>how are you defining 'woke' and 'wokism'
Tough question, it's always hard to be honest about one's definitions. I will try to formalize wokism in a way that will make it clear why I despise it to people who see nothing obviously wrong with it apriori.
- It's an ideology characterized by outsized obsession with and the veneration of a few identities, chief among which are women, queers, and varying subsets of non-white ethnic groups.
- It's an ideology characterized by outsized hatred\bias\dismissal against the "opposite" of the above venerated groups, namely straights and\or whites and\or men, among others.
- It's an ideology that is utterly convinced of the morality of every single one of its positions, and sees 0 utility in debating, compromising with, co-existing, or even ignoring in peace any of its myriad opponents.
- It's an ideology that is uniformly in power across Western (== USA, Canada, Australia, and north-western Europe until the border defined by Russia, Poland, Hungary and the Balkans) institutions, chief among which are media, PR/HR departments of any corporation, law, secular universities, non profit organizations and think tanks, any left of center political organization, and, of course, mainstream social media.
Solve this system of constraints to whatever degree of accuracy you desire, and whatever the solver spits out is a wokism.
As to why someone would hate wokism, several reasons.
- They belong to a group mentioned in #2, or adjacent\similar to one.
- #3 makes sure that any single opposition or push back to wokism is a declaration of war against all of wokism. For instance, I'm atheist, vegetarian, non-white, left-leaning on economic matters, and very moderately progressive (== A lot of tradition is stupid, but we don't know which, and so one must be always very careful overriding it) on social matters. All of this isn't enough to offset the fact that I'm a straight man who is pro free speech.
- #4 makes wokism pattern-match to patterns that describe other authoritarian ideologies. Wokism is extremely similar in rhetoric and actions to religious fundamentalists in my country for example (which is why I call them a religion, they tick all the boxes except having a prophet, a god, and a path to forgiveness), other people who witnessed communist dictatorships often compare wokism to one. Regardless of whether those comparisons are in fact valid, wokism reminds (and promises) some of its opponents of much uglier things.
>Dictionary tells me it is "alert to injustice in society, especially racism"
Dictionary was right till about 2018-2019. The word 'Woke' dates back to the 1930s, originally meaning literal awareness and coined in AAVE, as in "Those cops appear to be looking for trouble, stay woke". By the 1960s the term refered to more abstract awareness of cultural\political matters, and by the 2000s the term reached wider English usage and had primarily positive connotations. See Wikipedia and linguist John McWhorter for more details about the history of the word.
The negative connotations of the word appears to have started roughly in early to mid 2020, replacing 'SJWs' or 'Social Justice Warriors' (itself an originally positive term, originally coined by the ideology itself and later used as an insult by roughly 2013-2014). Now it's the dominant word used to refer to the ideology described above and its adherents.