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How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

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Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#761

Post by lovich »

cloudfifty wrote: post #730
sgregnt wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK The core is freedom, i.e. a lack of coercion of any kind. If, to be yourself, you need to claim someone else property, then Libertrarians would say it goes against the core principles of liberty, because to execute this claim you exercise coertion. But as long as you do not exert coercion on no one else, you're free to be yourself anyway you like.

There nothing "freedom" about some sole family owning the only water supply generation after generation or whatever dystopian scenario that libertarianism likely would bring about. In practice it's just a dismantling of democracy in favour of feudalistic power through wealth and property.

No don’t you see, by virtue of the free market, someone will innovate around the need for water!

Then they will hold a monopoly over necessary resources for a few generations until someone innovates around them.

You have to realize it’s a good thing to see others go without just to make sure I never have to share my excess wealth /s

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#762

Post by ModernMech »

fallingknife wrote: post #585
thurn wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not think there is a difference between 'you should follow my religion' and e.g. 'you should use neutral pronouns to make other people more comfortable?' The later isn't about some fundamental belief, it's really just an extension of a concept that has existed for thousands of years -- politeness

Since when did "politeness" mean you have to do what other people tell you? If English people demanded that we spell color like "colour" because seeing it without the u made them uncomfortable, the correct response would be to tell them to fuck off. I don't see why it's any different with people demanding their own pronouns

Because when a specific person asks you to refer to them in a particular way, it’s polite to acquiesce. When you call someone something they don’t like, they will respond by not liking you. If someone asks you to refer to them as “they”, and you tell them to “fuck off”, you’re not going to have a good relationship with that person.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#763

Post by nullc »

gavinray wrote: post #721
howinteresting wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a good thing for the trans and nonbinary employees at your former workplace.

Why is this getting downvoted? This is a legitimate issue, and I'm not even the political/social-justice type. (I don't mean the company forcing putting pronouns in your username, but for trans/non-binary people to put it in their profile name) Had an instance at a job once where someone joined, I spoke with them and they were really nice + helpful. Maybe 2 months later, I went looking for them and they didn't seem t…

I've heard from more than one transgendered person that passed that they felt that it outs them as transgendered to go around labeling pronouns.

Many people, including those who are not transgendered, are also uncomfortable with being forced to hyper-identify with their gender. For many their gender is just a small aspect of them, and especially in a professional context where their gender has no role being forced to put on a gender-show feels sexually invasive.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#764

Post by nonameiguess »

DethNinja wrote: post #680

I think people are over-analysing this issue here at HN. It is far better for upper class to ensure that people discuss and focus on issues like gender and skin colour than the class differences. Hence, they ensured that this is the issue plebs would hear all over on the media and shift their attention from class divides to gender and skin colour.

This is true I suspect, but as siblings have noted, it doesn't require reifying the "upper class" as some decision making entity that is doing this on purpose. It's just that discrete sectors of the "left" push both social-identity based and class-based critiques of inequality. Both of these get broad pushback from the political right, but identity-based inequality remediation is generally acceptable to business interests, who are far less likely to care and may even largely be socially liberal, cosmopolitan, and urbane. Start trying to remove class distinctions and alleviate economic inequality, on the other hand, and now you're a threat both to the political right and to business interests that otherwise don't give a crap about politics.

Maybe somewhat ironically, though economic leftism or at least Marxism certainly started in academia (Marx himself being a scholar), as far as I know, the recent push for wokeness and the term "woke" itself arose originally from AAVE in the 1930s and became popular more recently thanks to Black Twitter. It did not come from academia, and it doesn't seem like the form it has taken in academia is anywhere near what the original proponents had in mind.

Lead Belly was singing "stay woke" back in 1938 and he was not talking about intersectionality and transgenderism.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#766

Post by Msw242 »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #434
Msw242 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is number 1, baybeeee

https://youtu.be/4fTkA3dvpPM?t=1m35s

The irony of using an American cultural artifact to speak for you on why you don't think America is number 1 baybee.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#767

Post by rayiner »

shadowgovt wrote: post #601
frankbreetz wrote: post #589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent said in his comment, the teachings made his brown skinned child feel inferior, and he didn't feel this way as a child with the old way of teaching.

I see. The pedagogy is flawed if it's raising that question without answering it, but not for raising the question at all; the unfortunate truth of at least living in the US is she's going to deal with a lot of assholes who believe those sorts of things. It's not at all inappropriate to prepare students for that by arming them with better answers. I also went to school in Virginia. The old way of teaching (at least i…

Do you think my progressive Maryland school is throwing “skin color is really important in society” while leaving “but all skin colors are equal” out of the discussion?

But we’re dealing with kids who haven’t yet been socialized with the ideal of color blindness, like you and I. At the same time, they don’t take what teachers say at face value.

