Talk:Woke/Archive 1

OED essay
This traces the history a lot further back: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/11/woke/ --Pharos (talk) 19:29, 26 December 2016 (UTC) --Pharos (talk) 20:10, 26 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Boston Globe has some interesting stuff too: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2016/12/18/woty-peters-woke/fzCf06ld7Hu9Jt9b9p90TO/story.html

and Kant said that he woke from his dogmatic slumber by reading the works of David Hume...

Older
Older usage of the term exisits, I am pretty sure. Somebody should figure this out.--I&#39;m on day 4 (talk) 09:15, 30 January 2017 (UTC)
 * We don't base anything on what one editor thinks. If you can back that up with a reliable source then please do so. Meters (talk) 02:46, 5 February 2017 (UTC)
 * Woke is the past tense of wake. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/woke. It is a very old English word. It is not a recent invention. Wake up. This word has been used in the past to imply the meaning of "to have become aware of," see Billy Sunday's Address, ca 1915: "So when they found the other end of America...they woke up to the realization that there was no more West." See https://books.google.com/books?id=aTZNAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA181&lpg=PA181&dq=woke+to+the+realization+that&source=bl&ots=8mybeVcK2t&sig=BrO4eGg1BqQ_xRueXvB7tMPtxG4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiJ7cHyrdrTAhXI6SYKHXB2A1g4ChDoAQg_MAc#v=onepage&q=woke%20to%20the%20realization%20that&f=false Ariel31459 (talk) 04:03, 6 May 2017 (UTC)
 * This term is not originally from the "New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)", at least not conceptually. 2601:49:1:5316:79B2:76C4:CDBB:BD5B (talk) 06:02, 31 July 2018 (UTC)

African American Vernacular English context
I have changed the description of the African American Vernacular English context; instead of defining it as an AAVE slang word, I put it as a political term of African American origin, drawing from the AAVE expression "stay woke" and its grammatical aspect of ever-vigilance. I think this maybe captures the relationship better.--Pharos (talk) 18:13, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

"modern activist usage" & "first modern use"?
I think it should read "contemporary," since usage from the 1960s and 70s is just as modern.Oulipal (talk) 16:02, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Problem
The difficulty with the orientation of this article is that, as a first position, despite the term having it's origin in non-standard English, it does not motivate the term's precise meaning in standard English -- and, as a consequence, loses much of its potential communicative power to the otherwise uninformed reader. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:8003:2A09:6E00:4D81:9549:F7FA:233A (talk) 10:21, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
 * Woke doesn't have a precise meaning in standard English - it means whatever the user wants it to mean, either positively or negatively. Outside black American politics it's more or less synonymous with social justice warrior. --Ef80 (talk) 09:33, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 18 April 2019
The History or the word Woke came from the movie 1988 "School Daze" directed by Spike Lee. The movie was a satire of how Black Americans dealt with each other within micro verse of America. The movie ended with the phrase "Wake Up". Wake up was the call for awareness that slowly evolved into a slang term of StayWoke. It remained StayWoke until it was political appropriated to Stay Woke. StayWoke still means (Black & Latin American) ethnic and cultural issues and awareness. Stay Woke however is the political version that means a liberal cause. Harrisdmartin (talk) 02:41, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
 * Red question icon with gradient background.svg Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. Saucy[talk – contribs] 04:39, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Staying woke.
I was interested to stumble on this phrase as it reminded me of school history and Hereward the Wake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hereward_the_Wake Language is a flexible tool and often recreates itself. Polkadotcycles (talk) 09:57, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

Why is there a dedicated section for "This is Woke"?
Can't this be put back in the "Modern activist usage" section? —Srid YO 20:51, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

What does "racist justice" mean?
Black racism? Race based and racist affirmative action? Black caucus in congress?

62.226.94.123 (talk) 23:46, 14 January 2020 (UTC)

Criticism missing in the article
When even Obama is criticising the left for being too "woke":

https://nypost.com/2019/10/30/obama-rips-woke-culture-at-foundation-event/

62.226.94.123 (talk) 23:51, 14 January 2020 (UTC)


 * I think what Obama is talking about there is the problem of people trying to appear "woke" as part of a call-out culture. That is arguably not what being woke is "supposed" to be about, but it is something that gets associated with it, and should be at least mentioned in the article.  I don't feel familiar enough with the culture and politics (not woke enough about wokeness?) to start a "Criticism" section right now, is anyone else willing to fill the void? Pastychomper (talk) 16:14, 24 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I might do it. Halo Jerk1 (talk) 11:07, 25 January 2020 (UTC)

Disambiguation page?
Are there specific guidelines for when a disambiguation page should be made? The four different disambiguation links on the page seem rather distracting, so I thought it might be better to make a disambiguation page? Stonkaments (talk) 05:50, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

"Get woke, go broke"
Under Parodies and criticism, I added this true, neutral and relevant sentence:


 * The phrase "get woke, go broke" has been used to suggest that commercial ventures that attempt to align themselves with social-justice causes are likely to alienate their customer base.

It was reverted without explanation by "NorthBySouthBaranof". 2A00:23C5:FE0C:2100:3853:4973:AF6A:B625 (talk) 09:57, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * You failed to cite a reliable source. All material included in Wikipedia must be sourced. Who says these things? NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 13:34, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * There are multiple sources reporting on this. I found several articles by newspapers and marketing organizations such as the Chartered Institute of Marketing, that refer to it.174.0.48.147 (talk) 11:14, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The Chartered Institute of Marketing probably isn't a reliable source. What newspapers?  The context in which they mention it and the weight they give it matters, as does whether it is news or opinion. --Aquillion (talk) 19:04, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
 * You can't just scrub an article of a well-known saying by coming up with excuses to invalidate perfectly good sources. It's transparent and frankly, wrong.198.161.4.71 (talk) 17:45, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
 * We cover things according to their coverage in reliable secondary sources; a neologism like that is, per WP:NEO, not covered just because an editor feels it's widely-used - we need good secondary sources describing its usage, first. I'm not seeing those in this case; the sections you're trying to base a section around are mostly just passing usages in unrelated reviews, opinion pieces or the like. --Aquillion (talk) 17:58, 27 August 2020 (UTC)

Weird, this whole section was deleted. Surely it's important to include in the article as it's a common expression in wide use.
 * This is discussed above. This is almost entirely WP:SYNTH using opinion-pieces and editorials; we'd need independent non-opinion sources discussing the term in order to support a section or describe it using statements of fact. If it is, in fact, a common expression in wide use, it should be easy to find secondary non-opinion sources discussing it rather than just using it; otherwise it doesn't belong here per WP:NEO.  We don't mention every catchphrase that happens to appear in a handful of opinion-pieces or the like - we need actual WP:SECONDARY sourcing to demonstrate notability and to structure our coverage around. --Aquillion (talk) 15:48, 28 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Would it be better if we change the "parodies and criticism" to "reception" for these opinion pieces? Espngeek (talk) 17:20, 28 August 2020 (UTC)
 * It doesn't solve the underlying problem, which is that that usage is a sub-neologism of no particular notability. If it's worth covering then more secondary sources should be covering it - a random smattering of "here's some articles that used the same term" isn't something we can devote a section to, whether it's framed as reception or criticism or whatever.  Most of the sources aren't even commenting or criticizing it, they're just random usages that people are trying to use to argue in the article text that the term is significant; that sort of thing is WP:OR at best. --Aquillion (talk) 04:43, 5 October 2020 (UTC)

Is "wokism" synonymous with "wokeness"?
Apokrif (talk) 12:29, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

"Critical social justice"
I have removed references to this neologism inserted in the lede; it was supported only by two dubious and polemic opinion sources. Going to need better sources than that to merit inclusion in the lede here. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 17:39, 30 January 2021 (UTC)

Why was my revision reverted?
I realise that I accidentally removed some references but I hardly think my edits could constitute vandalism. I made some red links which I then hastily removed. 2A00:23C5:F983:C200:84A4:4CEE:9283:F52F (talk) 15:29, 31 January 2021 (UTC)

Page lock?
Would somebody please lock this page? Espngeek (talk) 22:47, 2 March 2021 (UTC)

Expand coverage?

