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The Origins of Wokeness
831–840 of 1001 posts
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#832I always thought the origin had something to do with Zack de la Rocha screaming "wake up" into my ears over and over in the 90s
> You know they went after King when he spoke out on Vietnam
> He turned the power to the have-nots
> And then came the shot
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#833> 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 found it extremely odd that he specifically pointed out professors being sexist as a thing that's perfectly fine to let them get away with.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#834IMO people who whine about wokeness or, more broadly, political correctness, just don't like it when they're called out for being insensitive pricks, or for perpetuating the garbage that marginalized groups have to put up with every day.
Sure, there are people who preach wokeness and empathy and whatnot who are indeed actually prigs. That's true of every movement, good and bad. But as usual, those are the small vocal minority, while most of us just want society as a whole to stop shitting on people just because they're different from whatever the mainstream du jour is.
The blowback against wokeness is mostly due to conservatives hijacking the term and over and over and over using it to describe only the bad behavior they see, while ignoring that the bad behavior is in the minority.
I used to really enjoy Graham's writing, but this is rubbish.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#835> optimizing for proportional representation has to come at the expense of quality
That's like saying a baseball team should try to sign a catcher if that's the best available player right now, even if they already have plenty of catchers and desperately need a shortstop. You need balance on a baseball team, just like you get a better party with a good mix of people, just like you get a more interesting university community if you bias against a monoculture.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#836[deleted]
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#837Black person here. Like most discussions of "woke" and "wokeness," this one too fails HARD by not fully and directly addressing the origins of the term -- and by "fails hard" I do mean will almost certainly do more obscuring than clarifying by starting from an information-deficient premise. Including, e.g. "The term 'woke' has its origins in the Black American community as a signifier of awareness about ones politica…
There is so very little citation or substantiation in the entire essay. Even the footnotes are largely just more speculation. He presents it as some kind of historical record but it's literally just his thoughts.
It’s almost like that is the entirety of the rhetorical and argument station expectations when people comment on too much wokeness.
Vibes.
“I invented a meaning for this word that bears no resemblance to its actual meaning and then am critical of others because I think my invented definition is bad”
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#838> 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.
Being "smart" isn't a binary, and can't describe someone in any all-encompassing ways. Someone can be smart about investing in startups but stupid about understanding social discourse around marginalized groups.
I am not surprised at all that Graham is both of those things.
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#839From 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…
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It's much more than that. If the government says, "only land owners can publish", regardless of content, that's still obviously censorship. In what world would "only Christians may publish" not be censorship?
Re: The Origins of Wokeness
#840I am in particular happy that we at least try to banish s-word from tech vocabulary. I never thought it bothered me, but someone out there cares for me before me even knowing, and I am grateful.
Is it policing speech? Yes, kind of. Can it be considered under PC umbrella? I guess so.
Priggish? Hell no. This is not priggish, this is just respect for human beings.