User:Hodgdon's secret garden/sandbox/woke

Woke twitter -


 * 1) merriam-webster - It’s now seeing use as an adjective to refer to places where woke people commune: woke Twitter has very recently taken off as the shorthand for describing social-media activists.
 * 2) dictionary.com - woke was diluted, the subject of humorous memes or just casually used as a label for anyone who is “with the times,” not necessarily engaged in the fight for justice and equality. This dilution especially occurred on woke Twitter, with major brands appearing to capitalize on social justice to appeal to millennials.
 * 3) inquirer.net - “woke” is Twitter slang for being socially and culturally aware. It’s about being “awake” to racial and social injustices committed daily. // The term is derived from African-American vernacular English, and can be traced to its use in the Black Lives Matter movement, which protests the killing of black people and racial inequality. //// it can get toxic. It’s okay to speak up—actually, it’s encouraged that you do, but to use your awareness of social politics to feel superior over others only shows that your wokeness is nothing but a call for attention. // Suddenly, to “stay woke” has become a competition of sorts, of who knows more about a culture. It’s reached a point where if you unknowingly say the wrong thing, you’re deemed as problematic and dismissed.
 * 4) inquirer.net - Many social media personalities have become front-liners of wokeness. They have earned social media following, or “clout,” because of how they call out problematic tweets and how they “cancel” the people behind them through their posts. This is not necessarily a problem. The problem begins when the front-liners of woke culture become contributors themselves to a culture of oppression and bullying, and when wokeness gets reduced merely to the act of calling out and humiliating other people.
 * 5) Meghan Daum - At its best, Woke Twitter elicits greater awareness and sensitivity around issues of social justice. At its worst, it functions as the purity police and calls people out for the slightest missteps beyond the bounds of intersectional doctrine.
 * 6) nytimes[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/books/review/bret-easton-ellis-white.html - a millennial who borrows many of his cultural opinions from woke Twitter