 * Misc. sources


 * 1) January 22, 2021, UK-edition Grazia : "Fast forward a few centuries and the first recorded use of 'woke' in its politically conscious incarnation was via a N.Y. Times Magazine glossary of 'phrases and words you might hear today in Harlem' in 1962. The glossary was alongside an article on African-American street slang by black novelist William Melvin Kelley, and his explanation of 'woke' was the 'well-informed, up-to-date' definition the OED uses today."--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 22:50, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
 * 2) Claire Vaye Watkins in Feb. 5, 2020 nytimes - ". . activist DeRay Mckesson was arrested while protesting the extrajudicial execution of Alton Sterling by the police. Mckesson broadcast his arrest on Periscope, where viewers around the world watched him handcuffed by the police in a T-shirt reading '#StayWoke,' the millennial iteration of an adage that has bolstered the black community’s freedom fight since the black labor movement of the 1940s, as Kashana Cauley explored in The Believer. Historically, the phrase stay woke, Cauley wrote, 'acknowledged that being black meant navigating the gaps between the accepted narrative of normality in America and our own lives.' Innovative grammatical constructions like 'stay woke' and 'wokeness' powerfully evoke the ongoing struggle for justice embodied in Black Lives Matter and the movements that came before it, as well as those that followed . ." --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 18:13, 3 March 2021 (UTC)
 * 3) The Elect: The Threat to a Progressive America from Anti-Black Antiracits By John McWhorter: . . Third Wave Antiracism, more often termed 'social justice warriors' or 'the woke mob.' . . Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that because racism is baked into the structure of society, whites' 'complicity' in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity towards them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct. . ."
 * 4) Beyond Woke By Michael Rectenwald
 * 5) Cynical Theories By Helen Pluckrose & ‎James A. Lindsay
 * 6) Stay Woke: A Guide to Social Justice
 * 7) The American Interest, Vol. 15, No. 3: "Beyond Black and White: Can Americans Unlearn Race? [By] Morton Høi Jensen: In his lucid new memoir, Thomas Chatterton Williams channels Albert Camus and James Baldwin—and offers a thoughtful counterpoint to the tired racial dogmas of both Right and Left. . . If this innocence of experience made Losing My Cool, on occasion, a slightly moralizing tale . . his new book is a far more subtle, courageous, and moving achievement. Contrary to its title, Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race is less preoccupied with the self than with the world that surrounds it, and in particular with the culture and politics of contemporary American society. / The difference between the two books is partly attributable to the short but significant span of history that separates 2010 from 2019, or the early Obama years from the early Trump years: a decade of police killings of unarmed black men; Black Lives Matters and “woke” anti-racism . ." --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 17:27, 4 March 2021 (UTC)
 * may I ask your purpose for listing these sources here? A couple are opinion pieces; one is self-published; two of the books, Beyond Woke and Cynical Theories, are essentially polemics, while Stay Woke: A Guide to Social Justice is evidently meant as a parody. I'm not seeing too many sources here that meet the requirement of having a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Plus, most seem to be using "woke" as a buzzword meant to encompass a bunch of other things while being something else entirely. Rather than describing the term or concept directly, they're mostly on the "use" end of the use–mention spectrum. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:15, 6 March 2021 (UTC)
 * User:Sangdeboeuf said "a couple are opinion pieces." How curious. Are you of the opinion that coverage given the topic of Woke involves only uncontroversial statements of fact (as a cherry-picked citation of wp:RSEDITORIAL gives the impression, somehow extrapolating from this guideline some kind of Wikipedian exclusion of the use of opinion pieces that doesn't exist)? Indeed, if you do possess this singular animosity about opinion pieces, please clarify how you can hold this position, especially in light of Neutral point of view/Reliable sources's not only not denigrating use of opinion pieces in giving coverage to controversial issues but advocating their use. And also: wp:SELFPUB, about self-publication being a reliable indicator of what are the self-publisher-concerned's views. --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 15:35, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Obviously the "coverage" of the term woke includes opinion pieces. But op-eds and blogs are primary sources for their authors' opinions only. To achieve balance, we should stick to secondary and tertiary sources. WP:NPOV and WP:BIASED don't say we used biased sources, only that they're not forbidden. I'm not opposed to these sources because they're biased, but because they lack a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. The John McWhorter link is the one that is self-published. McWhorter is a linguist, but his essay is about anti-racist "ideology". That's not within his professional expertise as far as I know (aside from being a regular columnist on the topic, and columnists are not necessarily experts). —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:41, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
 * "while Stay Woke: A Guide to Social Justice is evidently meant as a parody." - You mean, as was "A Modest Proposal"? --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 16:28, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes. What does that have to do with this article? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:41, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
 * User:Sangdeboeuf said, "McWhorter is a linguist, but his essay is about anti-racist "ideology". That's not within his professional expertise as far as I know (aside from being a regular columnist on the topic, and columnists are not necessarily experts)." Ironically, "Wiki" means allowing "editing" by everybody, not just some credentialed faction. The wisdom of crowds and all. The Athenian genius as resides within the entire body politic as a whole. And, as we've noted, WP atomizes points of view, attributing them to sources, allowing each reader to take them into account before coming, in turn, each to their own. The corrective to the mass of humanity's being prone to believe myths and be mesmerized isn't some special priesthood of any sort, not even the exalted denizens of the corporate media and faculty lounge; rather, it's allowing a free exchange of ideas among the body politic as a whole, with our job not to spoon-feed readers of the most elementary primers but serve as a prism reflecting a fullest-possible selection from out of the intellectual byways of the world for the benefit of astute readers of the type who generally consult encyclopedias. We simply don't bar our encyclopedic coverage of the linguist(!) Noam Chomsky's political opinions on Wikipedia: someone ranked as the "most quoted" living, public intellectual in the world (in the dozen years prior to/including 1992, as tabulated in the "Arts and Humanities Citation Index." (Note: Wikipedia says, "Chomsky's status as the "most-quoted living author" is credited to his political writings, which vastly outnumber his writings on linguistics." ])! Only the wiki rump-faction purists-in-appeals-to-authority believe a more-Catholic-than-the-Pope regime of barring mention of, say, Chomsky's non-linguistic work, "improves" the encyclopedia. Such a practice differs from Tayyip Erdoğan (and minions)' appeal to their sanctioned journalistic and scholarly authorities only in kind, not in respective, philosophical essences (the random assumptions and prejudices as happen to predominate at the moment among whatever exalted subgroup that either English-speakers or the Erdoğan government rely upon, I believe, are susceptible respectively to mesmerization by certain mythical flights of fancy, just are regular folks).--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 17:15, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is crowdsourced, not its . Due weight applies. When McWhorter's political writings attain the same influence as Chomsky's, then sure, go ahead and cite secondary sources analyzing his views in this context, of the kind that exist in profusion for Chomsky:  —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:03, 8 March 2021 (UTC)

Arbitrary break
Friedersdorf's article &mdash; about scholar DiAngelo's framing of BLM or Woke movement/philosophy (with miscellaneous commentary by McWhorter & Thomas Chatterton Williams)
 * 1) atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf  (i.) : ". . As Kelefa Sanneh observed in The New Yorker this past August, in DiAngelo’s view 'fellow white people have all the power, and therefore all the responsibility to do the gruelling but transformative spiritual work she calls for.' / "I find it highly improbable that fair-skinned Americans will not only put whiteness at the center of how they understand the world, identifying with it so constantly that it governs their every interaction with people of color, but also regard themselves as racist, regardless of their awareness or intentions, and perpetually strive to atone for that unchosen sinful condition, even as they move from majority to minority demographic status in the United States. . ."
 * 2) atlantic - (ii.) ". . a prominent strain of anti-racist thought in academia, corporate America, and beyond aims at something that has never happened in history: to convince a rising generation of light-skinned Americans that whiteness is both core to their identity and 'problematic.' In such circles, the statement 'There is only one race, the human race' is deemed a microaggression and white people are expected to have a self-critical, if not self-loathing, relationship to their racial group. / For two decades, the academic and author Robin DiAngelo has been paid by colleges, private corporations, nonprofits, and government entities to teach audiences a kind of 'whiteness studies.' She is treated as an expert by national networks and the public broadcasters NPR and PBS. . ."
 * 3) atlantic - (iii.) " . . John McWhorter, the Columbia University linguist, put it to me, 'One of the most glaring holes in the logic of current "authentic" black thought is that one is to revile the old one-drop rule as racist, and yet to tar as a self-hating elitist the person who is of only partially African genetic ancestry who declines to classify themselves as "black."' To the extent that anyone offers a rationale for that position, McWhorter continued, 'it’s that while race is a biological fiction, racism is not, and must determine how one identifies oneself. As to how healthy it is to define oneself on the basis of others' ignorance and abuse … we are not to ask too many questions. Thomas [Chatterton Williams]'s work is invaluable in really digging into this Mobius strip masquerading as higher reasoning. . ."
 * 4) atlantic - (iv.) ". . [Thomas Chatterton Williams 's] New York Times op-ed from the same year arguing that 'woke' discourse is 'in sync with' though not morally equivalent to the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides reduce people to abstract color categories, he wrote in the Times, 'feeding off of and legitimizing each other,' while those searching for common ground 'get devoured twice.' " --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 20:13, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Friedersdorf uses the term "woke" one time in a 4,470-word essay. The Atlantic piece is not primarily about the topic of this article, which is the the term "woke" itself, not DiAngelo's framing, anti-racist thought, or black thought. Use–mention distinction, again. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:30, 8 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I'm not a fan of using too many grindy culture-war opinion-pieces like this to begin with (especially ones, like this, that make very flashy, WP:EXCEPTIONAL statements without presenting any evidence or argument supporting them), but this one barely uses the term "woke" outside of that one line. --Aquillion (talk) 00:34, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Agree that this passing mention is not substantial enough an engagement to add anything. Jlevi (talk) 13:21, 9 March 2021 (UTC)


 * If a topic becomes the subject of television-broadcast or print-published parodies, this too is an indicator of its currency and its notability and nothing i n the guidelines preclude the mention of such a thing within such a subject's encyclopedic coverage. With concern the term woke, Andrew Doyle is one such parodist.the times the times the guardian psychology today &c &c &c Yes, doing away with racism is a serious business(*)And, see my comment below! and it's understandable how folks might lack a sense of humor when approaching the subject in whatever aspect; that said: What Wikipedia is not. (Hmm: Weren't the Puritans noted for their utter lack of a sense of humor, too?)  Further, the "expanded" meaning that's become associated with the term woke -- for my quick, off-the-cuff, phrase offered as synonymous to this expanded context: "zero tolerance given anything deemed a microaggression"  -- found in McWhorter's and other critics' claims about illogical features found in this expanded-meaning philosophy, such as the concept of anti-black prejudice being associated with mere possession of "whiteness," indelibly, are not "fringe nor "exceptoinal."  This article talks of woke in the context of "overall awareness about oppression(s)," while mentioning that it's also gaining much currency after the atrocious Goerge Floyd incident; it neglects space to any expanded usage such as the term's association yesterday's "politically correct" or the more recently "cancel culture."  A contingent think this narrow focus a feature, I think it a bug.  McWhorter and Chomsky are public intellectuals, both signatories of the "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate" that Thomas Chatterton Williams spearheaded (Williams and McWhorter both oft commenting on black studies in "first-level" published sources).  (Incidentally, because a person reliable about his own beliefs (wp:ABOUTSELF), even any one of the three of them's blog posts can be used with confidence in filling in nitty-gritties of their respective beliefs -- per the guidelines, although editors, unfortunately, are free to apply their own, more stringent standards, I guess.
 * _________
 * (*)My own take: Woke is a religion/ideology as it must! There are illogical aspects to it, as there always are relating to even ersatz "religion," but such ideologies' premordial, prime, universal power is the only way to effect change in cultures: so my kudos to the whole "woke" agenda; but as no society-shaking earthquake comes off without engendering appropriate critique and "checks" upon its premises, I believe Wikipedia cover what relevant commentary there has been on the topic and its pool of associations.--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 20:10, 9 March 2021 (UTC)


