It’s a broad label for anything they don’t like (LGBTQ+, feminism, DEI, etc.), but doesn’t “woke” mean you are awake? Would that imply that things that are not “woke” or are “anti-woke” are “asleep”?
Then they go on about conspiracies (“climate change is not real”, “deep state”, “5G is harmful”, “vaccines cause autism”, the list goes on unfortunately…) where they’re claiming that you need to “wake up to the truth”. Surely they don’t consider “woke” to be “the truth”, so shouldn’t they call it something like “asleep”, “sleepy”, “snoozy”, or similar?
I needed to use a lot of quotation marks there…
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It’s from the 30s, actually.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
Implies waking up to the systemic violence and oppression and beginning to do something about it.
Then it began being used as a bad thing because people were understanding systemic harm and those in power did not like it.
Overuse the word, make it mean nothing, remove its power, push the people back into oppression.
same happened with anarchism. I bet someone will come reply to me, saying that anarchism is actually bad because it means “chaos” and “no laws”, yada yada.
Im willing to bet that everybody who doesn’t like anarchism, doesn’t know what anarchism is.
What is anarchism?
No rules, just right.
And who decides what is right? I’m not being antagonistic on purpose, but anarchy believes in the good of people much more than we have any reason to believe.
I was quoting burger king, I’m sorry I don’t think that anarchism is compatible with the violent tendencies inherent in human nature.
Haha oh sorry, we don’t have burger king in Western Australia, didn’t recognise it! (It’s called Hungry Jacks or HJ’s here)
There is an interesting precursor from the election that made Lincoln president. There were groups of young people forming “Wide-Awake” clubs and demonstrating.
Free coffee at meetings?
Seriously though, a club sounds nice. Individualism is overrated.
Overuse the word, make it mean nothing, remove its power, push the people back into oppression.
Conservatives have really been leaning on this tactic a ton lately.
Unfortunately, it seems to work every time.
ahh interesting, I did not know that
Yeah, but then the neoliberals appropriated it to mean things like changing corporate logos to rainbow colors during Pride month while doing absolutely fuckall for the marginalized.
Correct.
Those in power overused the word and made it mean nothing.
Neoliberals are a part of that.
It’s from African-American English, from the 1930s! And it’s always had more or less the same meaning – originally “being awake to (aware of) racial discrimination”, but now it’s obviously grown to cover discrimination and inequalities in general.
Would that imply that things that are not “woke” or are “anti-woke” are “asleep”?
Yep! 👍 But don’t forget, these people are also against Antifa, i.e. “anti anti-fascist”. They don’t care how bad the labels sound, as long as they’re making people’s lives miserable.
i.e. “anti anti-fascist”
You mean anti-fascist, not the double negative? That might be an important typo. 🙂
No typo. OP is saying that “these people” are anti-antiFascists.
Your right. I read your post wrong! Sorry.
No that’s quite accurate, they are against antifa. For example, Fox News hates antifa. They regularly call them a terrorist organization, use them as a pejorative or a bogeyman to dismiss protests or opinions. One could reasonably conclude they are very anti-antifa, making them anti-anti-fascist. This is indeed a double negative, which can be confusing and even misleading. If you seek to clarify the situation by removing the “anti-anti-” double negative, what does that make them?
… that’s correct, “fascist”.
Does that clarify things at all? Yes, I think it does. Interesting.
Personally I don’t see how they keep up with all those different contradictions. It’s very confusing.
“They” don’t like the term “woke” because like all good music it has Afro-American origins. It started off as describing somebody who was aware of racial discrimination and over the decades broadened in meaning to include a host of other social issues. And then it was thrown into the culture war meat grinder.
I like the parallel to the “wake up, sheeple, do your own research” crowd. I hadn’t noticed it before. It’s funny how two uses of this inoccuous verb that can probably be traced all the way back to the Proto-Indoeuropean language have ended up on opposite sides of the aforementioned meat grinder.
interesting, so it was originally about awareness!
eh. there’s also polka.
It’s like ska but with more horns
AFAIK “woke” started being used by woke people as something good.
Then the right stole the term to turn it into something insulting.
Where I’m from, “woke” is a generic code word used by white racists to refer to anything which doesn’t align to their principles. Any disagreement with their belief is simply labeled as “woke” because they cannot actually define and defend their use of the word, or directly name “the thing” (hard n----R word) out loud in public.
As others already wrote, the original meaning has been specific to awareness of racial discrimination, later broadened to general discrimination topics.
But that is just the US, and e.g. in Germany these roots (and also the connection to wake/asleep) are mostly missing.
So it is just a normal imported word, with no clear antonym existing.
Also because of this only recent import of the term, it is less connected to its original meaning, but often only associated with a well-intended, but superficial kind of activism.
E.g. it is heavily associated with a generally not very popular over-gendering going on in official and news texts, which leads to a broken kind of the German language. (German is heavily gendered, but a word’s gender often has nothing to do with the sexual gender).So the term had a somewhat negative connotation to begin with, even in more progressive circles.
Doesn’t hinder the far right from doing anti-woke campaigns nonetheless, wokism is just such a nice (but actually in the broader population none-existent) opponent. And they use the term “Anti-Woke”, because it just makes sense for an imported word.Anyone using woke or Antifa or liberal or dei as an insult doesn’t care about the actual definition. They probably don’t even know the definitions at all. It’s all just hate and propaganda and racism and bigotry and tribalism.
Surprise, MAGA is what happens when pathological liars and narcissists and abusers and bullies and racist bigots get into politics. And they are non stop DARVO on everything.
It’s a buzzword for anything the fascists don’t like.
It means they dislike the people that brand themselves as woke.
It’s like asking anti-AI people their opinion on support vector machines - you’ll rarely get an informed answer.
You need to refudiate SVM’s right now, in front of everyone
I did not have sexual relations with that support vector machine
Never understood this as well. During COVID the anti-vax crowd was calling people “sheep” as in being asleep or easy to control and direct.
Somehow that seemed to have morphed to “woke”, but woke to me implies that your are “awake” or “thinking”. If someone calls me woke I assume it to be a compliment.
Lol the sheep analogy. For shits and giggles, I like to reel them in by saying. Generally when a sheep is controlled and directed it’s in their best interest because they aren’t aware of the danger around them. So yeah, I’m not an immunologist and I’m not aware so I’ll be a sheep to protect myself.
Nicely said, it’s generally the sheep that goes it alone that gets eaten by the wolf!
see article by linguist: https://www.languagejones.com/blog-1/2020/9/21/on-woke
It seems “woke” come from groups of activists uniting in the belives that as long as their will be some kind of discriminations they will all be in a threat.
Therefore, all discriminated (including those who were, and those who could become) should unit and oppose, both to that discrimination and to the principle of discrimination.
Just as you may or not be actualy victim of some type of racism, but if you have some origines that could become discriminated some day. And the woke view is that you should refuse and oppose all kind of discrimination based on race or origines, because as long as one is seen as acceptable, yours could become (remain, or become back) at threat.
This as made a big union of groups opposed to conservative views. So feminist would also fight against racism, etc.
So by extension and out of fear, “woke” is the union of all type of those who do not fully follow the actual system ; at least for those who fully follow it.
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