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The Origins of Wokeness

paulgraham.com

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Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#951

Post by undersuit »

haberman wrote: post #780
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…

> gained racist connotations This passive phrasing implies a kind of universal consensus or collective decision-making process that the word has officially changed connotation. If this were the case, it would not be such a problem. What happens in practice is that a small minority of people decide that a certain word has bad connotations. These people decide that it no longer matters what the previous connotation was…

>Indigenous Americans generally prefer being called Indian, not Native American

Enforcing this false dilemma is what leads us to this situation. Even this CCP Grey guy is arguing for the false dilemma. Actually referring to Native Americans or Indians as a monolithic group is the problem. The many peoples forced to live in the Indian Territories(Oklahoma) have different needs than the peoples forced to live along the US-Canadian border(like Ojibway, Blackfoot, and Mohawk) and different needs than the Apache... another overloaded name[1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache#Difficulties_in_naming

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#952

Post by antifa »

jimbokun wrote: post #804
jrm4 wrote: post #226

Black 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…

Sure but that has almost nothing to do with how it’s used today. Language and the meanings of words change over time, and it’s all but impossible to make people go back to using tre old definition.

The second definition is a gentrification of the first definition. It has everything to do with how it's used today.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#953

Post by Manuel_D »

preciousoo wrote: post #950
jrm4 wrote: post #226

Black 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…

It is actually insane how far I had to scroll to see the first comment mentioning this. He has merits in his comparison to religion but this essay is a huge miss. Edit: in this thread, the actual origin of “woke” is only mentioned 3 times, the thread has 1942 comments as I type

https://x.com/seunosewa/status/1878835480424513903

"Usage is usage. I don't make the rules."

He also clarifies he's referring to the contemporary meaning in the linked essay:

> Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020.

> This was not the original meaning of woke, but it's rarely used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is the dominant one. What does it mean now?

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#954

Post by hhh1111 »

techfeathers wrote: post #923

Can someone steelman (or just represent) the argument of why Bud Light supporting Dylan Mulvaney is wokeness and not classical liberalism/free speech?

That ad campaign was enabled by the 1st amendment but not motivated by it. You’re conflating why they wanted to do it with why they could do it

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#955

Post by hhh1111 »

doccodo wrote: post #408

It's very telling that he gives Marxist-Leninism as an example of moral orthodoxy instead of the much more relevant Capitalist orthodoxy that exists in the U.S. which he viciously upholds. It's pretty clear that it's much more acceptable to rail against DEI, "wokeism", etc., than it is to suggest that a different economic system is possible in American society. There's very few people in power that can get away with…

“Anti wokeism” is to atheism what wokeism is to Christianity. It can turn into a religion in its own right sure but it’s origin is disbelief in another ideology.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#956

Post by sigy »

This essay might win an award for having the most words for the simplest point made. The genuflecting and synthesized history lesson that it's the first 3/4 of it was an entirely unnecessary diversion.

There is and always will be those who take earnest and reasonable ways of describing beliefs and behaviors and turn them into hyperbolic ad-hominem at both ends of the spectrum. If we are aware of it, and use common sense and a little bit of critical thinking, there will be less of this.

Did that take pages of text? No.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#957

Post by brisky »

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…

So there was a platform called Twitter - apparently people who were 'woke' liked it and became the most loyal clients. This made the platform grow and become popular. Then came the "hero" and saved the platform from "wokeness". This is the real story. Elon came and bought something that was grown by the despised "woke" people and made it his own.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#958

Post by intended »

gumball-amp wrote: post #707
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…

I think this is a fair assumption to make if you haven't been in some of the places where this has been most contentious -- in particular, I think left-wing activist circles, or segments of industry where the workplace has switched from being "apolitical" -- I know that term is contested, but I don't have a better one to use -- to shifting to an overtly social-justice-oriented space. I've spent the last decade in the…

Since 2008, people realized that many systems are entirely broken. This created a large wave of wealth inequality awareness. This is common on both sides of the political spectrum.

At the same time, the left realized that their techniques of debate fail miserably against the monolith of the right, especially after seeing that radicals were rewarded (tea party movement.. all the way to MAGA)

So they are also imitating this pattern.

I know so, because if I dig back enough, I’ll find the comments that predicted this.

The left is radicalizing to match the political capability of republicans.

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#959

Post by jacooper »

sedatk wrote: post #337
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…

Thinking about progress, I read that AfD’s chancellor candidate was a lesbian. That would be unimaginable two decades ago let alone the 60’s. Even the right is progressing and they don’t know it.

Doesn't mean they aren't fascists, gay fascists are by definition, fascists.

They literally started sending fake "remigration" tickets to anybody with a foreign sounding family name, exactly what the nazis did to jews in the 1930s.

https://www.t-online.de/nachrichten/deutschland/parteien/id_...

Re: The Origins of Wokeness

#960

Post by jacooper »

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…

This is BS, Elon absolutely censored people.

The guy who drove over people in the Christmas market in Germany recently openly backed the far right and was a racist. Elon removed all tweets that didn't match with the made up story that he was an islamist.

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