 * User Sangdeboeuf said that the McWhorter-quoting "Atlantic piece is not primarily about the topic of this article, which is the the term 'woke' itself, not DiAngelo's framing, anti-racist thought, or black thought. According to RSes, the term woke is of a broader meaning than what the article presently covers for it. As, for example, John McWhorter's August 9, 2016 Washington Post article, "Black Lives Matter Is 'Woke' to Old Problems — But Still Sleeping on Solutions" reads:"'[...] In the parlance of contemporary social media discourse, Black Lives Matter is the quintessence of 'woke.'' '[... W]oke-ness is a more complex business than the movement's platform drafting committee appears to realize, and it has its limits. Woke, in essence, serves a function that those of a certain age will recall the phrase 'politically correct' once did. [...] 'Woke' is a black-inflected renewal of the assertion that there is a particular politics and worldview that qualify as enlightened, rather than as one position out of many. And, within limits, there is value to that kind of assertion — at some level, we must all proceed upon conviction, on pain of stasis. However, one must at the same time keep in mind that truth is elusive, especially with regard to issues of race and justice. Plus — and I assume we can all agree on this much — any standard of being woke, by itself, is just that. A woke-ness worthy of the name is about going from woke-ness to bringing about meaningful, and tangible, change. [...] DeRay Mckesson participated, speaking about his 'less than pleasant' encounter with Baton Rouge police. And the truth is that in terms of focusing on that difference, as well as the fact that it’s hard to identify a single truth, Black Lives Matter’s new platform illustrates the dilemma facing the movement, whether it knows it or not. What we might call the practical limits of being, or staying, woke.' [...] 'A year ago, no one expected the movement to exert that much leverage in a presidential race. However, a problem with this platform is that it is unsuitably woke to the past. To be woke that slavery, Jim Crow and redlining had lasting systematic effects difficult to surmount is one thing. But in forging change, it is incumbent on BLM or any movement in the post-civil rights era to attend to what has — and hasn’t — worked in the past. Reparations presents the most acute challenge. This sounds sensible enough, but a thoroughly 'woke' person might say black America has already received reparations. They’re not called 'reparations,' of course, but that’s just an issue of terminology.' [...] 'BLM’s current platform is a great beginning, but its woke-ness quotient is insufficient for the call of the present. It isn’t as if generations of people haven’t had the same concerns that Black Lives Matter now does. And a great deal has been tried. Some of it has worked, too much of it has not. Part of being woke is having a sense of what can actually be done. Here, today’s revolutionaries must attend to the historical details. Not because younger activists should genuflect to their elders. Not because the movement can’t be progressive. And not because raising awareness has no value. But because the eventual purpose has to be changing lives: You can’t call for progress without checking up on what has impeded previous efforts. One must be woke to that reality, as well as the more grievous aspects of the black past. I am sure Black Lives Matter, with the energy and imagination it has shown thus far, can be, and stay, woke to a richer engagement with how we got from the past to where we are.'"--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 19:29, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
 * thedish - "The Roots Of Wokeness: It's Time We Looked More Closely at the Philosophy Behind the Movement." By Andrew Sullivan: "[...]we all act unknowingly in perpetuating systems of thought that oppress other groups. To be 'woke' is to be 'awake' to these invisible, self-reinforcing discourses, and to seek to dismantle them—in ourselves and others. / "There is no such thing as persuasion in this paradigm, because persuasion assumes an equal relationship between two people based on reason. And there is no reason and no equality. There is only power." [...] "Here's a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes. / "Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. [...] We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory[...]. What we have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity, by former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose. It’s as deep a dive into this often impenetrable philosophy as anyone would want to attempt. But it’s well worth grappling with."  [...] "They claim that their worldview is the only way to advance social progress, especially the rights of minorities, and that liberalism fails to do so. This, it seems to me, is profoundly untrue. A moral giant like John Lewis advanced this country not by intimidation, or re-ordering the language, or seeing the advancement of black people as some kind of reversal for white people. He engaged the liberal system with non-violence and persuasion, he emphasized the unifying force of love and forgiveness, he saw black people as having agency utterly independent of white people, and changed America with that fundamentally liberal perspective."  [...] "The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest. Let’s do this."
 * martincenter review of Beyong Woke by Michael Rectenwald - "Many, perhaps most, Americans are just now waking up to the meaning of 'woke.' What does 'woke' have to do with looting, bricks, fires, and blood in Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis? One asks oneself, 'Am I woke (good)? Or not woke (evil)? How woke is woke, how much wokeness is enough, and who decides?' / "In short, woke implies a new state of elevated, more highly evolved moral consciousness. As such, wokeness requires a new vocabulary to express its new concepts. / "Woke language is full of terms such as 'toxic' (even 'catastrophic') masculinity, 'whiteness,' 'white privilege,' 'white fragility,' countless new pronouns and genders, 'systemic racism,' 'cancel culture,' 'social justice,' 'gaslighting,' and 'de-platforming,' most of which are casually or arbitrarily defined, if at all. [...] Rectenwald defines 'woke' as 'the political awakening that stems from the emergence of consciousness and conscientiousness regarding social and political injustice.'"
 * thejewishvoice - "Like many other linguistic irritants the left has introduced into our cultural lexicon, 'woke' has become a household term seemingly overnight. It is generally understood to refer to some kind of Progressive state of self-righteous enlightenment, but what is its origin? How and why does one become woke, and what, if anything, lies beyond this condition? What are the philosophical underpinnings of this social justice religion? If you want to truly understand it and not simply dismiss it with an eyeroll, you can hardly do better than to look to writer, philosopher, poet, and former New York University professor Michael Rectenwald. Few contemporary scholars have researched the left’s totalitarian mindset more deeply, and elucidated it so thoroughly, as he." --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 18:45, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Andrew Sullivan's substack newsletter is nothing more than his self-published opinion. The Martin Center is a partisan conservative organization best known for trying to shut down the University of North Carolina Press (cancel culture run amok, no doubt). FrontPage Magazine (the original source of that piece republished in The Jewish Voice, as clearly noted at the bottom of the article) is a far-right outlet best known for peddling Islamophobic conspiracy theories and has been deprecated by overwhelming consensus. The latter two are both book reviews of a minor book published by a small radical-right publishing house which has apparently received little other notice in mainstream sources. What weight are we to assign to these sources? NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 19:56, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
 * could you condense your arguments somewhat? These lengthy walls of text make following this thread difficult. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:08, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
 * If a topic becomes the subject of television-broadcast or print-published parodies ... nothing [in] the guidelines preclude[s] the mention of such a thing – then please find a reliable, independent source for it.Wikipedia is not censored – this is not an argument for any specific content. Due weight applies.McWhorter and Chomsky are public intellectuals – then it should be easy to find reliable, secondary sources on McWhorter's commentary, just like with Chomsky.Any one of [their] blog posts can be used with confidence in filling in nitty-gritties of their respective beliefs – Why should we care about anyone's beliefs? Due weight, again.I believe Wikipedia [should] cover what relevant commentary there has been on the topic – relevance is determined by secondary and tertiary sources that cover the disagreement from a disinterested viewpoint. And it is definitely a . —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:28, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Interesting phrase: "anti-woke"
I'll return with some "cites"--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 19:30, 10 March 2021 (UTC)


 * UK:
 * 1) anti-woke backlash https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/30/anti-woke-backlash-liberalism-laurence-fox
 * 2) Britain's first anti-"woke" TV news channel https://www.businessinsider.com/britain-anti-woke-gb-news-ceo-interview-angelos-frangopoulos-2021-3
 * 3) Is Anti-Woke Becoming the New Woke? https://areomagazine.com/2020/01/21/is-anti-woke-becoming-the-new-woke/ "'. . the woke, a loose conglomerate of online social justice activists who comported themselves like new Victorians, or McCarthyites, monitoring everyone’s behavior, words and art for transgressions against their worldview. The woke were the new fundamentalists. Their tactics were illiberal, damaging to a society that believed in the free exchange of ideas and free speech. They weaponized social media and were turning us into a surveillance society. In the name of democracy, freedom, reason and the Enlightenment, it was important to push back against this illiberal tribe. . . YouTube talk show host Dave Rubin . . A professor at the University of Calgary recently incited a mini anti-woke Twitter riot when he tweeted out a blasphemous joke: the claim that any student who cited Jordan Peterson in his class would fail. The new anti-woke (a group that has begun to be taken over by regular old-fashioned conservatives) mobilized the mob against him. . . Anti-woke outrage is now a brand . .'"
 * 4) "The corner of the internet sometimes known as “anti-wokeness,” “anti-SJW” (“social justice warrior”), or the IDW (Intellectual Dark Web) has been in a state of war over today’s presidential election.  Some notable critics of the “woke left” (associated with identity politics and “cancel culture”) are embracing Donald Trump as a fighter against the blight of wokeness. Most notably, James Lindsay, co-author (with Areo magazine editor Helen Pluckrose) of the book Cynical Theories, has said that he will “unhappily” vote for Trump. Pluckrose strongly disagrees and has put together contributions from 14 critics of “social justice,” myself included, who argue that voting for Trump as a way to defeat “wokeism” is not only useless but actively counterproductive. https://arcdigital.media/anti-woke-anti-trump-a1439a88e4bf"--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 19:38, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

"14 Critics of 'Social Justice'"
 * 1) Pluckrose (listmaker)
 * 2) Steven Pinker—author, Enlightenment Now
 * 3) Thomas Chatterton Williams—author, Self-Portrait in Black and White
 * 4) Conor Friedersdorf—the Atlantic
 * 5) Irshad Manji—author, Don’t Label Me
 * 6) Walter Olson—author/US legal commentator
 * 7) Sarah Haider—writer
 * 8) Paul Graham—programmer-entrepreneur
 * 9) Matt McManus —poli-sci prof  author, The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism ". . I take a far softer line on critical theory than many of my colleagues here, I can recognize that many people don’t like it. They associate it with academic wokism or radicalism and may well see it as a serious threat to liberal individualism and meritocracy. Some may even see postmodern radicalism as a threat to reason and science themselves. Fine. We can have those debates later. . ."
 * 10) Cathy Young—Reason
 * 11) Tom Nichols—author, The Death of Expertise
 * 12) Katie Herzog—writer-podcaster
 * 13) Iona Italia—writer subeditor, Areo
 * 14) Alan Sokal—co-author, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science ". . I applaud Helen Pluckrose and Jim Lindsay for having written a book, Cynical Theories, that calmly dissects the anti-rational and anti-liberal ideology underlying it and argues, once again, for liberal values such as respect for viewpoint diversity and honest debate, and respect for evidence, reason and science. . ." --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 19:53, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

guardian - 'anti-woke' celebrities, such as
 * Piers Morgan
 * comedian Geoff Norcott
 * parodist Andrew Doyle

telegraph - "Laurence Fox . . actor and leader of the anti-Woke Reclaim Party . ."

washingtonpost - "Europe's Absurd and Hypocritical War against 'Wokeness’ Is Heating Up" --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 20:05, 10 March 2021 (UTC)


 * US:

