Wokeism

photorandy2023

2 years ago

I have written several postings related to Various topics including the military, Voting, the economy, religion and etc in America. A list of links have been provided at bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address additional issues in these topics.

Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism.

INTRODUCTION

With the advent of the technology and its constant rise at the speed of light, humans have seemingly achieved the best of their potential, so far. In the past couple of decades we have been introduced to the technologies, unseen and unheard of earlier, with the introduction of ‘Facebook’, to which majority of people living around the globe are familiar with, it marked the start of an era which none of us could have predicted. The most revolutionary among all of the social media apps currently existent in the world are ‘You tube’, ‘Tiktok’ and ‘Instagram’. These three platforms provide a constant stream of ‘entertainment’ to the people and the very platforms are responsible for the birth or should I say re-birth of the woke culture, better termed as ‘WOKEISM’. As we in this part of the world are not much familiar with the concept of wokeism, one could ask, what does it mean? Well, to answer that briefly, wokeism means showing of intolerant behaviour or attitude by the people sensitive to social and political injustice.

A BRIEF HISTORY

Now, it might seem to be a new term but as aforementioned already, it has been reborn. Wokeism as an ideology dates back to 1860 at the time of the slavery abolitionist movement in support of the then president Abraham Lincoln and later appeared in the columns of various known media outlets of the America every now and then, but it was not until the 25th day of May in the year 2020 when amongst the inevitably looming danger of a virus that had claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and was continuing to do so, the death of a single man took the world by storm and that man was George Floyd. It was that very moment that made wokeism an ideology associated to the liberal section of the society and with the passing of time, now it only stands as a Slang! Yes, a slang! a movement to break the shackles of slavery and racial injustice, an ideology earlier associated with the Civil Rights Movement now stands as mere slang!

THE TRANSITION

One might wonder, what took place? What caused a just movement to become a tool to serve the political interests of the liberal section of the society and fall prey to the clutches of extremist of left- liberal movement? The only reason wokeism was revitalized in this day and age was to serve something different under the guise of racial equality and the issues that have currently taken the reins of the movement are LGBTQ+ rights, feminism, white privilege and the most horrific among them Right to Abortion and many other.

CONCLUSION: CURRENT STATE OF AFFAIRS AND POSSIBLE REPURCUSSIONS

At present, this ideology has held the western world by its ear and has abruptly grown into a cult, mostly being propagated by the teen demographic, it has given immense power to the cancel culture resulting in a humongous amount of toxic intolerance towards any counter opinion, giving the vibes of a dystopian society where you are not to speak your mind even when stating a fact or you will have to face the dire consequences. The current absurdity and chaos is at the unprecedented levels, and an idea of the current state of affairs in the west can be derived from the fact that the issue that is being presented as necessity of the hour at the U.S congress in the month of October this year is whether a Male can give birth to a baby while at the same time the country is at the brink of financial emergency with soaring gas and food prices and severe shortages of daily pantry items at the same time.

There are many pressing issues around the world and the most recent among them is the world hunger index report 2022 in which YEMEN has been named the world’s hungriest country. The U.S is itself facing a growing concern of gun violence and mass shooting, especially in schools, but those issues seem to die out after a few days of mourning without any effective measures being taken to solve them. Using the clout extorted from the youth mainly through online forums to serve the far-left propaganda the attention has been taken off the real issues. Another instance of such ironic hilarity is something that happened in the month of May which took place in the far progressive Scandinavian country Norway, where a lady named Christina Ellingsen, who also happened to be the representative of a global feminist organization, was sentenced to 3 years in prison for telling a Trans gender (born male) that he cannot be a mother as he happened to be a man. From the above mentioned instances we can at least draw some idea as to how bleak the future could be of a society in which such an ideology has cemented it’s place. Now, the most dangerous face of this movement is the method of indoctrination that it applies to the kids as young as kindegarten level students, YES THAT YOUNG! by the introduction of objectionable reading material, most of the times sexual in nature, Flags of the movement (pride), gender awareness campaigns, and most of all by the state sponsored gender studies in the institutions.

