Millions or not, it's pretty contentious. That said, I'm probably wasting my time fighting the tide, as with complaining about misuse of the word "literally".
No, of course not. It's a certain demographic who have latched onto the word "woke" as Elon used it: first as a label for ridiculous radical-left ideas, and then for anything they associate with the left that they don't like.
You can derail any discussion by asking for definitions. Human languages is magical in the sense that we can't rigorously define anything (try "Love", "Excitement", "Emancipation" or anything else, really) yet we still seem to be able to have meaningful discussions.
So just because we can't define it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
It's not a derail, it's an attempt to understand the other person. If I say Thing is bad and you say Thing is good but we haven't actually defined Thing, then we could be talking past each other and not actually be in disagreement. Text over the Internet is such a limited medium.
There is more than one usage described in that article.
This is the relevant one in this particular thread:
> Among American conservatives, woke has come to be used primarily as an insult.[4][29][42] Members of the Republican Party have been increasingly using the term to criticize members of the Democratic Party,
Woke is a specific ideology that it places every individual into a strict hierarchy of oppressor/oppressed according to group racial and sexual identity. It rose to prominence in American culture from around 2012, starting in universities. It revolves around a set of core concepts including privilege, marginalization, oppression, and equity.
Now that we've defined what woke is, I hope we can move on from this 'you can't define woke' canard I keep seeing.
Woke is no more difficult to define than any religion or ideology, except in that it deliberately pretends not to exist ("just basic decency", "just basic human rights") in order to be a more slippery target.
--
*Side note to ward off the deliberate ignorance of people who are trying to find a way to misunderstand - I've attached some notes on how words work:
1- Often, things in the world we want to talk about have many characteristics and variants.
2- Words usually have fuzzy boundaries in what they refer to.
3- Despite the above, we can and do productively refer to such things using words.
4- We can define a thing by mentioning its most prominent feature(s).
-- The above does NOT mean that the definition must encapsulate ALL features of the thing to be valid.
-- The above does NOT mean that a thing with features outside the definition is not what the word refers to.
5- Attempting to shut down discussion by deliberately misunderstanding words or how they work is a sign of an inability to make productive valid points about reality.
> Attempting to shut down discussion by deliberately misunderstanding words or how they work is a sign of an inability to make productive valid points about reality.
Lumping a bunch of things together under a vague term to make it easier to vaguely complain about them is a sign of an inability to make productive valid points about reality.
I was about to say "right wing" hasn't shifted radically in the last decade, but then I guess it has shifted significantly in the UK at least; I hear it's also shifted significantly in the US, but I'm not at all confident in the reporting in that case.
> Now that we've defined what woke is, I hope we can move on from this 'you can't define woke' canard I keep seeing.
Trouble is, I said "[not] coherent enough to be tested" rather than "you can't define it"; and the comment you're replying to gives another definition that is a better pattern match for the following headlines:
"The woke mob can rant for all they're worth, but I'll keep adding Worcester sauce to my spag bol" - Daily Mail, 22 April 2021
"UK builders go WOKE: Study finds three quarters of tradesmen discuss their feelings with colleagues while two thirds shun the fried breakfasts and nearly half say they are history buffs" - Daily Mail, 18 June 2022
Here's another definition of "woke":
"alert to racial prejudice and discrimination" — c. 1930s AAVE
But again, here's a completely different one, one that doesn't directly touch on race issues at all:
"to be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures." — David Brooks, 2017
When a word means everything, it means nothing; when it shifts meaning under your feet as fast as "woke" has, it's as valuable for communicating as the Papiermark in the Weimar Republic was for trading.
Proof by Daily Mail headline, really? Do you think that's convincing to anyone?
The word woke doesn't mean everything, it has a very widely understood meaning. Even though you're literally citing clickbait as a rebuttal, the first article you mention is consistent with the definitions given above:
> "The woke mob can rant for all they're worth, but I'll keep adding Worcester sauce to my spag bol" - Daily Mail, 22 April 2021
This is a reference to woke people's usage of "cultural appropriation" as an attack, arguing that "white" people shouldn't cook or alter the recipes for dishes from other cultures. It's an outgrowth of the obsession with race.
> to be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures.
You say this quote has nothing to do with race. From just a few sentences earlier in the article you're quoting:
The woke mentality became prominent in 2012 and 2013 with the Trayvon Martin case and the rise of Black Lives Matter. Embrace it or not, B.L.M. is the most complete social movement in America today, as a communal, intellectual, moral and political force.
The reality is that the word woke is a very clear ideology with well understood roots in Marxist oppressor/oppressed worldviews. There isn't actually any lack of understanding of what it means, except amongst woke people themselves who like to believe that they aren't ideological actors following a herd but rather purely rational beings who just all happen to conclude the same things at the same time.
> Proof by Daily Mail headline, really? Do you think that's convincing to anyone?
Presumably the headlines are convincing to Daily Mail readers, of whom there are many.
However, the purpose of me using them is to seek examples of usage which doesn't match the other specified patterns; in this regard, "random large newspaper" should suffice regardless of my personal opinion of them being "should be in fiction section".
I could also have quoted newspapers being upset that the Church of England is "woke" for having gender-neutral pronouns for God, that Lego is "woke" for having a new range of disabled figurines, that the National Trust is "woke" for saying that Henry VIII was disabled in later life, or that Disney is "woke" because of their support for LGBT issues, but I (apparently incorrectly) assumed those examples would be enough.
> it has a very widely understood meaning.
"A" in the sense of exactly one, or at least one? Because I'm agreeing with the second, not the first.
