Forgive me if you were being genuine, but frequently when I see the word used on the internet, I see replies from people who seem utterly bewildered and claim that they really want to know what the word means. But it's trivial to find out what this or any other word or slang word means with a simple internet search, so it doesn't really seem like they care to learn what it means but rather they are trying to make a statement or trying to use cheap rhetoric to cast aspersion on the post being replied to without actually addressing it in any coherent way. Then when definitions are proffered, they are often not met with gratitude and understanding but with argumentation -- suddenly they do know what it means.
EDIT: Ah I misread your post you indeed were not asking sincerely, you were actually feigning ignorance as I thought. Worse, you're misrepresenting what the word means and baselessly attacking the parent poster as a bigot, and you have refused to walk that back or provide any evidence for these insults. This is a good example of behavior that is described as wokeism.
> they’re complaining about things that I think are good.
That's not what woke means though, it's clearly about hypocrisy and insincerity and performative pointless acts or gestures. Did you not read the definition I gave you, or were you being insincere when you asked about the meaning of the word in the first place? Also, the parent poster did not seem to be complaining about any of the things you are talking about here, if you are making that claim that they are bigoted it's very serious I hope you have some good reason to do so. I would go so far as to say it's totally against the site rules so you need to clarify.
I mentioned the bigotry because honest to god that’s the times where I hear people use it - complaining about the most basic progressive representation. It really seems (to me) like people who use it tend to be straight white men who don’t like that some spaces are making room for people who aren’t like them. But the term isn’t used in my circles, so I really don’t know what the “common” use is.
The OP's argument was that modern movies are political propaganda supporting "wokeism", so a concrete example where Hollywood movies are often - intentionally or otherwise - effective propaganda for America's gun glorification and violent self defence lobby despite actors involved in such projects insisting they are personally against gun violence seems to be the direct opposite.
On the other hand, many people [not involved in this thread] have cited the example of a black, female 007 as 'wokeism'. This does not appear to be an example of Hollywood filmmakers being insincere in their belief that black females should be cast in roles traditionally not occupied by black female actors, and it's rather more evident some objectors for whatever reason simply don't want them cast in that role.
Which is a moot point really, since my original point was that the objection was for whatever reason to the scripting and casting decision itself, not to the possibility that the filmmaker might be insincere in supporting black characters (there are people who rail against Hollywood for that, but they tend to be dismissed as obsessively 'woke' themselves)
One is that it's allegedly racist in itself ("It's a black role for a black actor") and the other that it's superficial tokenist wokeism and against the natural order of things. ("It's a black role for a black actor.")
In related news There was controversy in the UK this week about a famous Jewish actor complaining that former Israeli premier Golda Meir might be played in a new movie by a non-Jewish woman.
I find this all quite strange. The whole point of art is imagination. Expecting actors who are playing to a stereotype to actually be that stereotype makes as much as demanding that only real retired spies can play James Bond, and only real time travellers can play Doctor Who.
But perhaps that's not a popular view. These roles are tribal totems and morality markers, and casting against that reveals how they operate.
The real problem is the nature of status and hierarchy. Conservatives get very uncomfortable when status and hierarchy are challenged, and many liberals assume they're challenging status and hierarchy when really they're just challenging a certain ordering, and not the abstract principle.
Personally I find too much US media output has a lot in common with plain old everyone-is-a-warrior fascism. I'm really bored by big dumb movies and TV shows which are all about spurting blood and super-athletic ultra-violence in the pursuit of some dystopian Randian mix of self-defence and self-interest.
I don't care if the actors are male, female, white, non-white, gay, trans, or cyborgs. I do care about what they're doing, and most of it isn't that interesting.
Hollywood films allegedly being "woke propaganda", which was the claim which started this "what do you mean by woke?" subthread. Films which glorify guns are categorically not examples of Hollywood anti-gun propaganda; if they are any sort of propaganda at all, as opposed to just stuff that sells, they are clearly very non-'woke' pro-gun propaganda.