Looking at the things are progressing we can say that ‘all is not well’. Although we, in this part of the globe, are not much aware of this movement but it is slowly creeping up to us and is ready to take us by surprise and although we are facing issues that are to be tended to immediately, this one could be detrimental for many generations to come and should be paid attention to and taken care of sooner than later. To counter the propaganda, we have to walk the parallel lines and follow the same pattern like, the introduction of the proper reading material and awareness workshops and etc. and make our younger generation, our kids, mentally prepared and possessed with the requisite knowledge to counter the inevitable abomination and drive out the impending degeneracy. “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing”, the quote attributed to the 18th century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, though currently a matter of debate whether if it was misattributed, nonetheless carries the lesson to be passed down to the generations for them to “STAY AWAKE NOT WOKE”.

Wokeism: A Critical Analysis of its Impact on Society and the Emergence of Woke Capitalism

Wokeism, also referred to as “woke culture,” has emerged as a prominent social and political movement in recent years. This movement is centred on issues of social justice and inequality and is characterized by its focus on intersectionality, the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, gender and class as they apply to a given individual or group. While wokeism has been lauded for its efforts to address systemic injustices and promote greater empathy and understanding, it has also faced criticism for its potential to restrict free speech, stifle dissenting opinions, and prioritize identity politics over individual merit.

Wokeism Is a Cruel and Dangerous Cult

Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—of those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda.

Wokeism has been described by its critics as the omnipresent use of race—and to a lesser extent, gender—to replace meritocracy and thus ensure equality of result. What follows from implementing that ideology are reparatory actions to reward those of the present by atoning for the injustices done to others in the past.

Some see it as an update of 1960s cultural Marxism fads. Others scoff that it is just a return to 1980s-style political correctness.

Still more see it as the logical successor to 1990s-type race, class, and gender obsessions—albeit with a shriller and more dangerous Jacobin, Soviet, and Maoist twist. Wokeism’s hysteria also invites comparisons to the Salem witch trials and McCarthyism.

But few have described wokeism as the cruel creed that it is.

Wokeism’s natural logic is to destroy the lives of people of both genders, of all races, and—if need be—those of every age, all to leverage an otherwise unworkable ideological agenda. It is nihilist and destroys everything it touches. It tears apart foes and friends alike, whether by fueling media-driven hatred of Donald Trump or faux-deification of the disaster that is now Joe Biden.

Woke’s Victims

Defunding law enforcement and defaming police resulted in record numbers of murders in 12 U.S. cities. A wave of violent crime is even hitting America’s suburbs.

Without much fear of arrest, indictment, conviction, and incarceration, emboldened violent career criminals for the past year have robbed, assaulted, and killed the innocent with impunity.

The victims at the bus stop, the subway, or in the furniture store do not seem to warrant media or progressive attention, much less sympathy.

They are the ignored—the unnamed, and the forgotten collateral damage from the grand experiment of redefining crime as a social construct. The guilty are the elite academics, activists, and billionaires like George Soros who are untouched by what they birthed.

We have all seen videos of the vast expanse of flotsam and jetsam strewn by train thieves along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Yet the Wild West mess is still more than just the concrete manifestations of Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón’s unhinged efforts to excuse criminals from legal consequences.

The packages thrown along the ground by thugs and gangsters represent, among other things, lost COVID-19 test results of the ill. Presumably, they unknowingly are waiting still by the window for the delivery of results that never arrive. The package in the dirt was, perhaps, a key tractor part eagerly awaited, in vain, by the broke farmer in the Central Valley. The mess included the life-saving medicines shipped to the sick that disappeared.

And our elected leaders did what in response? Governor Gavin Newsom apologized for using the insensitive word “gangs” to describe those who plunder, loot, and trash railcars.

