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- Mar 6, 2017
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Part 9
What’s telling is that the exhaustion seems to come from moderates and leftists themselves as often as from conservatives — as if there’s a shared agreement that embodying wokeness is a kind of trap, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on.
Many people across the ideological spectrum seem wary of the performative semantics associated with “wokeness,” and the way that performance can undermine the sincerity of arguments being made in support of equality. “I always saw it as a tad performative,” Valdary told me, decrying what she described as “the unwieldy jargon of self-identifying as ‘woke.’”
“I think it’s mostly performative, and at best, tells me nothing about a person’s ideas re: racial justice,” she said. “It feels like a status-seeking label as opposed to a mode of being [that is] seeking positive change.”
Prior told me she likewise was leery of the ostentatious behavior associated with “woke” — but was more distressed by the increasing tendency of conservatives to use “woke” as an insult. “I have had private conversations with pastors who have used it as a term of insult,” she said, “because it’s hard — it is hurtful to use a term that is so meaningful to people and to use it in an entirely different way, it’s just simply wrong.”
“On the one hand,” miles-hercules said, the term “has been commodified in marketing to connote a host of associations to things like diversity, inclusion, and so on, in order to turn a profit by appealing to progressive sensibilities. Additionally, it has been plundered into conservative and right-wing discourse as a means of mocking and satirizing the politics of those on the other side of the proverbial aisle.”
Yet across a broad range of political beliefs, one recurring theme is that “wokeness” has demonstrable social, even quasi-religious, power. The writer James Lindsay has argued exhaustively that “wokeness” is essentially a religion where faith in social justice ideology stands in for belief in a deity, and that regular attendance at social justice protests has replaced the role of religious rituals for many progressives.
Valdary likewise spoke of being “woke” in a figurative sense — as an awakening akin to the Enlightenment.
“My sense is that by ‘woke,’ what people mean is a new form of being ‘enlightened,’ repackaged for our modern era,” she said. “The Enlightenment was meant to be an era of new progressive ideas, and folks fancied themselves awakened by new ideas and knowledge.” Similarly, “people today who identify as woke also see themselves as having been awakened to a new set of ideas, value systems, and knowledge. The mode and the values are different, but the sensibility — the idea that previously you were blind, and now you can see — is the same.”
(vide tweets and videos online)
www.vox.com
What’s telling is that the exhaustion seems to come from moderates and leftists themselves as often as from conservatives — as if there’s a shared agreement that embodying wokeness is a kind of trap, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on.
Many people across the ideological spectrum seem wary of the performative semantics associated with “wokeness,” and the way that performance can undermine the sincerity of arguments being made in support of equality. “I always saw it as a tad performative,” Valdary told me, decrying what she described as “the unwieldy jargon of self-identifying as ‘woke.’”
“I think it’s mostly performative, and at best, tells me nothing about a person’s ideas re: racial justice,” she said. “It feels like a status-seeking label as opposed to a mode of being [that is] seeking positive change.”
Prior told me she likewise was leery of the ostentatious behavior associated with “woke” — but was more distressed by the increasing tendency of conservatives to use “woke” as an insult. “I have had private conversations with pastors who have used it as a term of insult,” she said, “because it’s hard — it is hurtful to use a term that is so meaningful to people and to use it in an entirely different way, it’s just simply wrong.”
“On the one hand,” miles-hercules said, the term “has been commodified in marketing to connote a host of associations to things like diversity, inclusion, and so on, in order to turn a profit by appealing to progressive sensibilities. Additionally, it has been plundered into conservative and right-wing discourse as a means of mocking and satirizing the politics of those on the other side of the proverbial aisle.”
Yet across a broad range of political beliefs, one recurring theme is that “wokeness” has demonstrable social, even quasi-religious, power. The writer James Lindsay has argued exhaustively that “wokeness” is essentially a religion where faith in social justice ideology stands in for belief in a deity, and that regular attendance at social justice protests has replaced the role of religious rituals for many progressives.
Valdary likewise spoke of being “woke” in a figurative sense — as an awakening akin to the Enlightenment.
“My sense is that by ‘woke,’ what people mean is a new form of being ‘enlightened,’ repackaged for our modern era,” she said. “The Enlightenment was meant to be an era of new progressive ideas, and folks fancied themselves awakened by new ideas and knowledge.” Similarly, “people today who identify as woke also see themselves as having been awakened to a new set of ideas, value systems, and knowledge. The mode and the values are different, but the sensibility — the idea that previously you were blind, and now you can see — is the same.”
(vide tweets and videos online)
How being “woke” lost its meaning
Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war.
www.vox.com