Heck, this thread should be existence proof of there being more than one — if you reply to nothing else here, this one point is what I would ask you to focus on, because it's the most confusing to me. It's like all the people who say all Christians are the same before attacking (sometimes literally) other denominations, or all the Brexit campaigners who say the other Brexit campaigners are actually just Remainers because their vision for Brexit is one they don't like.
> You say this quote has nothing to do with race. From just a few sentences earlier in the article you're quoting:
What I said was:
> Here's another definition of "woke": […] But again, here's a completely different one, one that doesn't directly touch on race issues at all
Key words: "Definition" and "Directly".
And the article is behind a paywall, I got the quote from Wikipedia; do you expect most people using the term — not just people like me, who have seen this done a dozen times with various political clichés and are tired of watching fashions change, but also those who actively use the word to describe a behaviour they're supporting or opposing — to have read exhaustively all the source material before opining politically in public about if "woke" is good or bad, or using it themselves in a new sentence? Or even to pay attention to claims separated by more than a paragraph, especially as you yourself (this isn't to blame you, we're all like this) didn't do that with my words?
Different example of how language breaks away from original context: headlines defending serious professional misconduct by saying "they were just a few bad apples" as if the rest of that quotation fragment didn't exist.
Humans don't have the luxury of being able to mainline the entire internet like LLMs do, we skim and summarise, rhymes make things seem more true, all that kind of thing even before political tribalism turns this into a totem.
Those headlines you don't like? I'm sure I read somewhere that most people read only the headlines before commenting, and most of those who read more only read the first paragraph.
> The reality is that the word woke is a very clear ideology with well understood roots in Marxist oppressor/oppressed worldviews
I've read the Communist Manifesto and I call BS on that, and not just because of the 80 year gap between Das Kapital and Lead Belly. The closest connection I see between them is their incoherence in modern usage, specifically by those who have learned to use ["woke", "communist"] as generic insults. The idea of oppressor/oppressed worldviews goes back to at least Exodus, and that's an equally un-apt comparison.
Oh hey, "politically correct", as I recall, that was originally the right trying to demonise the left for supporting equality by memetic comparison to Soviet political officers…
> the Church of England is "woke" for having gender-neutral pronouns for God, that Lego is "woke" for having a new range of disabled figurines, that the National Trust is "woke" for saying that Henry VIII was disabled in later life, or that Disney is "woke" because of their support for LGBT issues, but I (apparently incorrectly) assumed those examples would be enough.
But how would any of these examples disprove the point? They're all related to some concept of an oppressed class vs oppressors where the oppressed class is defined biologically.
> I got the quote from Wikipedia
An understandable mistake. You shouldn't rely on Wikipedia to be reliable on anything related to wokeness, it's completely controlled by woke zealots. The quote you selected is actually about race, the fact that Wikipedia didn't make that obvious to you is a good reason to re-evaluate the reliability of that source.
Do we expect you to read material exhaustively: no, not normally, but if you're explicitly citing something to say "look! the word is used in different ways to what you're saying therefore it doesn't mean anything" then you ideally would verify the context of the sentence before using it.
> The idea of oppressor/oppressed worldviews goes back to at least Exodus
Indeed, wokeness does bear an uncanny resemblance to some aspects of Christianity. That's been noted by quite a few observers by now. There's a reinvention of original sin, the recent focus on transsexuality is the idea of a (gendered) soul separate from the body, the obsession with the supposed plight of the victim, etc. The psychological origins of this stuff are fascinating.
> that it places every individual into a strict hierarchy of oppressor/oppressed according to group racial and sexual identity
Not only is that not “woke”, its not any left leaning ideology, nor is it an ideology, AFAICT, that in any meaningful sense actually exists. Its an idea that if anyone actually held it (rather than it being a right-wing projection of the left-of-their-fantasy) would be radically opposed to actual left/progressive ideas like intersectionality.
"Woke" is a state of awareness (particularly, pragmatic rather than abstract awareness) of structure/institutional racism (primarily and originally) and inequity more generally (in the newer and broader sense.) It doesn't particularly correspond to a particular normative view of how society should be, so its not an ideology (concern for it correlates historically with a variety of different ideologies, whose only really common factor is general opposition to structural racism but with lots of different normative ideals, and views of praxis of change.)
> It rose to prominence in American culture from around 2012, starting in universities.
“Woke” originated in the 1930s, and its evolutions and spread in the 2010s started in the black activist community, not universities. By the late 2010s, the political Right adopted it as a generic term for everything they oppose, basically a rhetorical drop-in for their long-time favorite of “political correctness”. Your description seems typically of attempts to try to retroactively justify the right-wing use of the term as referring to a phenomenon that is both new and real rather than an empty epithet, despite the fact that the actual use is generally in contexts of right-wing complaints that haven’t changed for about 5 decades, except literally the substitution of “woke” for “politically correct”.
The best definition I can think of is "things that are common sense for black americans to be safe in white dominated america"
Yours has important inaccuracies, for example, it's not an ideology, let alone a specific one. There's definitely no specification, only a gut feeling of "I know it when I see it"
The most obvious problem with your definition is that Woke is an adjective and not a noun. It's a property of a statement or idea, not an idea in and of itself
This is a recently imagined, ret-conned definition of what it is, complete with bias, to serve the purposes of the right wing. The definition, if there is to be one, should include that it isn't consistent across time or across political/cultural boundaries. I recommend people don't use the term with any seriousness, and I often ignore people who do. Address the specific ideas you associate with it instead, if you want to have a meaningful discussion.
