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

economist.com

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

#951

Post by angelzen »

jackson1442 wrote: post #711
bequanna wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For example, it appears to be a woke idea that mathematics, science is some human (more specifically, white) invention and we should explore “alternative mathematics” or “alternative science”. Do you have a source for this? I’ve never heard of either of these terms, the closest being the “alternative facts” of one of Trump’s press secretaries.

Seattle, 2019: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/06/ethn-d06.html

> School district leaders in Seattle, Washington recently released a proposal to incorporate ethnic studies in the mathematics curriculum at all levels from kindergarten through grade 12. This initiative is part of an ongoing redesign of the district’s entire core subject curricula based on identity politics. The plan will be reviewed and voted on by the school board before the next academic year.

> Published by an Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee (ESAC), the new math curriculum is based on four major themes. These do not include, as one might think, numerical literacy, logic and problem-solving, or reasoning by analogy. Instead, the framework for K-12 will be Origins, Identity, and Agency, identified as “the ways in which we view ourselves as mathematicians”; Power and Oppression, based on the “disenfranchisement” of “people and communities of color”; History of Resistance and Liberation, the “stories, places and people who helped liberate people and communities of color using math, engineering and technology”; and Reflection and Action, urging young people to identify “mathematicians of color” and empower “their identities as mathematicians.”

Note the complete lack of 'math proficiency' theme. Fortunately it appears the proposal has not made it into the actual curriculum. https://www.seattleschools.org/departments/mathematics.

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

#952

Post by unmole »

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.

Would their majesty be an acceptable pronoun?

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

#953

Post by mbrodersen »

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 want everybody to address me as “Your Lordship”. People who don’t are clearly violent oppressors. Obviously!

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

#954

Post by notacoward »

sgregnt wrote: post #713
cloudfifty wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> libertarianism, which is literally to let everyone be themselves No, it isn't. Its core is to enforce private property rights? That will very likely not translate into "letting everyone be themselves".

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.

> lack of coercion of any kind

In practice, it means lack of government coercion because that's the easiest kind to oppose. Weaken government too much, and other forms of coercion will come to the fore. Changing that would require changing human nature though, so most libertarians prefer to turn a blind eye to it.

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

#955

Post by skissane »

gruez wrote: post #937
gavinray wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a company asked this I would put "gavinray [I don't give a flying fuck what you call me]". Happy to use other people's pronouns if it makes them happy, it really makes no difference to me, and clearly it's a big deal to some people so I've no problem obliging. But if you ask for something this stupid, company-wide, IMO you're due what you ask for. Because there's my pronoun. Call me he/she/they, or a goddamn Attac…

>I have had to go out of my way to break the habitual "Hey guys" -> "Hey all/Hey folks" though, and I don't find that one unreasonable. I thought "guys" (plural) was already considered gender neutral?

To some people it is and to others it isn't.

I think it depends to some extent on one's dialect of English–and that includes regional and subcultural dialects, as opposed to merely national variants. If one grows up in a region/subculture in which its use in a gender-neutral way is common, it is natural and automatic to view some uses of it as gender-neutral. If one grows up in a region/subculture in which gender-neutral use of the term is rare, viewing it as gender-neutral is much less natural and automatic.

It is also worth pointing out while sometimes its plural uses can be perceived and intended as gender-neutral (especially vocative plural uses), singular uses are almost always gender-specific, and even many plural uses are gender-specific too. A person who says "hey guys" is quite possibly intending it in a gender-neutral way; if the same person were to say "most guys are like that", that plural use is obviously talking about males only

The fact that the term is still gender-specific in many contexts, even among speakers and listeners who sometimes use and understand it in a gender-neutral way, leads some people to consciously choose to reject it as a gender-neutral term – sometimes even people who may have grown up with its gender-neutral use

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

#956

Post by notacoward »

rayiner wrote: post #553
christophilus wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that teaching kids to be critical of one sliver of reality, while uncritically absorbing anything from another sliver is a pedagogical crime. What we ought to be teaching is critical thinking.