mar 4 thehill - ". . anti-woke, anti–cancel culture agitators run the gamut, from civil libertarian critics of empire to self-styled neoliberals, middlebrow intellectuals to GOP opportunists . . speaking out against the woke cancel culture’s deleterious effects on freedom of speech and press [including]:
 * 1) "Alex Berensonnytimes slate nytimes wsj
 * 2) Glenn Greenwald
 * 3) Bari Weissnytimes
 * 4) Matt Taibbitb/substack rollingstone
 * 5) Bill Maher (..ah well duh) Let's see:
 * Greenwald mar 9 tweet (just yesterday) : "It's literally impossible to satirize woke idiocy in a way that its practitioners will know you're doing it, because in their world, the most outlandish and idiotic uses of wokeism are cheered, so no matter how glaring you make the mockery, they still won't see it."
 * Weiss mar 9 city-journal essay : ". . Power in America now comes from speaking woke, a highly complex and ever-evolving language. . . children learn how the new rules of woke work. . ."
 * Taibbi feb 27 tweet : "Robin DiAngelo is to woke capitalism what Thomas Friedman was to globalization. Two prolific evangelists." --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 20:17, 10 March 2021 (UTC)
 * This is not an article about "social justice" or "social justice warriors". Not every use of the word "woke" in the media belongs in an encyclopedia article. Areo magazine calls itself an "opinion and analysis digital magazine" with Pluckrose as its editor. The only notable thing they've done as far as I know was to famously publish several articles by a fake psychologist, one of which essentially plagiarized author Michael Gurian. The one discussion on RS/N I could find describes Areo as very similar to Quillette, which is considered 'generally unreliable'. Arcdigital.media is evidently a branch of the blog-hosting site Medium. For our purposes the Pluckrose and Young pieces are basically self-published. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:38, 10 March 2021 (UTC)
 * The pieces in The Guardian, WaPo, and The Hill are opinion essays. City Journal is by a conservative think tank. Assorted tweets by some journalists are hardly significant. Once again I have to ask, what is the purpose of listing so many low-quality sources here? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 20:52, 10 March 2021 (UTC)
 * All of these columns and essays and tweets are very helpful in telling us what these people believe. None of them are very helpful in coming to any sort of agreed definition of the term, much less being able to define or label someone. Does anyone self-identify as "woke" and have an opinion on what it means? Because as of now, similar to "social justice warrior," it appears to have become a pejorative epithet applied and used only by opponents. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 20:42, 10 March 2021 (UTC)
 * The best and most even-handed analysis I've found yet is this Vox article, with this quote from a linguistics researcher: the term "woke" has been commodified in marketing to connote a host of associations to things like diversity, inclusion, and so on, in order to turn a profit by appealing to progressive sensibilities. Additionally, it has been plundered into conservative and right-wing discourse as a means of mocking and satirizing the politics of those on the other side of the proverbial aisle. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 21:06, 10 March 2021 (UTC)
 * A wikicontributor above said (seemingly not without a "tribal" tone of disparagement), "by a conservative think tank"
 * Sullivan: "I can see why people take this path of least resistance, but what we’ve seen is simple avoidance of the deeper issue of CRT’s profound illiberalism, a dismissal of it, or an anti-anti-woke position that sees opponents as mere hysterics (and maybe racists). And the CRT advocates have brilliantly managed to construct a crude moral binary to pressure liberals into submission."
 * Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Greenwald: "Many peoples' [politics] defy the clean left-right dichotomy on which the professional media and punditry classes depend, the only prism through which they can understand the world.
 * Why identify critiques of woke il-liberality as politically "rightward"? Who says? (Just curious! I've got no axe to grind here: As self-described "crypto-woke," I'd register even to the so-called "left" – using this seemingly useful schemata of current popularity – of Mr. Matt McManus, just above.) In point of fact, a super-rough estimate of the politics of folks listed in this thread is 10% Conservative ( figuring Lindsay as being only one-half a person, because he claims political nonalignment outside his being anti-woke). The only Conservative well known in the US we come to above is in the next thread up at Sullivan, although an unorthodox one.
 * wp:BLOG: "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications."
 * Opinion-maker Sullivan has published all over, plus had a stint when young as editor of The New Republic 1991-1996; education, per Harvard Magazine: "first-class degree (equivalent to a summa) in modern history and modern languages at Oxford, where, in his second year, he was president of the Oxford Union, the debating body that claims to be 'the most illustrious student society in the world.' He won a Harkness Fellowship to the Kennedy School in 1984[...]. He returned to Harvard in 1989 to write his doctoral thesis, 'Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott,' which won the government department’s Toppan Prize, for the best dissertation 'upon a subject of Political Science.' "; and his writing gig for the past two decades has been at The Dish, circulation 200,000.
 * "Why Is Wokeness Winning?" Andrew Sullivan Oct 16, 2020

if critical race/gender/queer theory is unfalsifiable postmodern claptrap, [...]how has it conquered so many institutions so swiftly? [...] This summer felt like a psychic break from old-school liberalism, a moment when a big part of the American elite just decided to junk the principles that have long defined American democratic life, and embrace what Bari Weiss calls 'a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.' [... T]here’s the deep relationship between CRT and one of the most powerful human drives: tribalism. What antiracism brilliantly does is adopt all the instincts of racism and sexism — seeing someone and instantly judging them by the color of their skin, or sex — and drape them with a veil of virtue. [... T]here is a religious component to wokeness. A generation of nones can feel bereft of transcendence and meaning, and 'becoming woke', like being 'born again,' fills that spiritual hole. [...] Those who hold a view of the world in which only power, and the struggle for power, matters, have few qualms in exercising it. [...] Shutting down speech protects the oppressed; bullying on social media and in the workplace becomes a form of virtue; mercy and forgiveness are mere buttresses for white supremacy; HR departments diligently identify dissidents, and discipline them. Once you set up this system of censorship and fear, persecute a few prominent sinners pour décourager les autres, and encourage snitches, dissidents will increasingly self-censor, and dissent peter out, until the new orthodoxy is the only one. [... A]dvocates of what Wes Yang has called 'the successor ideology' never debate any serious opponents of their position. This is because debate in a liberal society implies equal standing for both sides, and uses reason to determine who’s right or wrong. But there can be no 'both sides' within CRT, no equation of 'racists' and 'antiracists', and debates are inherently oppressive. [...] Critical race theory is much more attuned to human nature. It gives you the simplest template for understanding the world, it assigns you virtue if you assent, it gives you instant power over others purely because of your and their identity, and it requires nothing more than tribal instinct to thrive. That’s why it is here to stay.


 * --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 17:42, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Once again we are seeing a conflation of "critic" and "expert". Winning a Pulitzer Prize doesn't make someone an expert. Nor does being a magazine editor or head of the Oxford Union. Greenwald's & Sullivan's self-published opinions don't help us make any generalized statements about the term "woke". —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:18, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Why identify critiques of woke ... as politically 'rightward'? Per Aja Romano in Vox: "It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right ... On the right, 'woke' ... is usually used sarcastically ... the increasing tendency of conservatives to use 'woke' as an insult". And Vox is an independent source on such usage, unlike the folks listed in this thread, who are merely examples of it. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:33, 11 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Yet, such endorsement of Romano's expertise begs the question of how, User Sangdeboeuf, you apply wp:RS's sorting mechanisms to find her qualifications sterling enough to accurately report on woke semantics, as Vox cyberculture-beat reporter, yet find others', in like circumstances, leaden (as you've so done, above). Anyway, to answer the question you did ask: Because it would be preferable not to replicate unfortunate phrasing within Wikipedia's voice even when it's been directly taken from otherwise marvelous research on general usage of the term woke but that also, unfortunately, implies the fallacy: Should statements "Paleoconservative critics of 'woke' social justice use the term disparagingly" and "Critics of 'woke' il-liberalities use the term disparagingly" be true, it follows that "Critics-of-'woke'-illiberalities are paleoconservative-critics-of-'woke'-social justice" and vice versa.--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 16:35, 12 March 2021 (UTC)
 * "Winning a Pulitzer Prize does not make someone an expert." To the contrary, a topic covered by a journalist is a secondary source with regard to that material, if the journalist is a respected one, it becomes considered more reliable and of higher quality. From examining many such sources, it's determined whether points of view on a topic are mainstream or fringe, whatever opinions we Wikipedian examiners ourselves may possess. Our article's remaining of the nature of polemic by unobjectively implying virtue to reside in woke ideology and virtue's lack in arguments opposing, it should accept edits so that both sides might be presented neutrally and rationally.--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 19:57, 12 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Harvard cognitive psychologist and a popular writer on language, mind, and human nature Steven Pinker says: Woke is a "convenient label for a kind of ideology that has been with us for decades but it has increased in its prominence particularly in 2020..." Also co-authored: The "best means of combating [racism] is the open exchange of ideas."
 * Psycholinguist-author of the 1994 book The Language Instinct (also see: "Steven Pinker"), he thinks that designations of virtue and demonology are components of the psychology of religion also found in especially at either pole of political ideology, right or left, in which opponents' politics are demonized and fellow-adherents assigned virtue; his upcoming book (see publisher's blurb here) appeals for acceptance of rationality as developed in the Enlightenment and not uncritical embrace of a mythological mindset, despite myths' real facilities for bolstering ethical values, reinforcing a sense of identity, and effecting tribal solidarity (see publisher's summary: "The rational pursuit of self-interest, sectarian solidarity and uplifting mythology by individuals can add up to crippling irrationality in a society.").
 * havard.edu/gazette - - Harvard Magazine: "Anecdotes Aren’t Data: Steven Pinker Wants Clearer Delineation Between Facts and Feelings"--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 19:57, 12 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I never said Romano was an expert. As I already explained, Vox is an independent source on such usage, unlike the folks listed in this thread, who are merely examples of it. Romano, as you've said, is Vox['s] cyberculture-beat reporter. Insofar as Vox is reporting the news, with its established structure for fact-checking and editing, it's considered a reliable source. The opinion pieces you've cited are not at all comparable. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:43, 12 March 2021 (UTC)
 * An encyclopedia must itself reflect only a positive view about woke social progress because periodicals such as Vox do, while banning mention of any secondary sources that directly profess negative views about woke il-liberalities, since the general tenor of such "news" views is characteristic of the former, rending this opinion of woke social progress as of objectively true? No, basic principles of summarizing knowledge require such views as are found to be in the minority to be given space. Even such as the socio-political views of which the Economist is chock full cannot simply be reflected as objectively true if and when there are competing ones. This UK periodical, founded in 1843, predates the first US wire service by about half a decade, the latter's inaugurating the tradition of neutrality in journalism in that their news items would be run by subscribing periodicals with disparate editorial positions, yet even such wire service pieces contained opinions as circumscribed roughly by the need not to raise the hackles of any of these subscribers. An arguably more knowledgeable source for a sociopolitical coinage's meaning might be a professor who's a celebrated cognitive psychologist-trained linguist, Steven Pinker, who, as we've seen in this thread or the one just above, is wholly in the "woke il-liberalities" camp.
 * (Random sample): ". . This morning (October 26, 2014) I woke up in Oslo, after having addressed the Oslo Freedom Forum ... at least one speaker at the Forum singled out speech codes and other restrictions on expression in the United States as a worrisome development. . . The students at elite universities . . may be disciplined by an administrative board with medieval standards of jurisprudence, pressured to sign a kindness pledge suitable for kindergarten, muzzled by speech codes that would not pass the giggle test if challenged on First Amendment grounds, and publicly shamed for private emails that express controversial opinions. . ." --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 23:01, 12 March 2021 (UTC)

Your "random sample" has nothing to do with the topic that I can see. Campus free speech is a different topic. Where does anything in the Vox source count as a positive view, and why are we talking about inherently POV concepts such as woke social progress and woke il-liberalities? I think we're getting hung up on the use–mention distinction again. A bunch of blogs and op-eds using the term "woke" in whatever anti-PC crusade they're on doesn't constitute encyclopedic coverage of the topic. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 03:18, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Due your perception my random samples have got nil to do with woke – along with my sense it would be your preference – I let off from expounding on the big picture of, well, yes, what is obviously inherently, [politically] pov about the "woke" (as in any other) social movement, let me switch my telescope's ends for the granularity of – my less-often-preferred – wikipedantry. Or rather (I suppose under the sanctions @ wp:BRB), you've initiated a slow-motion quasi edit war (diff - diff - diff]), I'll concentrate on it in entirety, my proceeding exactly one item at a time.