> I don't think it's necessarily an example of that although for some people perhaps it is. But the fact that Hollywood has excluded such people from such roles and then they take a specific role that was developed by a white man and put a black woman into it "because it's time", and make a big noise about how wonderful they are for doing such a thing is near the epitome of insincerity and hypocrisy in my opinion. I don't have a problem with them deviating from a checklist of skin color, genitalia, and sexual preferences for traditional roles like this (are all the previous 007s the same height, same hair color, same eye color?), I have a problem with them endlessly going on about how wonderful they are, how all those other people are racist and sexist, for us only to find out that hey it's not the redneck from West Virginia who has been writing and producing and acting in these exclusionary Bond movies all these years. Turns out it was Hollywood all along. And the "fix" they congratulate themselves for is not to actually put effort into develop characters and roles and stories that different people have the opportunity to make their own and different audiences can build a following with. They just do the cheap "this character is now a black woman" thing. I realize not everybody sees it that way, but that's my opinion and I don't see how it's invalid or based on bigotry
Do I think Hollywood not casting certain people was a Hollywood decision? Yes. Do I think they deserve massive congratulations for casting Lashana Lynch? No. And if you want to argue the black 007 character wasn't actually that great or big a deal, fine. I'd largely agree with you on both points.
But for many years prior to Lashana Lynch being cast, there were people insisting that the idea of a black 007 was "woke propaganda or "political correctness gone mad" that should be opposed. I think it's something of a heroic stretch to suggest that their real objection of the anti-'woke' crowd to the casting of a black 007 was that Hollywood ought to have done it much earlier.
There is nothing hypocritical about denouncing A while someone else does X.
You seem to be the one asserting that the word has only one true meaning. That is absolutely false. The word originated with one meaning and has been co-opted by other groups including onew that have used word in ironic or sarcastic ways that have twisted that meaning.
It is thus perfectly legitimate to ask people, especially those who you think are using the ironic meaning, what they mean when they use the word
I am not the GP but this sort of "this is good"/"you are a bad person" litany is exactly what is off-putting to many people.
I won't even comment on "The real reason I asked was to get people on here to reveal what kind of progress they are against."...
And as for entertainment strong moral undertones are enemies of fun.
Nothing is 100% objective-truth. Recognize this, and get over it.
If women are a group historically discriminated against by virtue of their sex (female, different physicality, different reproductive role) rather than by their gender (feminine, caring, pretty, submissive, domestic, …) then is the fusing of sex and gender truly progressive? Is it medically, scientifically or philosophically true to assert TWAW, or is it a well-intentioned social fiction?
Like you, I believe there’s much to be commended in “woke” (including the full acceptance of people who wish to live as if they were the other sex, or of no sex) but I think the mechanism (identity politics, intersectionality) and the philosophy (postmodernist) are unhelpful and irrational.
Are they? And is that the definition of gender? submissive?! It's hard to think of someone I know now, who identifies as female, who fits your definition.
And if true, what does some historical discrimination have to do with someone's personal belief of themselves? If I think I'm non-binary, does the historical reason for discrimination against women change me somehow?
And who are you or I to tell someone else what their identity is? That just seems bizarre to me.
> postmodernist
Ironically, most people criticizing post-moderinism are using it as the mechanism of their critique - which is especially post-modernist!
Accepting trans people is about separating gender and sex, not fusing them.
Wokeism is in part an ideology and a set of political goals, but it is also a means of competition. It is the foundation for a system of verbal duelling that determines who gets the limited number of spots at the top of our hierarchy. Like the Edwardian's preoccupation with gossip and scandal or the Aztec's ritual sacrifice of losing ullamaliztli players, it's a means for an overproduced elite to thin its ranks. An excellent example of Wokeness-as-duelling is the story of Annamie Paul, a Canadian politician. Annamie Paul was a woman and lawyer from a dark-skinned Jewish family - this will become important later - who won leadership of the Canadian Green Party. From a Woke standpoint that was the desired outcome, a black woman can become leader of a political party, aren't we wonderful. But winning a position of power and wielding it well are two different things, and Annamie Paul faced a leadership challenge over her position on Israel-Palestine. It was quite mainstream for a western country, but not for Canadian Green party voters. As the back-and-forth turned acrimonious, she alleged her critics were motivated by racism. Public support for the Green party, which had been making slow advances over the preceding years, collapsed spectacularly in the next election.
