The Origins of Wokeness • Hacker News Board

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#481

Post by dang » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:09 PM UTC

miunau wrote: post #70

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…

[flagged]

Please make your substantive points without personal attacks.

Btw your assessment could not be further from the truth. I've never met anyone who was more interested in learning or more intellectually curious than pg is.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#482

Post by elicksaur » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:09 PM UTC

soheil wrote: post #371

Unbelievable how anti-pg hn has gotten. I don't think what pg is saying is anything new, he's always had the same sentiment around anti-censorship, anti-authoritarian/mob and pro-breaking-the-rules attitude. It's called "hacker" news for a reason.

Tech billionaire Paul Graham is the establishment.

Miss when his essays were actually about hacking!

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#483

Post by lbrito » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:09 PM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #135

I sadly suspect we’re going to see some risk adverse hiring of boring white dudes in all positions of leadership. Regardless of competence. We’re already seeing DEI weaponized. Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not. Organizations will be risk adverse and only hire the most boring white dude they can find from central casting. Whateve…

> Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not.

This isn't restricted to tech.

"I'm French when I score, Arab when I don't" - Karim Benzema.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#484

Post by schiem » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:12 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…

From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way.

The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#485

Post by tqi » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

Cartoonish displays of "wokeness" are stupid and corrosive. But I would argue that people who are loudly "Anti-woke" could also be described as "self-righteously moralistic [people] who behave as if superior to others". Both sides are impenetrably convinced that they alone are the arbiters of what is "good" behavior. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the far ends of "Woke" and "Anti-woke" people have far more in common to each other than they are to people the middle.

Ultimately, I think the problem is we separate ourselves along easy to define lines like left vs right, white vs non-white, bike vs car, and let the loudest assholes on either sides dictate terms.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#486

Post by let_me_post_0 » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

willguest wrote: post #130

> Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it. It seems that the defining factor is that there was no actual authority attached to the morality of the situation. He is essentially saying that life was better when one could get away with doing whatever they wanted with no repercussions. This is such a well-travelled path that I am surprised his…

I live in Europe (Germany) and we have no wokeness here. Saying something sexist or racist isn't a big deal. Some people will think you are an asshole and that's it. Our leftists go to the US and come back ranting about how oppressive wokeness is. I'm a minority myself and have experienced my fair share of racism. But I have no desire to push for somebody to get fired for making a racist joke or some such thing. I will just lower my opinion of them and move on with my life. I don't want to live in a country where a wrong word at the wrong time might mean you're fired.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#487

Post by NeutralCrane » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

prewett wrote: post #367

Leary wrote: post #59

I think there’s a fascinating throughline from older Christian moral enforcement to what the essay calls “wokeness.” Historically, a lot of Christian movements had the same impulse to legislate language and behaviors—just grounded in sin rather than privilege. For instance, the 19th-century American Puritans famously policed each other’s speech and actions because the stakes were framed as eternal salvation versus da…

The book "American Nations", whose basic idea is that the US + Canada is composed of 12 cultural "nations", also observes that the Puritans were rather intolerant. The Puritan culture influenced what he calls "Yankeedom" (New England west to Minnesota) and the "Left Coast", which was settled by Yankee shipping. My impression is that these two areas are the most "woke"; it seems that Puritan intolerance casts a long s…

My 2 cents is that this book was one of the worst excuses for historical analysis I've ever read (not that the author is even a historian; he's a journalist). It felt closer to astrology or a Buzzfeed quiz about what Harry Potter house you belong to than anything of actual value. It reminded me of a litany of corporate workshops I've experienced, where the author comes up with an interesting hook and then works backwards to support their conclusions. Great for selling a story to those looking for intellectually empty calories. Pretty much garbage otherwise.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#488

Post by hhh1111 » Mon, Jan 13, 2025, 9:16 PM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #270

> Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one. I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. Au contraire , the idea that racism is a problem is now labeled "critical race theory" and it's a crime to spread this knowledge to students in multiple states. Teachers in Oklahoma can't teach students the fact that the Tulsa Massacre was race…

This is a dishonest argument. Paul can oppose an ideology without agreeing with everyone and especially extremists who also oppose that same ideology.

I dont think wokeness or paul graham are communist or fascist respectively so forgive the hysterical sound of the analogy im going to make here, but i think your argument is similar in reasoning to this one:

You oppose fascism? Well, fascism opposed gulags. If you oppose gulags I guess you were a fascist after all."

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#489

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

I think part of this is correct regarding the professors who started off as "radicals" or hippies in the 1960s but there is no mention of why the cultural revolution of the 1960s happened in here. Couldn't that be examined more closely?

In my opinion, we have been undergoing a cultural clash for power at the top of society for decades between various groups. At one point in time this country was firmly in the hands of WASPs. Waves of immigrants arrived in cities who clashed with them. There were fights about who could get into the most powerful universities which was directly related to the struggle for power between the groups. Wokeness in the US, is in my opinion, a consequence of identity politics which we have had for some time. I think identity politics is probably more natural than not having it because we see it all over the planet. I think a lot of people have created a narrative that they are fighting against identity politics but in fact have just recreated it in different terms.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#490

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

“An aggressively performative focus on social justice.”

Paul is giving the strawman definition (or, ironically, the PC definition) of “woke”. It’s a code word that can be anything the user doesn’t like, and isn’t anything they do like. It’s used as a weapon along with its alias, DEI.

But people aren’t using it with that “performative” definition in practice. People are using it to label social justice topics that they don’t agree with. So it’s disingenuous to try and define it in a way that is much more narrow than its practical usage.