moderate and you'll get a bunch of denials "Oh no, not me, I'm conservative to the bone"

    On the other hand democrats seem to flee just as much from the label "liberal". It seems to be the kiss of death. They seem to run, hide and deny. Republican gleefully try to paint their opposing party opponents as liberal, who try to excuse and explain that they are nowhere near as liberal as people say they are.

    My question is, why is that? has it always been that way?

    If there is no higher compliment to a republican to be considered conservative, why isn't the same true for Democrats and liberal?

    It seems to me that the labels do not have equal weight, one appeals to me, mine, keeping what I have, vs the other side, we, us, and sharing. If I speak in generalities, the crowd from 60 years that supported traditional conservative policies feel like they worked hard for what they have, made the best out of the system as it existed, while mostly blind to social inequality, the impact of slavery and prejudice. Some elements of conservatism did have a heart and was pragmatic. If I am correct, the idea of Universal Health Care came out of a conservative think tank and was supported by Mitt Romney when he was a governor of Mass. Note, he is now an outsider in his insane party. Kudos to him.

    Traditional liberals mostly believe in the ideals the country was founded upon, at least the standards that were stated, equality before the law and equal opportunity, a key word is opportunity, not a guarantee of equality.

    Based on ideals, IMO Liberals see more clearly the nature of human beings and feel the need to tread more lightly, because appealing to our better nature is a harder sell, than appealing to our selfishness. Based on human nature, the latter seems to be the easier proposition to embrace.
     
    Fred Rogers would’ve turned 95 on Monday. It has been 20 years since he died, but the man who took decades of children through the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, teaching them to respect and love others, remains almost a synonym for kindness.

    He once said, “There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.”

    But the America the creator and namesake of “Mister Rogers' Neighborhood” inhabited is not the America of today. Had he lived to see this moment in our history, I fear his reputation, at least in Republican circles, would’ve been less beloved and more “woke.”

    Consider the way Rogers would close each episode of his long-running children's program: “There's only one person in this whole world like you. And people can like you exactly as you are.”

    In an era of snarling Republican politicians like former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a sentiment like that might be seen as weak. Or woke. It sounds in line with the “radical leftist ideology” the two men are incessantly going on about.

    In a video statement released Thursday, Trump, vying for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, described a swath of his fellow Americans, namely liberals, as “Marxists who would have us become a godless nation worshiping at the altar of race and gender and environment.”............

    And according to researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, since September 2020, more than 200 local, state and federal entities have introduced more than 600 "anti-Critical Race Theory bills, resolutions, executive orders, opinion letters, statements, and other measures."

    Those who are “different” – transgender people, immigrants, people of color who want history classes to reflect their experiences as well – are treated as others. Republicans write laws to make them outliers, build walls to keep them out and chastise teachers – teachers, of all people – who try to help children understand ideas like diversity and equity and inclusion.

    Those three words, now treated as one swear word – DEI! — by people like DeSantis, encapsulate much of what Mister Rogers believed and encouraged.

    “We want to raise our children so that they can take a sense of pleasure in both their own heritage and the diversity of others,” he said.............

    I miss Mister Rogers. I miss his quiet kindness, his humility and the clarity with which he helped us see right from wrong.

    But if he were still with us, I’d hate to see what the right-wing media and the DeSantises and Trumps of the world might do to him. I’d hate to see a man preaching decency ridiculed.

    Though I can posit how he would respond, because he once said: “The only thing evil can't stand is forgiveness.”

    Happy birthday, Mister Rogers. We’ll keep trying to do better..........


     
    uhoh



    Conservative author Bethany Mandel, whose new book is centered around the term "woke," struggled to define it during an interview. CNN anchor Abby Phillip and the "Inside Politics" panel discuss the debate surrounding the term
     
    The term "woke" appears to be immune to all definition, at least by conservative commentators.

    Fox News' Dana Perino, a co-host of round-table talk show "The Five", stumbled through her own attempt to explain woke, eventually invoking the Supreme Court's obscenity observation – "I know it when I see it" – and likening it more to a "feeling."

    "One of the things about woke ... can you explain it to your mom?" Ms Perino said, before recounting how Donald Trump used to get standing ovations for deriding the idea of "political correctness."

    She then made the obscenity comparison, saying woke is "sort of like the Supreme Court definition of pornography, you know it when you see it."

    "Democrats want to get you in an argument where if you have to define 'wokeism' as if the Webster's Dictionary is defining it. That's not what it is," she said. "It could be feeling, it could be a sense."

    The discussion was sparked after former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki explored on her new MSNBC show how consevatives’ demonisation of ideas they considered woke appears to have backfired in the midterm elections and may do so again in 2024.

    Ms Perino’s argument that wokeness is more of a vibe that causes a person to put pronouns in their Twitter bio might be less notable if Republican candidates and incumbents were not actively running campaigns based on anti-woke culture war rhetoric.

    Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis – who are expected to be the primary contenders in the 2024 Republican presidential primary – both frequently use the word "woke" in their campaign speeches, always as a term of derision……

     
    Never forget, Trump sold "Woke" shirts in 2020.

    Then, "woke" just became the new term for "politically correct" for people that don't like big words.
     

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