What exactly is woke? (And more to the point, why are some people anti-woke enough to label others as woke? A pox on both their houses I say.)
Woke is being too focussed on selected diverse minority needs to the detriment of wider public needs.
Anti-Woke is being too focussed on wider majority public needs to the detriment of diverse minority needs.
Being narrowly opposed both create a binary battle, more heat than light.
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Frankly, woke used non-pejoratively, just means politically correct in 20th C language. It picked-up the label woke by analogy of younger people being awakened to some suppressed social, freedoms and rights issue behind otherwise everyday life activities, that they hadn’t previously noticed. And from being awoken to the issue, those people often become sensitive to actively noticing and raising the issue at relevant opportunities thereafter.
One quarter of our way through the 21st C most of those issues fall under the DEI and Identity Politics umbrellas, where as well as Race, ethnicity and colour, Gender, sex and sexuality, diversity extends to any kind of socio-cultural or neuro-diversity. As well as actively noticing the issues the woke naturally become active campaigners on behalf of diverse groups identifying with them.
So far so good, diverse people have diverse needs and individual rights like everyone else, and majorities need reminding of both their explicit and implicit ignorance of diversity issues in both language and action. So far, no different to good old political correctness, it’s about taking care and being seen to take care, when dealing with larger public groups which invariably contain diverse minorities.
The problem arises with the labelling and with campaigning where the latter inevitably demands snappy acronyms and symbolic labelling and the maximising of common interests by joining forces with other potentially suppressed diversity groups.
As originally with political correctness, there is the risk that by focussing on the diversity elements and their needs and rights, the primary purpose of the original activity gets downgraded, overlooked and lost / hidden behind the PC/Woke language. We risk losing sight of the original purpose and the needs of the wider enterprise or public. Potential tyranny of a minority, multiple minorities. Those with interests in and responsibilities for satisfying the majority needs, and recognising the needs of the diverse minorities, quite rightly question the details and validity of the diversity needs where they conflict, add cost and risk or otherwise disadvantage the majority need. Balancing multiple different needs is necessarily a point of contention and compromise, so care – mutual care – is needed in agreeing detail.
When campaigning meets careful management, especially in our electronic-social-mediated times, the nuances of agreeing detail get drowned out by the sloganising of the issues. One cultural right on one side meets one objective fact on the other and finer but relevant details can’t get a hearing. For this reason, those pointing out the downsides of of any given diversity interpretation label their opponents as woke and take up the binary opposite anti-woke position.
Both are stoking a binary war instead of carefully resolving detail to mutual satisfaction. And let’s not forget there are actually many different issues under that “diversity” heading.
Woke is being too focussed on selected diverse minority needs to the detriment of wider public needs.
Anti-Woke is being too focussed on wider majority public needs to the detriment of diverse minority needs.
Being narrowly opposed both create a binary battle, more heat than light.
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