Disregarding that, I suppose, per wp:BRD and perhaps through a priori sentiment that news reports about Helen Pluckrose vis a vis "woke" should be wikiverboten, information was reverted that (although, per wp:Reliable Sources, reliable sources are "are not required to be neutral, unbiased, or objective. Sometimes non-neutral sources are the best possible sources for supporting information about the different viewpoints held on a subject" and, which, I'd contributed, attemptedly, to right the imbalance obtained to-date by our article's unwaveringly "woke" stance, hence, information contra "woke" from the Independent (about Helen Pluckrose: some such about info and assistance the entity she'd founded gives, e.g., traditionally religious who seek workplaces exemption from woke-ideology sensitivity training and whatnot)... Otherwise,


 * TO START, PER wp:LWQ, best practice is, "where possible, [to] link from text outside of the quotation instead – either before it or soon after." Next up, part of Romano's quote resorts in quite classic fashion to the psychogenetic fallacy of skirting merits or demerits of criticisms of "woke" in favor of dog-whistling, inaccurate-at-that, left-right tribalism. In fact, otherwise, in light of wp:WIKIVOICE: "Unless a topic specifically deals with a disagreement over otherwise uncontested information, there is no need for specific attribution for the assertion." What, other than this tone, would the requisite disagreement-about-Romano's-assertions be, that triggers her quoting? My reversion of the material, as a practical matter (and, again, pedantically speaking) is proof that the material is contested – if nothing more than by me: it's being preferable, per wp:YESPOV [emphasis mine], to "Prefer nonjudgmental language. A neutral point of view neither sympathizes with nor disparages its subject (or what reliable sources say about the subject), although this must sometimes be balanced against clarity. Present opinions and conflicting findings in a disinterested tone. Do not editorialize. When editorial bias towards one particular point of view can be detected the article needs to be fixed." If there are contradictory pov's involved -- such as, it's being apparent that Romano's characterization of critics' use-of-"woke" contains her editorial suppositions that in turn provide the impulse to quote her -- then, again per wp:YESPOV, it's preferable to "Indicate the relative prominence of opposing views. Ensure that the reporting of different views on a subject adequately reflects the relative levels of support for those views, and that it does not give a false impression of parity, or give undue weight to a particular view. For example, to state that "According to Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust was a program of extermination of the Jewish people in Germany, but David Irving disputes this analysis" would be to give apparent parity between the supermajority view and a tiny minority view by assigning each to a single activist in the field."  (For what it may be worth, as noted in my initial edit summary - diff [as well as subsequent, null-edit edit summary - diff ], my sense of the part of the material-I-deleted's inappropriateness is Romano's defensively-accusatory tone, other than which there wasn't content not banal or a stereotype sloppily generalizing the entity, critics of "woke," as politically conservative.) --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 18:02, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I didn't respond to your 14:34, 11 March 2021 edit summary because it had qualities of a word salad, much like your commentary on this talk page. Please take the time to condense your thoughts and express them more clearly. Establishing relative levels of support for different views depends on published, reliable sources, not personal evaluation of some blogs and opinion pieces. Sticking to reliable sources is not editorial bias. Romano gives a specific example (rep. Matt Gaetz) and quotes two different experts to support the idea of criticism coming from the right. I don't see anything sloppy about it. Nor does it imply that criticism comes from the right. I don't see anything defensive or accusatory in the tone of the Vox article. Could you give an example? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:55, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I haven't seen any reliable, secondary sources that treat "woke" as a social movement, only assorted commentators using it as a term of abuse for what they perceive to be a social movement. Until we have better sources for this aspect, the article is and should remain about the term itself, its usage, history, impact, etc. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:18, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Semantic bifurcation?
User:NorthBySouthBaranof said, "Does anyone self-identify as 'woke' and have an opinion on what it means? Because as of now, similar to 'social justice warrior,' it appears to have become a pejorative epithet applied and used only by opponents." The meaning has bifurcated: "Stay woke" and "woke" qua, in a positive sense, "remain awake to injustice" (a la Dr. West, arrested during protests in Ferguson, then eg alongside DeRay McKesson in LA, alongside Bree Newsome) – versus: "Woke" (almost never, "stay woke") qua, ditto, with negative connotations about the overall movement's allegedly cancel-culture aspects.
 * Sources for the former:


 * 1) 2008 - " When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble [... They can't get away with subjection. [...] It takes courage for folk to stand up."] &mdash; Cornel West, Hope on a Tightrope
 * 2) October 15, 2014 salon - Rutger's Brittany Cooper: ". . This past weekend, protestors [...] descended on Ferguson[...]. I'm reminded of a verse: 'it is high time to awake out of sleep. (Romans 13:11)' In college, some youth government leaders used this verse with the slogan, 'The Awakening. Don't sleep.' These days, young folks have remixed it, proclaiming 'stay woke.' I am sitting with what it means that we have moved from 'Don't Sleep to Stay Woke.' For we have awakened from a long, fitful slumber. Lulled there by our parents and grandparents, who marched in Selma, sat down in Greensboro, matriculated at Black colleges, and argued before the Supreme Court, they convinced us to adopt their freedom dreams, impressed them into our bodies, in every hug, in every $25 check pressed into a hand from a grandmother to a grandchild on his or her way to bigger and better, in every whispered prayer, in every indignity suffered silently but resolutely in the workplace.  ". . We have awakened from sleep. [...]  Cornel West has re-emerged, [...] the one who we tried not to listen to, [...]the one who is -- despite all of our collective quibbles and begrudgements – right. This moment is about all of us. About what kind of America we want to be. About what kind of America we are willing to be, willing to fight for. About whether we will settle for being mediocre and therefore murderous to a whole group of citizens. About whether there are other versions of ourselves worth fighting for. Don’t sleep. Millennials, it seems, are the ones we have been waiting for.  Fearless and focused, the future they are fighting for is one I want. It is high time to awake out of sleep. Stay woke."
 * 3) August 25, 2015 yesmagazine - "Strategies to Make Powerful Social Change – Starting With 'Stay Woke'": ". . Bree Newsome. I will never forget her. She climbed up the flagpole at the South Carolina Statehouse in June and took down the Confederate flag. [...E]lements I can identify in Newsome’s recipe for homemade freedom: 1. Stay woke. Newsome’s actions were a response to Gov. Nikki Haley’s unfulfilled promise[...]. Anger is the appropriate feeling to have when our boundaries have been violated. Newsome reminds us that the purpose of anger is to generate the energy we need for self-protective action. 2. Get up early. . . 3. Deeds, not pleas, bring change. . . 4. Use what you have. . . 5. Speak the language you know. . . 6. To go far, go together. A South African proverb says: 'If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.' . ." &mdash; Mistinguette Smith
 * 4) March 5, 2021 truthout.org/Cornel West (interviewed by Emory University philosopher George Yancy): ". . as Michel Foucault used to say, every history of the past is a history of the present and vice versa. [...] You’re in but not of this empire, you're in but not of this white supremacist society, trying to be in but not of this predatory capitalist society, you’re in but not of this patriarchal, homophobic society, but you know all that’s inside of you, too. And that is part of the paradox, the white supremacy that is inside of me. I grew up within a patriarchal empire, so I’m going to have the patriarchy in me. So, I have to fight that every day. That’s part of learning how to die. That needs to die daily in order for me to emerge as a stronger love warrior, freedom fighter and wounded healer. [. . T]alk about identity these days will not mean much at all if it is not rooted in integrity and high quality and solidarity. You see, racial identity and gender identity could just be weaponized for another middle-class project that would reproduce neoliberal politics that will unleash Wall Street greed, generate high levels of poverty, no accountability of the elites at the top, and everybody walks around with a smile, because you got some Black folk and Brown folk at the top. And it just means that the class hierarchy is more colorful, and the imperial hierarchy is more colorful, but people are still suffering."
 * 5) February 20, 2021 theneweuropean - playwright, novelist, critic and broadcaster Bonnie Greer: "Stay Awake to the Right's Weaponisation of Woke": ". . 'Why would anyone not want to be awake?' Indeed. But for those on the right spectrum, wokeness implies the opposite: a kind of unthinking, automatic, sleepwalking into a left wing way of being. But that's not where the term started. This is the same with woke's sibling, 'political correctness'. I have always been amused by the right's appropriation of the term 'politically correct'. As I recall, it was a term of satire back in the day, something we university students from the late 1970s and early 1980s used to mock... ourselves[...]: it’s a joke. [...] But woke is, of course, African American jargon which goes back further than recent years. Further than political correctness. And its meaning is quite beautiful. It means being awake to not only the possibilities of escape from inhuman conditions, but of being awoke to the Divine. To transcendence. It is also about being awake to nature, to the sky and the trees and the air. Those of the enslaved who could, escaped using a series of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. One of the ways to chart the route north and therefore to freedom, was to keep the constellation Polaris in your eye and in your mind. Escaped slaves, travelling along the route, had to move at night. To get out of the South and to freedom they were told to stay awake – to be woke – and to 'follow the Drinking Gourd'. This is another term for the Big Dipper, that large asterism which consists of seven stars of the constellation Ursa Major. Four define a bowl, three define a handle: the drinking gourd. Within it is Polaris, the North Star, the pointer to freedom. I can remember being told by elders to 'stay woke', i.e. watch how I proceeded through the world, how I treated people; how I was treated. I had to always remember who I was; where I came from and what that all meant in the scheme of things. Now woke is a term of abuse, flung around by those on the right[,... ]a way to delegitimise and hold back the inevitable tide of history towards a more multi-ethnic world with new definitions, new history." --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 20:12, 11 March 2021 (UTC)--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 16:33, 12 March 2021 (UTC)
 * harvardcrimson, yesterday - woo hoo! "Cornel R. West, Steven A. Pinker, and Ronald S. Sullivan Jr. signed on as founding members of a new nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to defending academics’ freedom of expression[: ]The Academic Freedom Alliance." Pinker said "freedom of opinion at universities[...]is 'indisputably under threat.' 'Much of the intellectual repression comes when there is a noisy group of activists who pressure university officials who just don’t want trouble.' . . 'Penalizing someone for holding a minority viewpoint “corrodes the credibility of the university' "
 * chronicleofhighereducation - ". . Jeffrey J. Poelvoorde, an associate professor of politics and the sole Orthodox Jewish faculty member of a small college in South Carolina. Poelvoorde refused to attend mandatory anti-racism training in the wake of the George Floyd protests — he was the only one of his colleagues to refuse. 'My quarrel is not so much with the content of these materials the administration would impose on us, but rather the coercive imposition itself,' Poelvoorde wrote in a letter to administrators at Converse College. / " 'They told him they would fire him, they would revoke his tenure,' George told me. 'He stood up to them, we came in and provided legal and moral support, and after a whole lot of Sturm und Drang, they completely caved, backed down, and exempted him.'  /. . "only a change in the cultural atmosphere around these issues — a preference for open debate and free exchange over stigmatization and punishment as the default way to negotiate controversy in academe — could resolve the overall problem. / "The Princeton University political historian Keith E. Whittington, who is chairman of the alliance’s academic committee, echoed Strossen’s point. The recruitment effort, he said, aimed to gather 'people who would be respectable and hopefully influential to college administrators — such that if a group like that came to them and said "Look, you’re behaving badly here on these academic-freedom principles," this is a group that they might pay attention to.' /" '. . two tenured professors speaking about what they know about,' [ Lucas E. Morel ] said, noting that the debate was a perfectly civil and collegial exchange of views between himself and Harris — though continually interrupted by students photo-bombing the proceedings with signs bearing denunciations of the very existence of the debate. / " '. . Let us declare with Frederick Douglass, "There can be no right of speech where any man … is overawed by force and compelled to suppress their honest sentiments." ' " --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 21:29, 12 March 2021 (UTC)


 * --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 19:58, 13 March 2021 (UTC)