It's not hard to see, with the benefit of standing outside the fray, what Annamie Paul's mistake was. A Jewish woman, asked about the situation of the Palestinian people, can only acknowledge her privilege, and if she wishes to make no concessions she must pay the political price of not using her privilege to benefit the less fortunate. She could not, in that context, allege racism because in the context of that particular debate, she was of the privileged race - technically religion, but in that context the distinction wasn't important. The rules of Woke competition are by design self-contradictory, but they are still taken seriously, and everyone could see that she had violated them. So she lost the position she had attained, and given the hit to her reputation will need more effort and luck than she spent to get it if she is to attain another as lofty.
Now, what is wrong with any of that? In my opinion, nothing. For Annamie Paul I can only say 'live by the sword, die by the sword', if she'd been able to demonstrate genuine compassion for Palestine she could have walked out of that trap as easily as she walked in. As for the broader effect on society, Woke competition actually selects for the qualities I'd want in my elite. Verbal intelligence, compassion, and tolerating paradox are all good qualities for an elite class to possess. Further, while it's easy for a hypocrite to use it to attain higher rank, it's very hard to retain said rank unless one genuinely displays the virtues Wokeness demands. But, and of course there's a but, it is a system that produces winners and losers, and the losers get to have a say. In particular, straight white men are shut out of a lot of targeted benefits and mutual aide societies others have access to, while being discouraged from forming our own. It takes the arrogance of a rich white man to look at a system like Woke competition and say, "I can win that". So of course, poor white men don't think it's a game worth playing, and when they denounce the structure of the game, any rich white man - or rich white woman for that matter - who tries to argue against them finds themselves in the same position as Annamie Paul, punching down in public. That, of course, makes it worthwhile for people winning the game to use said PWM as a vector to demonstrate their own compassion and attack their competition.
This only changes when the rules of the game adjust to be more reflective of the actual difference between rich and poor. Woke competition does allow for a change of the rules, but it's currently not clear whether such an adjustment would require an overhaul or a tweak. People who think it would require an overhaul often allege that a key goal of woke competition is to fracture the poor along intersectional lines to prevent them making common cause against the rich. If true, that's of course an unforgivable transgression that may require replacing Woke Competition with something else entirely. Those of us who think it might require only a tweak think that this is an artefact of the unconscious privilege of the rich, which they will remedy with all haste once it is brought to their attention.
However, that would be sufficient if it was just talk but there seems to be plenty of walk there as well.
Whereas look at the actual positions of political power. Biden/Harris -- they're both horrific in many wokeness metrics. Rich old privileged straight white, war monger, sexual assault allegations, top cop whose record on imprisoning black people is problematic, descendant of slave owner, and of course staunch supporters of Israel just to name a few (I'm not saying these are fair or valid criticisms but it's all prime woke ammunition).
Yet somehow it doesn't affect them. For all the dueling and competition among the elites (or at least their political representatives) you're imagining, very little wokeism was used against them as far as I could see. They also required very little verbal intelligence, compassion, or tolerance.
What they had is an elite and their corporations who consolidated around them and protect them, don't ask the wrong questions and don't bring out the woke attack dogs. The opposite of dueling and infighting.
And in your last paragraph you're acting like the systems are set up by (or at least is able to be changed by) and for the benefit of people who are not the rich elites. The evidence points to the opposite. It is clearly a tool to divide the underclass and insulate the ruling class.
I disagree with the idea that even the kind of elites you mean aren't affected though, and I'd point to the example of Andrew Cuomo for evidence. It's very plausible that Andrew Cuomo's calls in the early days of covid cost a number of people their lives, that's all the reason any party would need to remove a prominent member. But when he was removed it was through a set of sexual assault allegations that someone had clearly been sitting on for some time. When infighting did erupt, woke competition was the weapon of choice.
As for my last paragraph, that was in small part assertive optimism, in large part a rhetorical device, and just a touch of sarcasm. People like you after all don't need convincing there's a problem with woke competition, it was addressed to people who buy into it. That woke competition is only intended to divide the underclasses can be easily dismissed as the author hiding from his racial privilege, that it has that effect unintentionally because of unconscious privilege by the rich... the rules of the game practically require believing that.
