I can only imagine how uncomfortable I would be in front of a television camera (Do those still exist?) and get stuck. Watching this woman try to define woke was cringe to the max, and everyone is jumping at the opportunity to use it as a means to paint how ridiculous she and everyone who opposes their ideology is. The perfect gotcha moment.
And now that the term is being characterized as a type of dog-whistle for a racial slur, I think it’s time we define it and put it back on its user.
Is it really that hard to define woke? I don’t think so. Just look at the word and ask, “What exactly are people woke/awake to?”
Ok, here goes.
— To be woke is to be awake to the deeply seeded structure of society which is fundamentally an arms race for power. The only difference between people are those with, and those without power. Those with power seek to maintain that power by structuring society in a way that maintains their positions of power. Any challenge to that structure is seen as an attempt to dismantle the power structure and creates reactionary moves to further oppress those who bring light to that power dynamic.
Woke is a pose. It’s a disposition. You see a power dynamic, and you stand in opposition to it.
It’s Martin Lawrence in the movie Boomerang telling Eddie Murphy how the white ball on the pool table is in charge and seeks to knock all colored balls off of the earth, which is why the felt table is green. We used to satirize these people, and now they are in charge of things they have no business controlling.
It’s the person who believes they are awake and aware of specialized knowledge about the nature of existence — specialized knowledge beyond the reach of normal people, or “folk” as they would say.
That’s why you’ll often hear it described as a religion and see fanatic devotion to it usually as believers fight any challengers. It’s a rudimentary gnosticism in that they believe they are awake to some special knowledge of the world and have risen above all others because of this special knowledge. They see, but you cannot.
That’s really it. It’s basic and simple. It ignores all of the wonderfully interesting dynamics of human interactions and frames everything in terms of power.
It’s all about power.
It’s why gender is framed as a role constructed to maintain power structures which keep women oppressed.
It’s why you never hear a call for the gender pay gap to be leveled out in terms of manual labor, but in terms of CEOs. They want economic power.
And why “tradwives” (traditional wives) are seen to be harmful to the narrative and openly criticized. They don’t help women as a collective group gain political or economic power.
It’s why you hear racism defined as “power + privilege.” And why only black people killed by someone with a perceived power advantage is on the news.
It’s being aware of “whiteness” as the dominant culture whose purpose is to support their own power.
It’s believing that cultural constructions like analytical and scientific thinking, the nuclear family, and other foundations of Western civilization are not tied to underlying realities of cultural evolution. They are simply faked values created to keep whiteness in power.
It’s why anyone not white who cherishes values associated with Western civilization of liberalism in general is said to have internalized racism. They hate their ethnicity and clamor onto white culture to play their power game instead of being awake to their true nature.
Now that the term “woke” is rightfully satirized, the woke have and will continue to distance themselves from it. They’ll pretend that it is just made up by right-wingers as a slander.
But that’s a lie.
As a former insider, I know that they adopted and used this term with glee. A couple years ago, I was an administrator for a huge progressive social media group. To their credit, they asked me to join as a more conservative voice to balance things out and challenge people. But members and other administrators often described those who challenged the dogma as “insufficiently woke.” It was their term and they embraced it as if they needed to get them more woke.
Nobody forced it on them.
In those gotcha moments, they often pose as if they are just smarter than anyone who is challenging their ideology. If you pay attention, you’ll notice these tactics come up now and then and suddenly everyone is asking you to define all of your terms or chanting, “Source? Source?” It’s just a cheap debate team tactic that does nothing to move us closer to truth.
But there is nothing intellectual or smart about wokeness. It’s using one factor to explain the entire world: power.
That’s really it. It’s the most juvenile, basic, non-complicated ideology you can imagine. That template of power dynamics is the only template they use and they just copy and paste it onto everything they want to control.
Don’t be intimidated. They’ll try to intimidate you, because it’s shallow and can’t stand up to any critique. But stick to your guns. They’ll scream, get worn out, and go away.
That’s what happens to paper tigers.