Kids need to be socialized in the ideas and values that make their civilization successful. Critical thinking is one piece of that, but we focus too much on it in elite environs. We also need to teach kids to tend to the edifice of civilization we’ve built, not just how to tear pieces of it down.

> We also need to teach kids to tend to the edifice of civilization we’ve built

The truth of that depends entirely on whether that civilization's "success" is something that either can or should be sustained, and that's the assumption that most "woke" people challenge. Very few seek to tear down any part of it without having carefully considered whether it really contributes to long term success.

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

#957

Post by rayiner »

notahacker wrote: post #929
zpeti wrote: post #889

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To give you the perfect example, I think all the types of people who were protesting (100% correctly) at the Occupy Wall Street movements have been completely neutered and neutralised with this woke movement in corporations. These bankers and banks basically destroyed the american dream like no other person/corporation in history, they did more damage to minorities than any "white oppressor", yet they've basically be…

Name one person who has decided banks are no longer to blame for 2008 because rainbow flags. The Occupy movement failed because sitting in tents complaining about systems almost invariably fails, and people aren't as angry about a deep recession caused by subprime mortgage lending because it's 13 years later and the deep recession we experienced most recently wasn't caused by anything at all to do with the banking sy…

> Name one person who has decided banks are no longer to blame for 2008 because rainbow flags.

The Democratic Party: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/16/wall-street-donors-line-up-b...

Parties are coalitions of voters. A lot of the anti-Wall Street populists are rural or working class whites who may have regressive views on social issues. As the Democratic Party moved to the left on social issues since 2010, it has replaced those working class white voters with high income professionals, including most of Wall Street.

Remember, in 2009, Democrats held both Senate seats in West Virginia. Now, those working class white states have all flipped Republican. Biden’s 2020 run failed to recover Obama’s 2008 support in the Midwest. He won the presidency thanks to vote Reagan suburbs around Atlanta and Phoenix going Democrat. (My traditionally red Maryland county went +14 for Biden but +30 for Larry Hogan, during a blue wave. It voted for both Romney and McCain.) You can’t have a meaningfully left party when your marginal voters are socially liberal Republicans.

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

#958

Post by shlant »

zpeti wrote: post #770
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 pri…

This causality claim seems like a real stretch. If Glen is just providing opinion, I will say that all the LGBT people I know (friends and internet personalities) are skeptical of a lot of pinkwashing and in fact many make fun of corps doing so. During this years pride my twitter timeline was filled with people laughing at how stupid and backwards it all was when corps like Raytheon and Axon pinkwashed their logos.

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

#960

Post by clavicat »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #106
wisty wrote: post #25

See "concept creep" - https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2016-08154-001 Abstract: > Many of psychology's concepts have undergone semantic shifts in recent years. These conceptual changes follow a consistent trend. Concepts that refer to the negative aspects of human experience and behavior have expanded their meanings so that they now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before. This expansion takes “horizont…

> I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda. I don't feel comfortable with anyone using the term "liberal moral agenda" unironically because of culture-specific connotations: for starters, it's a very US-specific phrase which will have attached meanings that would be lost or misinterpreted by people unfamiliar with how the term "liberal"…

Translation: it’s bad PR for my tribe.

One of the privileges of occupying a position of hegemony is that you get to instruct your subjects in how they are allowed to refer to power, and pathologize expressions that are offensive to it. Liberals have all these rules about how you are allowed to describe liberals—the idea that we should observe similar courtesies when describing the “reactionary right-wing” as you pejoratively put it is, naturally, absurd.

So even an anodyne description like “liberal moral agenda” of what is objectively a moral agenda informed by liberal priorities becomes verboten, simply because it allows its adversaries to vocalize their opposition to it. Depriving the opposition of their own vocabulary and replacing it with one of your making is a classic move—anyone who fails to update their dictionary marks themselves as an enemy.

Someone is indeed making conversation impossible to have, but whose fault is that, exactly?

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