We are. I have no doubt that "woke" is used by lots of people to attack one another. It's a great tool that divides people against one another and insulates the ruling class.
>The way I use it I'm thinking more of the most influential 10% than 1%. People who have it better than most citizens, but their position is precarious. So more the democratic party insiders Biden/Harris bullied into tilting the odds against Sanders/Yang/Gabbard than just Biden/Harris themselves. Of course, my theory does require that Biden/Harris spent a long time in the trenches honing their skills in this kind of dominance struggle. If you don't think they thrived in that environment for so long through being better at earlier versions of woke competition I'd be curious what you think the selection mechanism was. Another thing you might not have noticed about Woke Competition is that it's not about being a perfect person or having no skeletons in your closet. One of the presuppositions is that we all have something undeserving about us and need to keep that fact constantly in mind.
I'm not sure what you mean. Biden and Harris simply weren't attacked with any of the woke stuff which they both have ample material including support for Israel! It's not that other people didn't want to be president or other big donors did not want others to be president.
> I disagree with the idea that even the kind of elites you mean aren't affected though, and I'd point to the example of Andrew Cuomo for evidence. It's very plausible that Andrew Cuomo's calls in the early days of covid cost a number of people their lives, that's all the reason any party would need to remove a prominent member. But when he was removed it was through a set of sexual assault allegations that someone had clearly been sitting on for some time. When infighting did erupt, woke competition was the weapon of choice.
Well firing someone for sexual assault is not woke. Covering up the sexual crimes so it can be used as leverage and/or blackmail while at the same time contgratulating yourselves about how you're the hero of women and denouncing others is woke, but it's that hypocrisy. Using blackmail and little black books to sink politicians who outlive their usefulness is just standard operating procedure in politics and predates woke by centuries.
> As for my last paragraph, that was in small part assertive optimism, in large part a rhetorical device, and just a touch of sarcasm. People like you after all don't need convincing there's a problem with woke competition, it was addressed to people who buy into it. That woke competition is only intended to divide the underclasses can be easily dismissed as the author hiding from his racial privilege, that it has that effect unintentionally because of unconscious privilege by the rich... the rules of the game practically require believing that.
I didn't get that. It sounded like you thought woke was good (selects for qualities you want in your elites, only needs small tweak to improve), and that you thought your elites are interested in your interests ('which they will remedy with all haste once it is brought to their attention').
I mean, sure, for all I know the common use where you are really is exactly what you’re saying, but one thing I’ve never noticed (caveat: easy to miss when it’s text and no faces) is a member of a minority saying “stop being woke, you don’t get us at all” (everything after the coma, yes, but never calling that “woke”). Given how big the anglosphere is (and the fluid nature of language), I don’t don’t that this use has happened at least once by someone in a position to actually use it appropriately, but I mainly see one majority person saying something and another majority person saying the first guy is woke without any apparent involvement from whichever minority is the topic. Or, indeed, the “that’s just woke” accuser insisting that the token minority person who agrees with the first person that $thing is bad is wrong and needs to shut up.
Of course, I also accept that what I see on news shows is basically entertainment these days, so I don’t trust even that experience much either.
> You don't let trolls dictate what you understand of any other words, do you?
Well, the derogatory use appears to have been created by those I would call trolls, but as for other words? Heathen, do-gooder, bleeding heart, papist, yokel, redneck, fag, nerd, socialist… trolls have [re]defined words as insults throughout history.
Wikipedia absolutely does not list it as a hypocritical or insincere thing. Wikipedia defines it as "alert to perceived racial prejudice and discrimination"
The Wikipedia definition you quote funnily enough is the one I described, "Opponents of progressive social movements often use the term mockingly or sarcastically, implying that 'wokeness' is an insincere form of performative activism."
So you're confusing me quite a bit, first you tell me I shouldn't let trolls dictate what words mean, only for then doing exactly that yourself, citing the definition trolls and opponents use.
And another thing - Urban Dictionary can certainly be used to get to know what online slang, memes mean. Using it as an official definition for a word is a bit wrong though, seeing as how UD is more about tongue-in-cheek joke definitions.