Teachers say “skin color is really important” and “America is systemically racist against dark skinned people.” Teachers can say “but all skin colors are equal” but that isn’t necessary what kids take away. What do they mean by “equal?” Is it a euphemism, like so many others we use? Is it moral equivalence rather than literal equality? At the same time, teachers are saying people with different skin colors are different—the kids are taught to celebrate their diversity. And why would so many people think people with dark skin are inferior if there wasn’t some truth to that? You can’t tell second graders that skin color is a big deal but also not a big deal.

Also, the premise isn’t true. I grew up in Virginia when it was a red state. I went to college at Georgia Tech, where most of my classmates were from red parts of the south. But I’ve only ever been called a racial slur twice, both times by homeless people who weren’t white.

Telling brown kids that society is systemically racist against them when it isn’t true does harm. It divides them from their white peers and makes them look for racism where it might not exist.

The TV show “White Lotus” actually has a great take on this. Native Hawaiian girl goes to elite school and visits a Hawaiian resort with her friend’s wealthy white parents. She’s learned CRT education at her college and become woke. She convinces a native Hawaiian hotel worker to ignore his moral compass by telling him to steal her friend’s family’s jewelry because after all white people stolen Hawaii from people like him. He gets arrested and it ruins his life. And she strains her relationship with her white friend, who genuinely cared about her as a person. As the parent of a brown girl the show articulated exactly what I’m afraid of with CRT education.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#768

Post by mindslight »

bequanna wrote: post #696
zpeti wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this laissez fair approach is the exact opposite of modern wokeness. It’s their way or it’s attacks and cancellation. If you’re an oppressor class you have almost no way to be forgiven. The easiest way to show this is just ask some woke stars on their views of libertarianism, which is literally to let everyone be themselves.

Indeed. The woke are experts at placing people into endless categories and determining which is “good” or “bad”. Which are the “oppressors” and the “victims”. Listen to their rhetoric, it is pretty much the opposite of live and let live. One of the more ridiculous ideas to come out of this is that “everything is a human construct”. For example, it appears to be a woke idea that mathematics, science is some human (mor…

While I agree with your narrative, it also seems like a perfect straw man. It seems like the world has gone crazy, but via the web we're exposed to every crazy thing.

I don't know how to reconcile these two things. There are surely people stuck in environments for whom it completely describes their experience. But like the wokeness narratives themselves, there are also going to be people facing adversity for other reasons who end up misattributing their difficulties to "wokeness".

Perhaps it's just the same social bullying behavior there has always been, but couched in new criteria. Perhaps these new terms are just foreign to us (eg we're used to school bullying in terms of who plays football), and the overall situation is actually getting better. Or perhaps not.

I think in order to discuss it with the weight of a societal problem, there at least needs to be some measurable framework and resulting data showing effects and trends. To do otherwise is just stoking the identity politics dumpster fire.

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#769

Post by FabHK »

babyshake wrote: post #28

It definitely seems as though specifying your preferred gender pronouns is no longer optional. This is required "in solidarity". Being an otherwise progressive person, I don't feel great about this and how quickly it happened.

I'm Fab (he/him/his, or in German er/seiner/ihm/ihn/ sein/seine/seines/seiner/seinem/seinen/seins/sich/ der/dessen/dem/den/ dieser/dieses/diesem/diesen/ jener/jenes/jenem/jenen/derjenige/etc.)

Re: How did American “wokeness” jump from elite schools to everyday life?

#770

Post by zpeti »

DethNinja wrote: post #680

I think people are over-analysing this issue here at HN. It is far better for upper class to ensure that people discuss and focus on issues like gender and skin colour than the class differences. Hence, they ensured that this is the issue plebs would hear all over on the media and shift their attention from class divides to gender and skin colour.

These two paragraphs from Glen greenwald are my favorite and very relevant to your post:

“But they [GCHQ] want you to know that they absolutely adore gay people. In fact, they love the cause of LGBT equality so very much that, beginning on May 17, 2015 — International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia — they started draping their creepy, UFO-style headquarters in the colors of the rainbow flag. The prior year, in 2014, they had merely raised the rainbow flag in front of their headquarters, but in 2015, they announced, “we wanted to make a bold statement to show the nation we serve how strongly we believe in this.”

Who could possibly be opposed to an institution that offers such noble gestures and works behind such a pretty facade? How bad could the GCHQ really be if they are so deeply committed to the rights of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and trans people? Sure, maybe they go a little overboard with the spying sometimes, and maybe some of their surveillance and disinformation programs are a bit questionable, and they do not necessarily have the highest regard for law, privacy and truth. But we know that, deep down, these are fundamentally good people working within a fundamentally benign institution. Just look at their flamboyant support for this virtuous cause of social justice.“

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