The Origins of Wokeness • Hacker News Board

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#491

Post by normalaccess » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

cmdli wrote: post #210

yapyap wrote: post #99

I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people. As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead. and then on the other side it feels like…

“Woke”, for the most part, is a boogeyman that the conservative right uses as a summary label for various political movements on the left. Basically nobody on the left talks about “woke” except for perhaps a period of six months back in 2017. Many political groups do this: they identify some aspect of the opposition, preferably one that is easy to ridicule, and then repeat those accusations ad-nauseum. The complaints…

Even Obama is not a fan of "woke" culture and calls it out for the hollow vapid gotcha politics that it is: https://youtu.be/qaHLd8de6nM

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#492

Post by somekyle2 » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:18 PM UTC

tantalor wrote: post #151

If anything, this is a useful looking glass into the minds of people who love to complain about language policing and think "censorship" is our biggest social problem.

If you're very rich, not left leaning, and have a big platform, I imagine it's very easy for censorship/woke mobs to seem like the biggest problem. Most of your needs/wants (in terms of food, shelter, safety) are met, you can mostly do what you want, but people online call you names and some of your posts might get taken down. It's one of the only problems you can feel, and it's obviously because the culture is wrong, because you feel it's empirically established that you are smart and good.

It's a little like people whose exclusive concern in the realm of sexual assault is false accusations; if you can't imagine being a victim or a perpetrator, false accusation is the only part you think can affect you, so naturally your priority is minimizing that risk. Skews your perspective a bit.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#493

Post by enragedcacti » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

thomassmith65 wrote: post #289

The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn't have any real power. I don't know what Graham thinks 'political correctness' would have looked like in the 1960s – most Americans still thought women's lib was a joke, many Americans were fighting to preserve segregation, and nobody had heard of such a thing as a gay rights m…

Yup, Graham utterly fails to get over the bare minimum bar of American social justice critique, which is "What side of the civil rights movement would your proposed ideology have landed on?"

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#494

Post by tzs » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

tines wrote: post #441

I think the conditio sine qua non of whatever social movement PG is trying to describe here is that we have become, and will become more, a low-trust culture. Social circles are wider and shallower now than ever. If I can't take the time to get to know a person, I can't assume good faith when they use some questionable word. It benefits me to impute the worst motive, because (1) it is much safer to avoid a false harm…

> This is also why the Democrats are so fractious internally, relative to the Republicans. Republicans default to trusting each other (not saying whether that's merited or not) while Democrats only make temporary uneasy alliances

The number of votes it took for Republicans to select a Speaker of the House and the effort that Speaker has had to subsequently undertake to keep that position says otherwise.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#495

Post by hyeonwho4 » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:19 PM UTC

phibz wrote: post #455

I first heard the term from my ex-wife when she was involved with black politics in Chicago in 2014. At that time their definition was firmly in the "awareness of racial and social injustice". It was seemingly later twisted to mean hypocrisy or hyper political correctness. Redefining it seems to have nerfed any effect it once had.

That is not incompatible with pg's definition, if "raising awarenesss" dominates "doing something about it".

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#496

Post by ajbt200128 » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

> What does it mean now? [...] > An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

sure yup. Performative social justice bad. Now lets continue reading and see what PG thinks is performative.

> I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it.

> There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment."

> In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia

> Another factor in the rise of wokeness was the Black Lives Matter movement, which started in 2013 when a white man was acquitted after killing a black teenager in Florida.

> Similarly for the Me Too Movement, which took off in 2017 after the first news stories about Harvey Weinstein's history of raping women. It accelerated wokeness

> In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video. At this point the metaphorical fire became a literal one, as violent protests broke out across America.

note: it's ok PG, you can say the cop murdered him. no one will cancel it for you (except maybe the right).

Wow you're right PG, all of this IS performative, because none of it has actually helped anyone you know and respect. It's just helped women, POC, LGBT etc.

TL;DR; PG like most billionaires hates when anyone like him is held accountable, would rather see humanity suffer than not be able to say whatever he wants.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#497

Post by enragedcacti » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

blactuary wrote: post #287

Ukv wrote: post #38

> Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase "people of color" is considered particularly enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. [...] There are no underlying principles. To understand much of our language, Gnorts would have to already be aware that our words and symbols gain meaning from how they're used, and you couldn't, for instance, determine th…

He's a smart enough person that even asking that question makes me think the whole piece is written in bad faith. Yes, language evolves and has specific context and nuance.

its not that complicated, he just doesn't think that hard about things when they support his conclusion. He's silently edited blog posts in the past to fix glaring holes that a 7th grader could catch after commenters on HN pointed them out.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#498

Post by greycol » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

electriclove wrote: post #406

yapyap wrote: post #99

I think the word “woke” means very different things to some people. As an example I think people from the American political left to somewhere(?) in the middle see it as what it has been introduced as, that being looking past the status quo and instead looking at your own values, i.e. the morality of homelessness and not having a disdain for them but empathy for them instead. and then on the other side it feels like…

There are many things on which I don’t agree with pg. But I feel he is accurate with describing wokeness as the term is commonly used currently. He doesn’t go into the history of the word in this essay.

You certainly don't use it to mean "those crazy people who are pro interacial marriage" but some do. The woke people supporting trans rights almost certainly don't support macho man randy savage chucking on a dress and that same day competing in the olympics but the characture that supports it is part of the woke mob.

People scoff and think of course I know what woke means, because the people the people they talk to/media they consume have the word at roughly the same level of meaning, not internalising the next more or less extreme group that isn't in their social circle include more or less in the meaning.

These days the word woke might as well serve the same purpose as "If by scotsman..." in that no one will disagree with you unless you get into specifics.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#499

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

rsolva wrote: post #77

rhelz wrote: post #5

From the article: "Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor right-wing ones, but without censoring either. [14]" Then follow to the footnote: "[14] Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying u…

Elon censored me for mentioning my Mastodon handle on Twitter. Me and anyone else who did the same.

[deleted]

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#500

Post by kieferbc » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:28 PM UTC

As defined in a Florida lawsuit, woke is, "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." I think that is generally true. I also agree with parts of what PG stated. More than anything, I think the term 'woke' as defined above has been twisted by both sides, and action is more important that talking.