So in the end, I frankly don't really know what you want to tell me, not meaning this in a rude way.
Wikipedia absolutely does.
"using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies perceived as over-zealous, performative, or insincere."
Which is basically what the top urban dictionary results say. I use that because it reacts a bit faster to contemporary usage. And it's obvious that is the definition was being used here.
> And another thing - Urban Dictionary can certainly be used to get to know what online slang, memes mean. Using it as an official definition for a word is a bit wrong though, seeing as how UD is more about tongue-in-cheek joke definitions.
That's not how English works, there is no "official" definition except how people use words. Dictionaries, whether Urban or Oxford, record their observations about the language, they do not define it. Woke is widely used exactly as urbandictionary and the quoted part of the wikipedia page say.
Don't take this in a rude way, but I'm frankly flabbergasted that people have such a difficult time comprehending this usage of the word. I suspect a lot of it is insincere, and all of it stems from not liking the definition or the people or comments that tend to use the word.
Well, yes, I wrote myself that Wikipedia quotes it as a negative thing, but in the chapter where they list examples of people using it wrongly. The official definition they write in the beginning of the article is not negative. The section we're both quoting from is literally called "Woke as a pejorative term".
> I'm frankly flabbergasted that people have such a difficult time comprehending this usage of the word
I know how people (mis)use the word. There's the original and official meanings,
- "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues" - Merriam Webster
- "alert to perceived racial prejudice and discrimination" - Wikipedia
Then there's people who use woke as an insult and changing the meaning of the word completely, the definitions we now both talked about and can be found on UD and on Wikipedia, and I'm repeating myself here, but in the section where they list the pejorative(!) usages.
One other funny detail of using UD as official definition is that it has 60 pages filled with different interpretations.
Even funnier to me is that the 6th most upvoted definition is a quote by Paul Joseph Watson, a far-right conspiracy theorist.
I still don't understand why you pretend like I don't know the different meanings of woke. I was complaining about people using the word woke to just complain about anything left from them they don't like, which is as embarrassing and childish as people on the left labeling everyone they don't like as a fascist and thus also completely misusing a pretty well-defined word.
But it seems to me that this is exactly the strategy of someone like Paul Joseph Watson. Taking a word which is used positively by people he doesn't like, start to use it negatively while hoping that this trend catches on until the word has the opposite meaning of what it once meant, while at the same time discrediting people who used it in a positive way.
And probably everybody in this thread knew all that full well from the start.
All I said was that it's a red flag for me when people use the word woke to slander anything politically left they don't like. When they once used "marxist", "communist", "liberal" and other words to just quickly dismiss things they simply don't like (without these things relating at all to the word they're using), now it seems to be "woke".
Basically, woke started out as a way to say that someone is aware of social issues. You seem to like to talk about what Wikipedia has to say about this word, so let me summarize,
In the 1930, woke was first being used as "referring to an awareness of the social and political issues affecting African Americans". In 2014 the meaning slightly transformed to "raise awareness about police shootings of African Americans" and in 2017 it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary where they (still) define it as "alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice".
Only then, in 2020, did it change. "parts of the political center and right wing in several Western countries were using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies"
People certainly used woke negatively before 2020, but pretending like this is 100% the meaning of it is just a lie. Is it negative in the context of this comment chain here? Yes, of course, but your statements about "'woke' has a definition that is basically insincerity and/or hypocrisy" are not true. It's one of the definitions some people use, but it is not "the" definition of the word.
Yes, today this word has a pretty negative meaning, but that's because right-wing reactionary trolls started to purposefully misuse it to put this word in a bad light. It was used in a positive way for almost 90 years apparently, and I first heard it being used in a positive way on TikTok and other social media platforms.
I don't even know why I am writing so much about this freaking word, and I still don't know how any of this relates to my original comment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That's what you can read in my comment: "The Wikipedia definition you quote funnily enough is the one I described, "Opponents of progressive social movements often use the term MOCKINGLY or SARCASTICALLY, implying that 'wokeness' is an insincere form of performative activism."" and then I mentioned that this is the definition for PEJORATIVE uses.
