Seems like we've redefined "political" to mean "things that make me uncomfortable."
Are you advocating for change in your workplace that isn't strongly linked to workplace peformance? (E.g. pronouns in email signatures or having the company take a public stance on some contempory issue like BLM) And is what you're advocating for considered "lefty"? And wasn't even on the public radar 20 years ago? Then it's woke.
Were they talking about green peace? Climate change? Save the whales? Homelessness? Air pollution? Food preservatives? Obesity? Genocide? Under-representation of Jews in the NBA? No.
No apparently you can not be actively working to better those situations and you’re just fine and definitely not part of the problem. Oh but this one cause? Yeah we declare you’re part of the problem.
Sorry but there are a lot of causes in the world. You simply cannot pick and try to guilt me into actively supporting it in leau of all the other causes I might be personally connected with.
That was quite the insulting seminar.
Who is doing that? Please cite something.
> And wasn't even on the public radar 20 years ago?
Where does 20 years ago time frame come from? That's pretty arbitrary and seems more to be based on your feelings than fact.
We've all heard there are facts and opinions, but there's a 3rd category I think: definitions.
And this is awful :(
It's normally the Worst Argument in the World: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen...
Arguing about whether a definition is particularly useful or outlines a cluster of similar things can be good, but it's rare.
Certainly sometimes it's good to debate a word but this crossed the line into incessant requests for people to do work to come up with ever more definitions and citations.
From my perspective you asked "What does woke mean?" and I drew from my personal experience to answer how I have seen it used. The examples I choose of pronouns in signatures and having a BLM position were very common ones that also occurred at my current company.
Does that make sense now? I'm not actually sure what you want a citation on... that people push for pronouns in email signatures? That this does not have a direct and obvious link to workplace performance? That pushing for such was unheard of in 2001? That this is how people use the word "woke"?
Wokeism (ˈwəʊkɪzəm), noun: 1) a type of progressive activism whose adherents like to play word games about whether or not they exist.
Humor aside, when there's even dictionary and Wikipedia entries about wokeism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke) that outlines common themes of woke progressivism, that sort of rhetorical trickery just comes off as disingenuous.
Arguing for “inclusivity” in a corporate setting is delusional wokeism (as companies are exclusionary by definition, they don’t hire most people)