Always In Search of Targets

It is a cruel thing to indoctrinate children with the lie that they are innately guilty of oppression due to their skin color. One accurate definition of racism is collective ill-treatment of an individual due to his innate appearance—on the pretext that such bias is deserved, given the target is deemed mentally, spiritually, or morally inferior because of said traits. But that, in a nutshell, is the essence of critical race theory: the destruction of all human traits and unique characteristics, as demonized individuals are reduced to stereotyped, faceless members of a collective.

For over a half-century, female athletes have sought to achieve parity in society’s attitudes to sports. Title IX forced universities to ensure rough equality for both female and male sports.

But the woke effort to redefine transitioning biological males as identical to biological women will assuredly destroy the life work of thousands of pioneer athletes.

Ironically, the sexist woke movement has allowed men to take hormones and undergo surgery to become females—even as their immutable skeleton frames, muscularity, or organ characteristics ensure an unfair and asymmetrical contest.

The lives of thousands of young female athletes will likely be diminished. Each sprinter, every swimmer, and all female pole-vaulters will now inevitably at some future date have a rendezvous with career implosion—defined by losing to a transgendered female/biological male.

Records are being rewritten, the very nature of individual women’s sports changed, and soon there will no longer remain an idea of “women’s sports” at all.

The Forgotten Broken Eggs of the Woke Omelet

The green wokeists postulate that they are saving lives by radical efforts to restrict gas and oil production, to raise fuel prices. They want to force Americans to buy high-priced alternative sources of wind- and solar-generated power and battery-powered cars. But away from the faculty lounge, millions of Americans are colder and less mobile this winter, paying far more to heat their homes and to drive to work.

Most of the woke climate change activists rarely see the poor trying to empty their purses to scrounge combinations of cash and credit cards to leverage over $100 to fill their cars’ gas tanks. Tesla drivers might be the architects of last year’s war on carbon fuels. But real-life victims pay for their piety—those who have no such options to buy high-priced electric cars.

For the cosmopolitan woke, the border is many things: a mere xenophobic construct, a racist barrier, a nationalist tic.

But the thousands who live near the Mexican border see their homes and farms overrun with drug traffickers—and during a pandemic thousands of unvaccinated and possibly sick illegal aliens. They suffer firsthand from daily violence as all security disappears.

For the American poor, who rely on government health clinics and state entitlements, the influx of thousands of illegal aliens into their communities becomes a zero-sum game. The more noncitizens put demands on such already oversubscribed services, the fewer citizens there are who will have access to quality care.

The woke lecture that colleges and universities must now go beyond their former de facto racial quotas for admissions and hiring, already mostly based on proportional representation and disparate impact. But now a sort of reparations system emerges. It is what the Left itself used to call in derision “overrepresentation.”

Equity in our Orwellian world is not equality, but payback. Again, it is the idea of making the current generation pay for the supposed sins of the long dead of centuries past.

Aside from the destruction of merit by the substitution of racial criteria, millions from a discarded generation will have doors slammed on their careers—simply because of the color of their skin. And they will never forget that.

The woke do not even make the effort to admit that class matters as much as, or more than, race. By doing so, they doom millions of poor white and Asian students, who managed in poverty to achieve excellent grades and test scores, from being admitted to top-tier schools. Their actual achievement, despite their absence of wealthy, college-educated, or well-connected parents, means little.

Once a morally bankrupt society—for naïve, utopian, or ignoble reasons—begins to calibrate graduation ceremonies, dorm space, roommate selection, achievement, and grading standards based on race, then it not only will lose its standard of living, but it will deserve to. And it may have a future date with the violence of Rwanda, Iraq, or the Balkans.

Power, Not “Equity,” Is the Creed

In sum, wokeness is not about kindness, equality, fairness, or morality.

It is the power agenda of the elite of all races. For differing reasons, they rig the game in their own interests, without a care about who suffers.

