The Left claims “woke” can’t be defined — they claim it’s just some phantom made-up figment of the hysterical Right’s imagination, intended to stoke the culture wars.
But it can be defined, in pretty simple terms. Here’s my take in the NY Post.
If you’re so inclined, below is a slightly longer version that goes beyond “woke” and into “woke capitalism” as well.
There was a little internet dust-up this past week when Bethany Mandel, one of the authors of the new book Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation, stumbled in trying to answer the question, posed by podcaster Briahna Joy Gray: “Would you mind defining woke?”
As someone who has explored this topic extensively over the past year, most notably in my book Levi’s Unbuttoned: The Woke Mob Took My Job But Gave Me My Voice, I am ready with an answer.
As I write in my book:
The term “woke” was originally used in black communities in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. It referred to being awake to bigotry and prejudice, and the coming revolution and racial reckoning. Early on in the 2010s it had a brief moment of earnestness, when it was broadened to apply to progressives of all races who had adopted genuine social consciousness, specifically around issues of inequality.
It evolved, slowly and then all at once, to inform an ideology — a comprehensive belief system — that is rooted in the idea that all of the world’s problems, every issue we face, can and must be defined by a hierarchy of oppression. Every problem must be viewed through the lens of oppressor vs oppressed. There are no issues in the world that should be viewed through any other lens. All political discussion and all policy that emanates from that discussion must be informed by this binary. There is no other legitimate way to view any of the world’s problems. Any suggestion that there is, perhaps, another way to view a challenge, any nuance on any subject beyond this binary, is evil and must be censored, silenced, stopped. Because any other view is literal violence.
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