At this point I can only assume that you act in bad faith or have severe struggles with reading, seeing how you ignore most of what I say and misenterpret the cherry-picked rest.
If you look at who is hired and admitted, that discrimination isn't accomplishing much!
Also, discrimination is about power; in its significant meaning, it requires power. If the owner of a tiny restuarant discriminates against you because you are a white male person, it is obnoxious but that is all the damage; you are safe, just go someplace else. If the government or the powerful majority discriminates against you, brutalizing you, arresting you, denying you work, etc. then it is very serious and damages your life and safety.
What changes - occasionally, in some places - is that white people and males no longer benefit from an affirmative action program that favors them - a ridiculous situation for the most powerful group in society. Look at sports as a simple example: Until the late 1940s, Major League Baseball only employed white players - it was a massive affirmative action program for white guys, who would not otherwise get the jobs. There was a great uproar, including among players, when they lost just a little of the privilege (the first year, in all of baseball, there were 1-2 non-white players. It took decades before the white guy affirmative action program disappeared.)
Being discriminated against in hiring by the government and most major academic and media organizations is being discriminated against by power. We're not talking about mom and pop shops, obviously.
I think if you look at overall black representation among actors, you will see it was very low. If you look for some in your memory, you will find them of course.
Even now, almost everything is led by a white person. Even in animation, almost everyone is white. Or look at sci-fi movies, where there are often as many or more alien species as non-white humans.
> The woke with their CRT and racial segregation policies (telling children that race really matters a lot) have ruined everything.
What is being told the children by whom? What does CRT say? If you dispute that race has a large (though certainly undesireable) impact on life, you are living in a sci-fi fantasy.
> ruined everything
I think it has, or threatens to, burst many bubbles, which 'ruins' many fantasies. Just talk to people with actual experience of it, such as black people, and you will find out just how isolated we have been from reality. Most white people don't do that because they don't have many black people in their personal network, which should be a signal.
If not "almost everything [was] led by a white person" it would be an under or over representation of multiple races, at least if it is supposed to be a "representation" of the western world*. You can google "us race demographics" and it will conveniently bring up a table showing 76.3% white and 13.4% black. I think some people forget that a motely crew of exactly one of every race is someone's utopian ideal with no basis in reality. And it's not hard to extend that idea to any arbitrary subset of humans in almost any context.
*The entire world isn't any "better": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_world
Edit: googled "actor demographics":
There are over 19,730 Actors currently employed in the United States. 32.1% of all Actors are women, while 63.9% are men. The average age of an employed Actor is 37 years old. The most common ethnicity of Actors is White (59.5%), followed by Hispanic or Latino (15.6%) and Black or African American (13.9%).
If someone's personal experience with actor demographics doesn't reflect that, its most likely because what they typically watch doesn't reflect it and not because of a systemic imbalance.
I don't know much about CRT but when I google high ranking results[1], the very first tenet is literally the opposite of your claim: Recognition that race is not biologically real but is socially constructed and socially significant.
[1]: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...
Why is that verboten? Why is it different than any other subplot of a personal challenge? It's a common part of real life.
The vast majority of representation on my "kind" is the same shit, over and over again.
No, I do not sympathise with the Latino nor Brazilian stereotype and it is grating seeing it played straight so often. It feels like they are trying to pander to me.
That is annoying and the sort of stuff I'd rather avoid if I am consuming fiction.
It almost becomes a distraction to the overall plot, versus something like Starwars where the good versus evil is non-specific enough it has universal appeal.
Giving black actors roles in areas normally dominated by white actors? That’s awesome! But whenever this happens loads of people online will claim that is “wokeism”.
Representation for gay, lesbian, queer, and trans people in media? Wow that’s great! Many complain this is “wokeism”.
Recognizing that trans women are women and trans men are men? 100% that’s the bare minimum and I am happy to see it. “Wokeism”
The real reason I asked was to get people on here to reveal what kind of progress they are against.
Of course there is sometimes an element of hypocrisy suggested in the “wokeism” complaint. But there’s always hypocrites. Sometimes accusations of hypocrisy are used as a smoke screen to simply complain about there being gay people on the television.