Rich white people assume that they possess the money, the influence, the networking skills, and the connections to navigate around the very exclusionary rules they make for others. For them, there are seldom costs. But they win apparent psychological gain at feeling spiritually superior while driving a Range Rover.

They get high on the sense of power they wield to engineer the lives of millions deemed less important than they. And to the degree they feel guilty about their own monopoly of wealth and leisure, such transient superficial remorse is alleviated by abstract caring for the “other.”

If they can ensure that 50 percent of TV commercials highlight African Americans, then they worry little about the nation’s existential crisis of 800 blacks murdered in Chicago this year. And no such television execs have a clue—or likely a concern—about how to stop it.

The woke take out a medieval contract that all their material indulgences can be balanced by virtue-signaling caring for the less fortunate—although always at someone else’s expense.

Woke = Wealthy Careerists

And for the millions of the affluent, elite nonwhite? The resurgence of racial obsessions conveniently destroys the old idea of class, even though now it is the far more precise calibration of inequality.

For all the woke talk about “constructs” of gender, race is somehow alone exempted and declared innate, definable, and immutable. One’s appearance becomes the permanent victimized refuge—even of NBA multibillionaires and billionaire rappers alike.

A Ward Churchill or Elizabeth Warren can desperately seek to leverage a career in becoming Native American, apparently as if they were almost trapped in their own white bodies. Yet they can still not manage to construct such assumed identities in the manner of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner.

If race is now the sole immutable barometer of who is a victim, who a victimizer, then LeBron James, Jay-Z, Kayne West, Chris Rock, Michelle Obama, and Oprah Winfrey are always to be among the eternally oppressed. The enormous influence, power, status, and wealth they wield never negates their victimhood, despite a nation three generations into affirmative action.

In the immoral calculus of woke, the poor white or Southeast Asian offspring of poorly paid high-school dropouts constitute “the privileged.” And a multimillionaire racist like the TV anchorwoman Joy Reid claims to be the perpetual victim, not the inner-city African American retiree who in 2021 has lost local police protection.

No wonder the woke elite and the affluent leftists fixate on race, given they are now the ruling class. Otherwise, their own privilege would be the obvious target of the once-beloved “Revolution.”

So, they fear that by their own prior left-wing standards, they too could end up on the wrong side of their moral Maginot Line. Wokeism’s obsessions with ferreting out “white privilege” are a way for rich people to head off (so to speak) the fate of Marie Antoinette.

Totalitarian Wokeism

A final note. We know wokeism is both contrary to human nature and antithetical to democracy and constitutional government.

Without public support, it has instead embraced an entire array of cruel, Soviet, and Maoist means to achieve its own self-interested ends. Woke talk about “racists” eerily emulates Soviet boilerplate about “counterrevolutionaries.” Today’s wokeist spouts things that could come right out of the mouth of the novelist Boris Pasternak’s character Army Commissar Strelnikov, or Mao’s Little Red Book concerning “suppression of counterrevolutionaries.”

No wonder the woke, so-called “humanists” are the first to resort to Trotskyization and iconoclasm. They are masters of censoring, blacklisting, scapegoating, deplatforming, ritual humiliation, doxxing, cancel-culture, ostracism, and disbarring.

Wokeism’s logic is the eternal one of the bully Jacobin with his guillotine lists of the revolutionary unpure, the 19th-century lynch mob storming the frontier jail, the Red Guards hounding the counterrevolutionary, and the forced mental hospitalizations of the Soviet Union.

But above all, wokeism is a cruel cult—created by and for the careerist benefit of the privileged.

The Problem With Wokeness

A few weeks ago, I mentioned on “Meet the Press” that for all the horror of the recent school shootings, we shouldn’t be scaremongering. There’s much less gun violence over all in schools today than in the early 1990s. Four times as many students were killed per year back then than in recent years.

This comment elicited a lot of hatred on social media, of a very interesting kind. The general diagnosis was that I was doing something wrong by not maximizing the size of the problem. I was draining moral urgency and providing comfort to the status quo.