Use vs. mention
Under we are told that Obama criticized "woke" culture (by which he meant "calling people out on social media"), that Bunyasi and Smith say striving to be recognized as "woke" (i.e. "educated around issues of social justice") is "self-serving and misguided", and that Beaud and Noiriel fear "contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses" (in the words of a New York Times journalist).These are all on the "use" side of the use–mention distinction, inasmuch as they show people  the term "woke" to refer to something that somebody doesn't like. They are not the term itself, any more than someone saying "I hate oranges" is about the word "orange". The issues in question deal more with callout culture, social justice, postcolonialism, etc. Labeling any of these issues a matter of "wokeness" is inherently subjective and judgmental. Wikipedia is not a dictionary; this article shouldn't be an indiscriminate list of media usage or a clearinghouse of people using the term "woke" to criticize or to praise. I suggest removing the material in question pending sources that actually relate it to the subject of "woke(ness)" as a term. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:36, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * wp:WORDISSUBJECT: Sometimes "a word or phrase is still at first blush about a topic other than the word or phrase itself/ but the word or phrase is a "lens" or concept through which the topic or closely related set of topics are grouped or seen. When this occurs, the article often focuses on the "lens" and may not be the main coverage of the topics which are viewed through it. World music, Political correctness, Homosexual agenda, Lake Michigan-Huron and Truthiness illustrate this." This would appear to be the case for Woke, as well. Cf. this section at Political Correctness:"Right-wing political correctness 'Political correctness' is a label typically used to describe liberal terms and actions, but not for equivalent attempts to mold language and behavior on the right. Economist Paul Krugman, writes that 'the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which – unlike the liberal version – has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of 'Newspeak': to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order.'Krugman Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute defined the right's own version of political correctness as 'patriotic correctness'."--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 19:59, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * This doesn't address the use–mention distinction or the POV issues I raised. If we are to cover other topics through the lens of "woke", we still need more than passing mentions or trivial usage. The above NYT article is an example of a source that uses "woke" almost as a throwaway description before going into detail on a bunch of unrelated topics. Obama using the term in a speech is also a perfect example of disproportionate news coverage. I doubt this off-the-cuff remark will pass the ten-year test. The two sources in the quoted paragraph from Political correctness are opinion pieces – not a good example to follow IMO. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:23, 14 March 2021 (UTC)


 * I can't make head nor tails of your use of the use-mention distinction, I'm afraid. It seems that what the distinction means is that merely speaking of a term's usages and not its overall meaning is an example of mention whereas delving into the actual meaning is use. Ditt, about your nearly complete disavowal of WP's using opinion pieces and the like when there's nothing wrong about our use of some of them, where appropriate, according to long-established standards and precedent here at the project; indeed, I think the overly puristic viewpoint in this regard is what's unnecessarily brought our treatment of the topic here into the truly narrow scope as it has currently! As for your comment that "[W]e still need more than passing mentions of the word" Philosophically speaking, I more power to adjust my own point of view than somebody else's. With that in mind, maybe the best way to try and stop our continually talking past each other is for me, myself, to try and at least imagine that you're correct and that, indeed (if I understand you correctly), no such thing as a woke social movement exists. Yes; I can see, then, that any major-news entity who uses the term when talking about said imaginary movement's influence on methodologies countering racism would be doing so in abuse of the term. I've got that. I still don't see how this would only be passing mentions, though, since each such article uses the same term in its headline and then again in the body, before talking about what they mean by it in depth. Hmmm. How about this. Say instead of a race-centered term it's some analogue we'd be talking about instead: say, that it's geocentric. . . . Someone might come across these strange-to-them analyses in the critique of an employing of geo-circumnavigational focus. However, these folks, noticing that such treatments only mention "geocentric" in their treatments' title and then in scattered fashion as a qualifying term throughout their pieces, instead of resorting to saying complex phrases like "theory of the earth as the center of celestial bodies' revolutions" as they go about developing their critiques, then such folks could believe that their own conceived topic (according to their personal understanding) of What-Is- Geocentric isn't even being touched on in the piece except tangentially. But, should it really be Wikipedia that judges whether these instances of the major-media's use of the term are misnomers or not? Shouldn't it, instead, take the more passive approach of merely allowing merely the totality of a term's actual usages to determine in what manner for us to summarize its meaning for our readers? This reflects my understanding of the appropriate application of the use-mention dichotomy, as well: If a source uses a term with this nuance in this major-media source yet in that nuance in another major-media source, to favor one over the other smacks of the deleteriousness inherent in the "mentions" side of this dichotomy, no? whereas, comprehending the same term's overall field of nuances so that its definition doesn't leave out any of its many uses in various circumstances and contexts more-so smacks of the "use" side of this dichotomy -- as least to my understanding: So, again, as I mentioned, your repeated reference to this idea completely has baffled me, to-date. I don't believe it's not up to Wikipedia to decide which usages of a term, which view pro or con of the idea it represents is legit -- despite the utopia of which the idea may be thought a harbinger may be thought to be a suspect mirage or legitimately like unto a heavenly manifestation by the idea's respective adversaries and proponents. Looking beyond metaphysical claims and being open to various sides of issues and various ways of examing things and constructing hypotheses about them, to my view, make up the marvelous scientific method that grew out of the Enlightenment, producing the first real Encyclopædias that were Wikipedia's forebears .--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 22:47, 14 March 2021 (UTC)


 * Let me start over again. First off, the "Use-Mention" page linked to reads like an inkblot test or alchemists' cookbook (or, maybe, a diviners' manual? . . . OK: I'll brb after my breakfast, then I'll address the rest of the concerns mentioned! . . . )--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 16:03, 15 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm back. I'm going to offer a mea culpa at the very bottom of the lowest thread on the talkpage.--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 18:05, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

"Woke" is pretty much just a pejorative at this point, and J.D. Vance demonstrated it neatly
JD Vance, he of "Hillbilly Elegy" tweeted this evening, We should eliminate the university degree requirement from the officer corps. It’s dumb to make people get a BA before becoming officers anyway, and it may just make the military leadership less woke.

Notably, I'm not sure literally anyone in history has described American military leadership as "woke." And the beyond-credulity use of the pejorative is what's attracting attention.

Max Kennerly notes, Right-wingers spent so long in their own echo chambers they forgot why they appropriated the word "woke" as an insult in the first place. Now their use is so meaningless that a jar of mayonnaise with a Yale Law degree thinks "woke" is "anything learned after secondary school."

Robert Schlesinger: I ... didn't think I'd live long enough to see the military brass criticized as being too "woke."

Jamelle Bouie: i have no idea what “woke” is even supposed to mean anymore

Jacob Silverman: "military leadership less woke"?? I think most of these reactionaries use "woke" as a catchall insult/descriptor that earns nods from a certain in-group but it doesn't have much meaning anymore.

The Atlanta Voice (Black newspaper): Conservatives have turned the word "woke" into a rallying cry against everything that's become socially accepted while being against promoting diversity of critical thought.

Other comments: every day on the website we learn an exciting new definition for what "woke" means. today we find out it's woke when you despoil and slaughter your way across the globe in a massive orgy of blood.

Interesting context and interesting timing. NorthBySouthBaranof (talk) 03:47, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * It is an interesting discussion, but needless to say we can't really do anything with a twitter conversation. There actually aren't many sources in the article discussing its use as a pejorative, and a quick Google Scholar search doesn't turn up anything obvious - there are lots of sources that plainly use it that way, but it would be more useful to find decent-quality secondary sources covering that usage. I suspect that part of the reason there isn't much coverage is because that sort of usage is mostly indistinguishable from the way they use a wide variety of similar words (eg., one of the few papers I could find even acknowledging that use, describes how we will examine how extremists attempt to reclaim work from the (white) Western Canon (such as Shakespeare) from those they consider ‘woke’, liberal, and left-wing, with the clear implication that the terms are used, by the online extremists they're discussing, in a very similar or even interchangeable manner. There isn't really much to say about that - culture-war types turning any word that refers to their ideological enemies into epithets isn't exactly news or particularly meaningful in and of itself. --Aquillion (talk) 12:09, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I did come across a piece by Jamelle Bouie that mentions this: "These days, it’s a term of abuse — a shorthand for puritanical political correctness, a pejorative wielded against liberal elitism." However, it's an opinion column, so I'm hesitant to give it much weight. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:48, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes, my impression (after spending a while going through Google Scholar looking for scholarly sources) is that that sort of usage is one of those Very Online things that looms large in the minds of a few culture-war-invested talking heads and people who follow them, but which isn't treated particularly seriously by actual experts. We do note its existence (Since then, journalist Aja Romano argues that woke has evolved into a "single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory"; among American conservatives, the term is often used mockingly or sarcastically. Linguist Ben Zimmer writes that as the term has gained mainstream acceptance, "its original grounding in African-American political consciousness has been obscured".) but I don't think we should give it more weight than we do currently. Truthfully the co-option of "woke" language by brands trying to improve their image has a lot more coverage among high-quality RSes. --Aquillion (talk) 22:02, 14 March 2021 (UTC)

“Please stop citing media as sources.”
2600:1700:13F0:8110:74A3:EC02:CC7E:2567
 * ”Please stop citing media as sources.”: Meters: “WP:NOTAFORUM If you want to complain about Wikipedia's use of major media sources, this is not the place)”
 * 2600:1700:13F0:8110:74A3:EC02:CC7E:2567: “Wikipedia is riddled with citations from major media sources. They are all biased, mainly toward the left.”
 * Keep Wikipedia free from political interference. Comment added by 2600:1700:13F0:8110:74A3:EC02:CC7E:2567 (talk) 03:57, 6 May 2021 (UTC)
 * What is the first word at the top of this page? “Talk.” If the Talk page isn’t a forum, nothing is. Who died and gave you the right to silence people with whom you disagree, and send their Talk page contributions down the memory hole, Meters? 2603:7000:B23E:3056:F9CE:E8A8:AD68:FECC (talk) 02:55, 28 May 2021 (UTC) Special:Contributions/2603:7000:B23E:3056:F9CE:E8A8:AD68:FECC

Notable commentary?