addit'l -
 * 1) nytimes - Damon Young: Like “virtue signaling” and “social justice warrior,” woke now says more about the politics of the speaker than it does about the object. But maybe two years from now the word will change again. //// I’m reminded of some of the inane conspiracy theories my wokest college classmates considered gospel. There was the Tommy Hilfiger one, where we shouldn’t buy his clothes because he went on Oprah and expressed disgust at black people wearing them. There was the Timberland one, where we should stop buying those boots because the emblem (a tree) represented lynchings. // These conspiracies could be debunked with superficial research. (Tommy Hilfiger hadn’t even appeared on Oprah’s show before that rumor circulated, the Timberland rumor apparently came from a poem wrongly attributed to Maya Angelou.) But even as we’d roll our eyes at them for believing these untruths, we knew they weren’t wrong about America. They just had bad information. //// Woke, however, described a racial awareness and cynicism so extra that it bordered on parody; where you’re so awake that your “third eye” saw things that aren’t there. The movies “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” and “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” satirized this concept. Each film’s most racially conscious character was either married to a white woman or willing to trample a sista to get to one. Also, woke was used exclusively by black people to refer to other black people. It was our word, because only we were mindful enough to recognize when that pro-blackness was a performance. // As the aughts approached, the term started to lose its racial connotation, becoming instead a catchall for any sort of progressive behavior. You were woke if you recycled, or maybe just retweeted an infographic on the virtues of recycling. White people were deemed woke. Some, painfully, even took it upon themselves to be the arbiters of wokeness. //// now? Well, woke floats in the linguistic purgatory of terms coined by us that can no longer be said unironically, levitating next to “swag” and “twerk” in the “Words Ruined by White People” ether. What was a compliment just a few years ago has become, at best, an eye roll. If a stranger at a dinner party is introduced — or introduces himself — as woke, I know that I’ll need some whiskey before talking to him. // Mostly, though, it’s used as a pejorative. Bill Maher seems to consider wokeness his personal albatross as he’s apparently blind to the paradox of getting paid likely millions of dollars a year to complain about what he believes he’s no longer allowed to say. Progressives have to be careful not to be so woke that we’ll scare moderates into voting for Donald Trump, warn (usually white male) columnists in every major American newspaper. // When the beloved and iconic Deadspin was effectively killed this fall, haters crawled out of the internet’s crevices, cheering the demise of a marriage of sports and wokeness they considered sacrilegious. Even Mr. Obama recently chided wokeness as “not activism,” which, well, is exactly what I’d expect him to say about it now. // Admittedly, woke’s current iteration has been earned. It became a thing you can accessorize like a hoodie. But to be woke, essentially, is to recognize and reject the damage power inflicts on the most vulnerable.
 * 2) nytimes - Bret Stephens: "Woke Me When It’s Over": In the humorless world of Woke, the satire is never funny and the statute of limitations never expires, even when it comes to hamantaschen.
 * 3) vox - Sean Illing: "Republicans Are Trying to Outlaw Wokeness. Literally." - We’re in the midst of something like a moral panic over so-called “cancel culture.” // As I noted a few months ago, there’s a rising contingent of thinkers — on the left and right — who believe a culture of censoriousness has engulfed intellectual life over the last few years. // To state the obvious upfront, it’s a genuine problem, although I don’t think it’s quite the existential threat some have suggested. And I consider it a debate not so much about the right to speak, but rather about where to draw the boundaries and what sorts of social sanctions are permissible when those boundaries are transgressed. // But when the topic is broached, it’s almost always framed as a left-wing problem. This is somewhat misleading. The left, of course, has its excesses, and there are very real efforts to not only suppress unpopular speech but also to punish violations of new orthodoxies. // There is, however, an emergent cancel culture on the right, one that is every bit as pernicious as what we’re seeing on the left, only it hasn’t received nearly as much attention.
 * 4) vox - conservatives have even reframed the protests as being a contributor to — even the cause of — the violent system they inherently oppose. This has typically been done through petty, disingenuous, exhausting semantic arguments, assisted by bad actors, bots, and trolls, and all of it has been done through and around the word “woke.” //// while many people on the right may be disenchanted with wokeness because they see it as an upgraded form of “political correctness,” many people on the left may be just as frustrated with it. That’s because claiming wokeness is often about maintaining the superficial trappings of progressive idealism without doing the real work to understand and change systems of oppression. //// Even on the left, the idea of being “woke” can be a double-edged sword, often used to suggest an aggressive, performative take on progressive politics that only makes things worse. // For instance, consider how the phrase “woke discourse” gets used on social media: The “discourse” can be about a zillion different things, but attaching “woke” to it usually denotes a perception of embittered exhaustion at progressive semantics and arguments. // What’s telling is that the exhaustion seems to come from moderates and leftists themselves as often as from conservatives — as if there’s a shared agreement that embodying wokeness is a kind of trap, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on. //// Boston Globe columnist Alex Beams snarkily condemned the performative progressive nature of the term. “Do you use the word ‘intersectionality’ a lot, even if you aren’t exactly sure what it means?” he wrote. “If yes, you are progressing well along your journey to wokefulness.” // “The real purpose of ‘woke’ is to divide the world into hyper-socially aware, self-appointed gatekeepers of language and behavior, and the rest of humanity,” Beams added.
 * 5) wsj - American companies are in a frenzy to get ahead of the current moment of woke moral panic. That sometimes means sacrificing an unlucky employee to the political mob or buying copies of the best-seller “White Fragility” to encourage workers to define themselves by race.
 * 6) spectator - If you do not subscribe to approved views, and fail to adopt question-begging terminology, you will simply get shut down, no platformed, cancelled. This approach has dubbed itself ‘activism’ or sometimes ‘social justice’ and its adherents are described as ‘woke’.
 * 7) lexpress.fr - Decolonial, Obsessed with Race, "Woke" ... Investigation of the New Sectarians: From the United States, Disciplines Centered on Identities Are Causing a Stir Within French Universities and Fueling a New Radical Activism.
 * 8) theweek - Damon Linker: ...interrelated trends that often get described as "woke" but can perhaps be more accurately labeled "antiracism," a concept popularized by [Ibram X. Kendi] a leading, and bestselling, advocate of this style of insurgent cultural politics. Antiracism differs from other forms of scholarly activism in eschewing the exploration of and critical engagement with discrete examples of injustice in the past and present. In its place, today's radicals favor sweeping denunciations of holistic systems of oppression as a prelude to tearing them down. // Racism (and its corollary "whiteness" or "white supremacy") infects entire cultures and epochs, we are told, contaminating everything it touches. That is the first axiom of antiracism. Here is the second: Everything racist must be razed to the ground or erased from our public life. Put those two claims together, and we're left with a movement of activists convinced that much of our civilization prior to the past few years deserves to be torn down, uprooted, and dismantled so that something less morally tainted can be built in its place.
 * 9) lexpress - critical race theory, gender studies, postcolonial or decolonial studies, queer theory ... Theories obsessed with identities as with systems of oppression, and which feed a new militancy that the Anglo-Saxons summarize by the term "woke", that is to say "awake" to social injustices on the race or genre. Editor-in-chief of Areo magazine, Helen Pluckrose, who defines herself as a liberal humanist and feminist, explains to L'Express why she believes these new jargonous dogmas are akin to a religious movement and represent a threat to classic liberalism inherited from the Enlightenment.
 * 10) stylist.co.uk - woke has become the perfect umbrella term to encapsulate everything people who hate the left associate with the left, especially cancel culture and political correctness.

misc
Alexander Beiner - sanctity of the group identity they believe constructs that individual (it could also deconstruct and thereby free them . / . Matt Taibbi has pointed out, the emphasis Robin DiAngelo and others place on ‘lifelong vigilance’ of power and privilege