This mental habit is closely related to what we now call “wokeness.” In an older frame of mind, you try to perceive the size of a problem objectively, and then you propose a solution, which might either be radical or moderate, conservative or liberal. You were judged primarily by the nature of your proposal.

But wokeness jams together the perceiving and the proposing. In fact, wokeness puts more emphasis on how you perceive a situation — how woke you are to what is wrong — than what exactly you plan to do about it. To be woke is to understand the full injustice.

There is no measure or moderation to wokeness. It’s always good to be more woke. It’s always good to see injustice in maximalist terms. To point to any mitigating factors in the environment is to be naïve, childish, a co-opted part of the status quo.

The word wokeness is new, but the mental habits it describes are old. A few decades ago, there was a small strain of Jewish radicals who believed that rabid anti-Semitism was at the core of Christian culture. Any attempt to live in mixed societies would always lead to Auschwitz. Segregation and moving to Israel was the only safe strategy, and anybody who didn’t see this reality was, in today’s language, insufficiently woke.

This attitude led to Meir Kahane and a very ugly strain of militancy.

In 1952 Reinhold Niebuhr complained that many of his fellow anti-communists were constantly requiring “that the foe is hated with sufficient vigor.” This led to “apoplectic rigidity.” Screaming about the imminent communist menace became a sort of display art for politicians.

These days we think of wokeness as a left-wing phenomenon. But it is an iron law of politics that every mental habit conservatives fault in liberals is one they also practice themselves.

The modern right has its own trigger words (diversity, dialogue, social justice, community organizer), its own safe spaces (Fox News) and its own wokeness. Michael Anton’s essay “The Flight 93 Election” is only one example of the common apocalyptic view: Modern liberals are hate-filled nihilists who will destroy the nation if given power. Anybody who doesn’t understand this reality is not conservatively woke.

The problem with wokeness is that it doesn’t inspire action; it freezes it. To be woke is first and foremost to put yourself on display. To make a problem seem massively intractable is to inspire separation — building a wall between you and the problem — not a solution.

There’s a debate on precisely this point now surrounding the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates is, of course, well known for seeing the problem of racism in maximalist terms. The entire American story was and continues to be based on “plunder,” the violent crushing of minority bodies. Even today, “ ‘gentrification’ is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy.”

Coates is very honest about his pessimism and his hopeless view of the situation. But a number of writers have criticized his stance. Cornel West has argued that it’s all words; it doesn’t lead to collective action. In The New York Review of Books, Darryl Pinckney argues, “Afro-pessimism threatens no one, and white audiences confuse having been chastised with learning.”

I’d add that it’s a blunt fact that most great social reforms have happened in moments of optimism, not moments of pessimism, in moments of encouraging progress, not in moments of perceived threat.

The greatest danger of extreme wokeness is that it makes it harder to practice the necessary skill of public life, the ability to see two contradictory truths at the same time. For example, it is certainly true that racism is the great sin of American history, that it is an ongoing sin and the sin from which many of our other sins flow. It is also true that throughout history and today, millions of people have tried to combat that sin and have made progress against it.

The confrontation with this sin or any sin is not just a protest but a struggle. Generalship in that or any struggle is seeing where the forces of progress are swelling and where the forces of reaction are marching. It is seeing opportunities as well as threats. It is being dispassionate in one’s perception of the situation and then passionate in one’s assault on it.

Indignation is often deserved and always makes for a great media strategy. But in its extreme form, whether on left or right, wokeness leads to a one-sided depiction of the present and an unsophisticated strategy for a future offensive.

Why ‘woke’ became toxic

The term ‘woke’ has become so divisive that it is harming support for the issues it is meant to be highlighting

In the West, the term “woke” has become a lightning rod on both the left and the right – a symbol of a modern culture war.