 * 1) Woke Church: An Urgent Call for Christians in America to Confront Racism and Injustice diff (last.fm - "[Book's author, Eric Mason, rec'd his ]doctoral degree at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, in Ministry In Complex Urban Settings, May 2007")
 * 2) The Madness of Crowds: Laver, M. Soc 58 (2021) - " --- is a push-back[ ]by these old-school liberals against a 'woke' movement that now sees them as part of the problem[ . N]ew cultural 'tripwires' which can unexpectedly cause[ ]people accustomed to being revered as 'good'—to fall flat on their faces" --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 18:16, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The first cites a primary source for Eric Mason's use of "woke". Moody Publishers is a small Christian publisher; as the author himself is evidently non-notable, I've removed it as WP:UNDUE. The Laver review could be useful under, however, particularly the statement Murray supplements his description of woke culture as 'deranged,' rather than merely intolerant of its critics ... The implication is that, while identity politics merit his attention and criticism, alt-right movements, much more dangerous and also powered by the Internet, do not. What we should do is uncritically paraphrase Murray's definition of "woke", because the author does not.  --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 18:42, 4 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It's quite natural for any of us editors trying to operate mostly from a secular standpoint (eg of the Academy) to undervalue certain works published within whatever devotional framework; however, in response to "the author himself is evidently non-notable": Mason's The Woke Church is big stuff! Mason's books have garnered any number of reviews (I quickly surfed to these two) and the premise of this latest attracts enviable notice (incl. newsweek, christianpost , patheos   , christianitytoday, , atlantajournalconstitution).  As for "Moody Publishers[ as ]a small Christian publisher": For what it's worth, Moody Publishing does a fair job of marketing its titles and its devotional-author stable includes quite a few "well-knowns." Including Gary Chapman: I just surfed to Amazon's "best sellers in Christian books" and Chapman's books (published by Moody's  Northfield Publishing imprint) are at both its #2 spot and #5 spots. There might be other Moody-imprint titles there but the list page doesn't highlight publishers. By the way, Moody's author-stable also incl. Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Tony Evans, Erwin Lutzer, J. Oswald Sanders, Juli Slattery, A.W. Tozer. Moody says it publishes over 50 new titles per annum (these often reviewed in major venues), for over a thousand total in their current catalog (nonfic and also fic, incl. what's advertises as "award-winning" titles in the children's, fantasy, sci-fi, young-adult, mystery genres). A portion of its English-language titles are intended for African-American, LatinX, and "urban-influential" readership. It has multi-language offerings (with some works[ prob. bibles? ]having been translated into over 70 languages) and branch offices upon five continents.  --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 18:26, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The point is that the publisher is a publisher, not a mainstream, general-interest publisher, let alone an academic one. Book reviews that don't mention the use of "woke" are off-topic, and several of the sources you mention are not generally reliable anyway. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 18:35, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The sourcing provided possess adequate independence. (I could have provided others less so : Admittedly, sometimes, someone such as a pastor's theological teaching or analysis can be found to be notable only within the religious community in qustion but not outside of it. With that caveat, certain publications (Patheos, Christian Post, etc.) are considered independent of the type of religion to which they give journalistic coverage (more examples: L'Osservatore Romano and Our Sunday Visitor with regard to Catholicism and Sojourners and Evangelical Press Association with regard to Protestantism). Provided Mason's (or another devotional writer's) analysis or thoughts about a matter had been absent such independent third-party sourcing, establishing its notability, if, per chance, (such as) an academic press had chosen to publish it, this could be taken by wikieditors as conferring some amount of notability sans such coverage; but, we needn't go that route. --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 20:45, 8 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Another activist sermon, delivered by MLK in 1963 in Mo Town, was released as a recording by a "race"-label. A "ghettoization" of this event (alleging it as soelely "important within its own community(!)" and that the independent sourcing that would otherwise prove this speech notable must be disregarded in light its publisher(-as-a-vinyl-recording)'s "niche"-audience status) would unnecessarily hinder Wikipedia's assemblage of knowledge about the US 1960s Civil Rights Movement. To reiterate: Although it's true that some things are notable only within a minority community; if these do become noted-upon, by general-news venues, they indeed become notable for Wiki's encyclopedic purposes.--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 18:47, 9 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Independence is only one factor in establishing reliability. The other main one is a source's reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. We specifically prefer respected mainstream publications over niche publications. If you could cite some general-news venues for your proposed addition, that would be great, thanks. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:27, 10 October 2021 (UTC)


 * 3. Cont. Re the woke church:
 * 1) SBC pastor Thabiti Anyabwile, writing in The Gospel Coalition), argues (in an article entitled "Woke Is . . ."), "We have to teach people how to be their ethnic selves in a way that's consistent with the Bible and how to live fruitfully in contexts that don’t affirm their ethnic selves. Hence, we need a 'woke church.' "But it's not just African Americans who need a 'woke church.' All people need it.[ ]We may need to find biblically richer and more careful ways of doing the work, but that the work needs to be done seems evident to me. Keep on Dr. Mason!"
 * 2) Page 84 in Voddie T. Baucham's 2021 Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelicalism's Looming Catastrophe: "At the heart of the 'woke' movement lies the idea that the sin of racism is no longer to be understood as an individual sin." (Btw: Fwiw, Eric Mason's cited four times in this book published this year by Simon & Shuster.)--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 17:47, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * 3) christianpost - "'Why are people and groups like Thabiti Anyabwile, Tim Keller, Russell Moore, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, 9Marks, the Gospel Coalition, and Together for the Gospel (T4G) being identified with Critical Social Justice on one side of the fault, and people like John MacArthur, Tom Ascol, Owen Strachan, Douglas Wilson, and the late R.C. Sproul being identified on the other?”[ Baucham ]asks in the introduction of his 270-page book. 'It is not a stretch to say we are seeing seismic shifts in the evangelical landscape.[ ]'" --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 17:58, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * 4. Anyabwile's notabilities as public intellectual/evangelical religious figure
 * 1) southernbaptisttheologicalseminary - "Thabiti Anyabwile, church planting pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., defends the value of expository preaching at an African-American pastors' conference at Southern Seminary, Oct. 27."
 * 2) usatoday - "[ ]Our Take on Leaders of Change"
 * 3) washingtonpost - "MacArthur clearly wants to paint the participants -- including prominent pastors Tim Keller, Russell Moore, Thabati Anyabwile and John Piper[ ]."
 * 4) christianpost- "[Ryan BurtonKing then named a long list of high profile evangelicals such as Russell Moore, president of the SBC's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, and Washington, D.C. Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile of Anacostia River Church who have spoken out against racial sin in America."
 * 5) relevantmagazine - "It's not hard to find examples of people dismissing the conservative likes of Dr. Russell Moore, Thabiti Anyabwile and Beth Moore as 'Marxists' or 'Leftists' because they speak up about justice issues that are often broadly categorized as falling under the 'woke' umbrella[ ]."
 * 6) patheos - "#Woke Evangelical Timeline" - "[ ]Anyabwile,another prominent black pastor in evangelical circles who has also criticized white churches for harboring racial prejudice[ ]"
 * 7) baptistnews - "Anyabwile, a pastor at Anacostia River Church in Washington who supports the idea of reparations for slavery, is one of a small number of influential blacks in the[ Southern Baptist Convention ]downplaying the threat of a so-called 'Social Justice Movement.'"
 * 8) christianitytoday - "Thabiti Anyabwile's Love-Hate Relationship with the Limelight: As a Pastor, He Prefers to Avoid the Public Eye. Here's Why He Doesn't."
 * 9) christianitytoday - "Interview with Vince Bacote[author of Reckoning with Race and Performing the Good News]" [ - "Q."] I have read and done interviews with both your colleague at Wheaton, Esau McCaulley and the historian Jemar Tisby. Their books, Reading While Black and The Color of Compromise are terrific. I am grateful for these voices and certainly for yours. I am under no illusions that all African Americans are in total agreement on how to address the vexing problem of race in America. Thabiti Anyabwile would disagree on various points with Voddie Baucham. It is the same outside the church with John McWhorter and Ibram X. Kendi.[ ]" ["A." W]e can better assess the contributions of each if we approach them by asking questions like 'what point are they trying to make?' and 'what brought them to this approach?' and 'how does this help me to be more truthful about the complexities of race and the range of responses we need to address this with faithfulness?' This will help us to be learners first who seek to discover more truth and respond better to questions of race."
 * 10) More from Anyabwile's "Woke Is . . .":"'Woke: A Lineage.[ 'W]oke' today is pretty close to the Afrocentricism of the 1980s[, ]a word coined by Dr. Molefi Asante[. T]here was the Black Arts Movement and Black consciousness movement of the 1960s[. ]That period gave us 'Black' as an ethnic identifier[. ]To be 'woke,' then, builds on this discovery: that being 'Black' is something to take pleasure in.[ T]here was in the 1920s the New Negro movement of the Harlem Renaissance[. T]o be Ethiopian, Negro, Black, or African-American (choose your descriptor and time period) has always involved a massive project in self-definition, self-determination and self-affirmation in a national and world context characterized by anti-Black racism and oppression. That's the one thing these periods have in common. That's why some version of 'woke' appears in nearly every generation.[ ]' 'Woke Church? [ 'W]oke church' continues in the tradition of Martin Delaney, Edward W. Blyden, Henry McNeal Turner, Alexander Crummell[. By the world's ]mockery, scoffing, and hatred they make some form of being 'woke' necessary. So may the church get woke and stay woke.'"--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 20:30, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Restraining from a standard for notability more stringent than Wikipedia's own, these additional book/periodical citations I've provided show that Mason is notable. (Absent rebuttal, after 24 hours, I'll reinstate the edit [see diff] concerning him.)--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 20:52, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Most of these are niche sources, and most have nothing to do with Eric Mason. Anyabwile's The Gospel Coalition piece is a blog, and therefore not usable in any case. Baucham's book is a polemic, and was published by Salem Books, an imprint of the conservative publishing house Regnery Publishing, not Simon & Schuster. (S&S has published plenty of senationalist garbage anyway). The Christian Post is not a mainstream source, but even they include a quote calling Baucham's book a "polemic". I'm not seeing any basis for mentioning Mason's commentary here. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:48, 10 October 2021 (UTC) edited 08:25, 13 October 2021
 * Your standards and WP's are starkly removed from each other. Just as books printed for the niche-audience of Hebrew speakers(*) aren't by that mere token rendered unnotable, neither are Christian-audience books on the subject of Christianity.
 * ______
 * (*) Although I don't know what %age of the world's est. 619 million evangelicals are English speakers, I'm sure they dwarf the Hebrew-speaking world. --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 23:12, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Even though the implication that The Gospel Coalition is "self"-published seems disingenuous, even were it (I contend it's not): wp:SELFPUBLISHED only advises caution.--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 23:12, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Christianity and evangelicalism are not the subject of the article. Men make up half the total human population, but men's magazines are generally not considered mainstream, reliable sources. WP:SELFPUBLISHED says (my bolding): self-published material such as books, patents, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, (as distinguished from newsblogs, above) ... are as sources. The word "blogs" is right at the top of the page. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:18, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Why such non-Wikipedia like prejudice against independent religion news sources? (Geez. What's next? Surely not rmvg all business-related sources -- plus, along with them, the nytimes's Roman Catholic Christian conservative opinion-columnist Douthat -- from our coverage given to "woke" capitalism! Bottom line is that Thabiti Anyabwile is, it seems, one of the two best-known evangelical advocates for a "woke" multi-racial Christian awakening and renewal. (Any arguments against this contention?)
 * Secondly: Imagine a Venn diagram with one circle inside of another. Blogs (the diagram's larger, inscribing circle) include members that are self-published (a smaller circle inscribed within it). That said, some blogs remain (represented by a good part of the remainder of larger, inscribing circle) that are not self-published but, rather, published by a news publication. As it so happens, with concern this essay published by Anyabwile about the "woke" church, it doesn't happen to be self-published at all, but, rather, published by the "blog" portion of the news site The Gospel Coalition-dot-org. --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 00:00, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Even if we were to treat Anyabwile's blog as a newsblog rather than a personal blog, the source is still a mainstream source, and the statements in the blog are still Anyabwile's . Religious publications are targeted to a specifically  readership, not a general one. They exist to promote a certain religious point of view, so by definition do not have a disinterested viewpoint. Hence the material is WP:UNDUE. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:11, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