But its origins are far from modern. It first emerged in the US in the 1940s from the word “awake” and was used to describe someone who is well-informed on issues of social injustice – particularly racism. In its original use, it meant being alert to the specific discrimination and systemic harm suffered by African Americans. Thus, being “woke” implies one has “awakened” from a slumber, rather like the protagonist, Neo, after being unplugged from the Matrix in the movie of the same name. More recently, it has been adopted as a ubiquitous watchword for a wide variety of social movements, including LGBTQ issues, feminism, immigration, climate change and marginalised communities.

But this broad use of the term has caused it to become heavily weaponised by both the left and the right, turning what was once a welcoming creed into a toxic and divisive word, particularly in Western countries including the US, Canada, the UK and other European nations. This toxicity is in large part due to activists failing to develop the necessary coalitions to instil the change campaigners are advocating for.

This is a shame because the messages of inclusivity and diversity underpinning “wokeness” should not be so easily dismissed.

So why has the term “woke” become so divisive? The trouble starts when campaigns over-reach, alienating moderate supporters. It is easy to see how this has happened. Examples include toppling statues of wartime leader Winston Churchill – cherished as a hero by many in the West – or companies being “advised” to stop using the word “mother” by LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall, which operates a “Workplace Equality Index” in the UK. To large swaths of the general public, this all screams of political correctness gone mad.

Wokeness also implies that those not in the club are asleep, deluded or wrong. This instant judgement forms a dividing line, forcing the other side to become defensive and further entrenching the debate. The moral superiority platform is hardly a way to bring sceptics on board, especially when wealthy and privileged campaigners who have co-opted wokeness do not even follow their own standards, such as celebrity Dame Emma Thompson, who flew across the world to join an Extinction Rebellion protest about climate change in London in 2019. This particular protest involved blocking bridges and roads in the heart of London, including stopping ambulances, and the public outrage was so great that it damaged its own cause, as it provided the impetus for a new Police Bill which will restrict noise levels and timings for future protests.

Another example is the turbulent debate about trans-rights and gender identity. Trans people want to be accepted for who they are, including being legally recognised as the gender they wish. The UK already provides a Gender Recognition Certificate, through which one can change their legal sex but only after time requirements and medical checks, which many in the trans community consider demeaning. Trans activists are therefore campaigning to reduce these checks in order to make it easier to legally change sex. These voices deserve to be heard. However, it is also reasonable to listen to the women who are expressing concerns about what this might mean for women in private spaces, such as in changing rooms, toilets and, more significantly, prisons and services such as domestic violence shelters.

Unfortunately, the instinct of modern wokeness seems to be to shut down such debate. The famous author of Harry Potter, J K Rowling, found herself at the centre of a woke storm after liking a tweet by Maya Forstater, who lost her job in 2019 after tweeting that “male people are not women”. The reaction was immediate, with some accusing Forstater of “killing trans people with her hate” for simply expressing an opinion. Rowling penned an emotional essay to explain her rationale for supporting Forstater. In it, she confessed that she had once been in an abusive relationship and could therefore see why single-sex spaces for vulnerable women should be protected.

British tabloid The Sun shamelessly jumped at the chance to sell more papers by producing a front-page interview with the man who had abused Rowling, under the headline: I slapped JK and I am not sorry. The woke response to Rowling’s essay had essentially provided a platform in the right-wing media for a domestic abuser to gloat about his abuse.

The aforementioned Maya Forstater took her former employer, the Washington-based, Hillary-Clinton-friendly, international development think-tank, the Center for Global Development, to an employment tribunal to contest the decision not to renew her contract. But it ruled that her views were “incompatible with human dignity”. This was recently overturned after an appeal, meeting the legal test that Forstater’s right to express her views was protected under the UK’s equality laws. So, she is protected by the law, but at the end of the day, she still lost her job.

Wokeness can also shut down good causes. In 2019, Canada’s oldest women’s domestic violence shelter, based in Vancouver, was stripped of local authority funding because it refused to accept trans women (who were biologically male). Perhaps the shelter should have handled the issue differently, as the local authority won a short-term victory in the name of “inclusion”. But the crippling of an essential service only meant further division and long-term damage to the cause.

It seems some civil society institutions have also become more radical, leaving even their original champions flustered. Simon Fanshawe, a pioneer in equality rights and founder of Stonewall, was disowned by the very charity he founded for merely highlighting concerns from women about the introduction of self-ID for trans people, signalling that the charity now mandates only rigid conformity to its new focus on gender ideology and a hierarchy of wokeness that is splitting the progressive agenda.

Social media has also raised the stakes. Where an offensive remark may once have resulted in a scolding from a friend or foe, people are now only a tweet away from being “cancelled” – a relatively new term for withdrawing one’s support for a person – which could result in losing your job or worse. Marion Millar, a “gender critical” feminist and accountant, was arrested by Scotland Police earlier this month for posting tweets expressing her views. One of them was a picture of a suffragette ribbon tied to a fence, which a complainant had described as a noose. Her tweets may have been poorly phrased and deeply offensive to some, but she now faces a potential jail term of up to six months – the same maximum length as a common assault charge against an emergency worker – with the possibility of her autistic children being taken into care.

The way some companies have tried to cringingly commercialise and adopt social movements and their language has also further devalued and trivialised the notion of wokeness. In 2017, Pepsi launched a high-budget TV advertisement featuring the (wealthy and privileged) model Kendall Jenner at a mock protest reminiscent of Black Lives Matter. In the advertisement, the conflict between protesters and police is quickly resolved – to the applause and adulation of the crowd of protesters – when she presents a can of Pepsi to a handsome police officer. The ad was met with a hailstorm of criticism for monetising social justice and trivialising the Black Lives Matter movement.

McDonald’s in California celebrated International Women’s Day in 2018 by inverting their golden arches logo to a W, sparking outrage from unions over McDonald’s historical resistance to increases in the minimum wage, which particularly impacts women given US labour statistics that show how women make up almost two-thirds of minimum-wage earners in the country. This all results in a climate of resentment, with “woke” now as likely to trigger an eye roll as it is to describe a progressive philosophy.

Individual socially progressive policies have long already commanded support across populations, even in conservative administrations. The UK’s current prime minister, Boris Johnson, often perceived as a right-wing populist by the left, was actually one of just five Conservative MPs who voted in 2003 to repeal Section 28, which banned local authorities from teaching or publishing material that can be seen to “intentionally promote homosexuality”. The Conservatives subsequently passed the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill in 2013, a major progressive achievement. It is hard to imagine that same success now if the campaign had been labelled as a “woke” movement, given how the term has been weaponised.

The challenge for socially progressive activists now is to ensure the next priority – tackling climate change – is not solely packaged as a woke project, otherwise centre-right and right-wing parties may be more reluctant to jump on board, just as has happened in the climate-sceptic US Republican Party.

No systemic problem can be solved without both sides listening. How do we give permission to people to engage in debate without slapping them down for having a different view? How can we create a shared perspective without alienating another group? Where do we place the threshold between an honest misunderstanding derived from one’s upbringing and a menacing hate crime? These questions are not asked enough, let alone answered, but if we do ask them, we could make progress without ever having to say the word “woke” again.

Resources

risingkashmir.com, “Wokeism: A constant battle between rationale and fallacy.” By Mir Faizan Farooq;

primescholars.com, “Wokeism: A Critical Analysis of its Impact on Society and the
Emergence of Woke Capitalism.” By Peter Phiri;

independent.org, “Wokeism Is a Cruel and Dangerous Cult.” By Victor Davis Hanson;

nytimes.com, “The Problem With Wokeness.” By David Brooks;

aljazeera.com, “Why ‘woke’ became toxic:The term ‘woke’ has become so divisive that it is harming support for the issues it is meant to be highlighting.” By Johnny Luk;