ColorLines / Eternity / Premier Christianity / Wear Your Voice

 * 5. 5may2021 ColorLines "How 'Woke' Became a Slur: Three Scholars Explain the Complex History of the Polarizing Buzzword": "[ UofVA's Meredith D. Clark ]: 'It is a quick way to signal to others that whatever those people over there are saying is not real, not substantial, this is something that's easily dismissed, you shouldn’t pay attention to it. And that is the same sort of treatment that has been reinforced over and over again through anti-Black policies and social practices used to try to cement our position at the bottom of society.[ ]There’s nothing for us to take back from them, it's up to them to figure out what it is that they don't want named and why[ they ]are willing to co-opt our term in order to keep it from being named."
 * 6. 6jul2021[ Australian Christian newspaper ]Eternity  - "Weaponized Words: First 'Intersectionality', Now 'Woke'" -"[ D]o Christians need to choose between staying alert to earthly injustice and being spiritually awake, or can they do both? Civil rights leader and Black pastor Martin Luther King Jr clearly did not think the two aspirations were in opposition but rather entwined, judging by his discussion of the subject in a 1965 commencement address at Oberlin College, Ohio – Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.""'There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking place in our world today. It is a social revolution, sweeping away the old order of colonialism. And in our own nation it is sweeping away the old order of slavery and racial segregation. The wind of change is blowing, and we see in our day and our age a significant development. Victor Hugo said on one occasion that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. In a real sense, the idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity. Wherever men are assembled today, the cry is always the same, 'We want to be free.' And so we see in our own world a revolution of rising expectations. The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution. 'I'd like to suggest some of the things that we must do in order to remain awake and to achieve the proper mental attitudes and responses that the new situation demands. First, I'd like to say that we are challenged to achieve a world perspective. Anyone who feels that we can live in isolation today, anyone who feels that we can live without being concerned about other individuals and other nations is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one. The great challenge now is to make it one in terms of brotherhood.' --- MLK, June 14, 1965undefined"--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 22:28, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * ColorLines is published by an advocacy group and should probably be used with attribution if at all. Otherwise it could go under "Further reading". The commentary from "conservative Christian" newspaper Eternity is opinion and therefore WP:UNDUE. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:04, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Of course such as the black church has been an incredibly important feature within the history of the anti-racist struggle and does continue to be in its post-Floyd iteration. Per WP guidelines, Wikipedia celebrates a multiplicity of notable viewpoints, and the editing stance that instead holds "niche" POVs as necessarily fringe is considered idiosyncratic. It's interesting that small to mid-size presses along with major publishing-house subsidiaries' special-interest imprints all of whose "niche" market is women (ah -- considered as such: despite the fact that the world's slightly higher %age women than men) often seem to "rule the roost"[sic] with concern issues involving improving societal mores and praxis: e.g., Seal Press is feminist. Robin DiAngelo's and Crystal M. Fleming's publisher, Beacon Press, has a religious affiliation (it's at the same time the sectarian press of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations). Does this mean that such as DiAngelo's and Fleming's POVs must be considered therefore not notable? No, we see if such authors have been noted/reviewed in independent places. The SBC's back and forth with concern whether the "woke" struggle should be thought appropriate or inappropriate in the context of the[ evangelical ]church has received notice not only to the nines in the church press but also in such general interest papers as the wapo and others.--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 16:06, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Please link the WP guideline that says Wikipedia celebrates a multiplicity of notable viewpoints. By my understanding, WP:NPOV expressly states that we should avoid giving undue weight to viewpoints outside the mainstream. See also WP:FRINGE. No one is proposing we cite Robin DiAngelo or Crystal M. Fleming, or anything from Seal Press, in this article. Feel free to link to any reliable, general interest papers supporting your proposed addition. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:42, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I respectfully disagree. I believe the "cites" in books and the church press make Mason notable and I believe the scores of cites I've provided from the church press -- along with those immed. below, in which Anyabwile's name is peppered throughout -- make Anyabwile notable. The wsj: "'Our Lord Isn't Woke.' Southern Baptists Clash Over Their Future: The Big Evangelical Denomination Is About to Elect a New Leader to Help Set Its Course after the Trump Presidency ... nytimes wapo nymag wapo latimes theguardian apnews nbcnews theatlantic theatlantic
 * But (per the first clause of the Serenity Prayer) I accept:
 * You believe that, because Mason's book's publishing house has a missionary status and the book's not-insubstantial notice quite naturally has been in the evangelical press, you believe it insignificant. (Thus: Mason's book, because it's "insignificant," "shouldn't be covered in WP.")
 * You believe the "woke church" adherent Anyabwile is "not prominent." (Not that he's "prominent albeit within a religious milieu" [See, also: usatoday; theweek: "Pastor Thabiti Anyabwile, an influential voice among some American evangelicals." -- which is still prominent per WP's guidelines -- but: "not prominent." Thus: His views, because he's "not prominent," "shouldn't be covered in WP."
 * However (to repeat): I respectfully disagree.--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 23:57, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
 * "Prominent" in the context of due weight means . Religious sources are not generally reliable, end of story. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:46, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * 7. thetablet.co.uk - "After a successful period as head of community fundraising and public engagement at Christian Aid, Chine McDonald is to lead religious affairs think tank Theos as its new director, where she will be replacing outgoing director Elizabeth Oldfield starting in January 2022. Chine McDonald read theology and religious studies at Cambridge, before embarking upon a career as a journalist, broadcaster, author and public theologian. She's a regular guest on programmes like Thought for the Day, Prayer for the Day and the Daily Service, has written for a number of regional and national publications, and serves on the boards of several charities including Christians in Media, Christians Against Poverty and Greenbelt Festival." Premier Christianity (UK's #1 christian mag) - Chine McDonald [2021 author God Is Not a White Man]: "When I read the news about the SBC meeting, I was struck by a comment from Mike Stone, a pastor from Georgia, who had hoped to become the next president of the denomination. 'Our Lord isn't woke,' he said. Now, I realise here that I may be in the comfort zone of my echo chamber, but my thinking is that the Lord Jesus was in fact one of the wokest of the woke."22may londontimes (Chine McDonald) - "A re-examination of the pervasive white superiority that has been embedded in Christianity for centuries is about far more than just being 'woke'." --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 18:00, 12 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Both of these are opinion pieces. The views of a religious think-tank director are WP:UNDUE in this topic area. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:46, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * 8. wearyourvoicemag - "Four years later[ 2012], Trayvon was killed while his murderer walked free and Black America was rudely awakened. The collective Black response to injustice ushered in the time of being woke. Kara Brown wrote a piece for Jezebel titled 'In the Aftermath of Ferguson, Stay Angry and Stay Woke.' The piece was a reminder that being woke is not a moment in time or an observation you make on Twitter, but rather a journey or a goal to reach." --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 17:19, 14 October 2021 (UTC)

MLK's speech (in various versions 1959-1968) advocating 'remaining awake'
"Cites":
 * 1) This was published on September 14: "The birth of Black Lives Matter marked a turn in progressive politics; five years into Obama's tenure, activists spoke more bluntly about their disillusionment with his vision of long-range change; they wanted Americans to 'stay woke' to injustice, a spirit of awakening that reached back to Marin Luther King Jr., who said in 1965, 'There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution.'"undefined Also, there's:
 * 2) nytimes (Jamelle Bouie) - "I want to make a point about the term 'woke'[ I]ts origins are in African-American vernacular, where it referred to a broad awareness of anti-black oppression. The metaphor of being 'awake,' for example, drives Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1965 speech 'Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.' Like so much other black slang, it's been borrowed and diluted[ ]."
 * 3) legalinsurrection - "Lisa Jackson, vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives at Apple Inc., who gave Monday's commencement address at Oberlin College, echoed the commencement speech that Martin Luther King Jr. made to the Oberlin College graduating class of 1965. [ ] 'He spoke about remaining awake through a great revolution,' she said. 'Or as you might say now, "Staying woke."'"
 * 4) aftenposten.no: "George Floyd. "Martin Luther King Would Ask Us to Stay Awake" - "King was as 'woke' as today's anti-racists. [ ] «There are all too many people who, in some great period of social change, fail to achieve the new mental outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. » In the same speech, King addresses an argument that is also widely used in the Norwegian context, namely that racism will resolve itself over time."
 * 5) lemonde - "Historian, specialist of the United States, Pap Ndiaye is professor at the Institute of political studies of Paris and visiting professor at Northwestern University. Author of The Black Condition (Calmann-Lévy, 2008) and American Blacks. On the march for equality (Gallimard, 2009), he co-wrote with Andrew Diamond Histoire de Chicago (Fayard, 2013). [ ]
 * 6) lemonde - "Before arriving in France, the term[ 'woke' ]spread across the Atlantic in the historical context of the struggle for black rights. "This slang expression has traveled in the African-American world from the 1960s," historian Pap Ndiaye explained to Le Monde in February. This specialist in the social history of the United States recalled that the great figure of the American civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, had urged young Americans to 'stay awake' and to 'be a committed generation', during a speech at Oberlin University, Ohio, June 1965."
 * 7) clarkuniversity - Ron Jones: "The movement exemplified King's broadened mission of advocating for the rights of citizens across racial, ethnic, and gender lines — an amplified iteration of 'woke,' a term King had employed as early as the 1950s. [ ] 'There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution,' King said."
 * 8) Seton Hall's Forrest Pritchett: "The concept of "stay woke" is inspired from a commencement address at Oberlin College in 1965 delivered by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr."
 * 9) dailymephian - "Before 'Stay Woke,' Dr. King Told Us to 'Remain Awake' through the Revolution"--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 00:30, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Despite the mention of MLK's "stay awake" motif in the article was removed (diff, the citations provide scholars' opinion that this motif during King's era clearly links to use of its slightly more vernacular hashtag/etc. correlate during our present electronic-social-media ("Floyd"? "woke"? ) era.--Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 21:18, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm only seeing one source here that was actually cited in the article (Garrett's A Long, Long Way) and it hardly says anything about the word woke, and that only by way of quotation. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:17, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
 * only seeing one source
 * Here's more:
 * 11. I suggest text that might resemble (after trimmings/expansions/etc. in var. places?): --Hodgdon&#39;s secret garden (talk) 20:43, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I've added a condensed, paraphrased version of the quote from scholars Michael B. McCormack and Althea Legal-Miller, who wrote the chapter in question from reference #3 above. #2 is a primary source, and #1 is another religious treatise; not reliable IMO. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:05, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I left out the connection between the term woke and King's Oberlin College address, which so far is based on a political polemic or book-length essay by Osnos, an opinion essay in The New York Times about the Democratic Party, a conservative blog, a newspaper interview with the historian Ndiaye, a university press release, and a religious tract. It's tempting to infer due weight from the number of sources, but taken individually they seem to fail to meet basic reliability criteria. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:50, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I left out the connection between the term woke and King's Oberlin College address, which so far is based on a political polemic or book-length essay by Osnos, an opinion essay in The New York Times about the Democratic Party, a conservative blog, a newspaper interview with the historian Ndiaye, a university press release, and a religious tract. It's tempting to infer due weight from the number of sources, but taken individually they seem to fail to meet basic reliability criteria. --Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:50, 20 October 2021 (UTC)