according to @Custoslibera’s post
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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This is fucking brilliant.
Woke is an extremely useful term for identifying fascists, neo-fascists, christofascists, and their enablers and sympathizers. The moment you use the term "woke" unironically I know you're a fucking idiot.
Woke used to be a positive term. It referred to people who had their point of view expanded or changed so that they felt more awake than they had before.
Woke used to mean enlightenment.
Woke used to be followed by up and it meant to stop sleeping.
It still means all that, conservatives are just anti-enlightenment.
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Woke used to mean aware of systemic mechanisms of privilege and oppression in society. I had to stop using it unironically because it turned into a white power derisive buzzword.
To be fair, it still refers to awareness and sympathy for those who suffer from systemic injustice. It's just wrong according to hate-driven pro-authoritarian movements to sympathize with outsiders.
Current use of woke as a term of contempt is an admission if bigotry.
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I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Those of us on the left needs to be more concerned with our optics and police ourselves better.
Catch-phrases like "all cops are bastards", "defund the police", "~~math is racist~~", "black lives matter", "trans-women are women" etc., do not help to promote ~~liberal~~ progressive ideologies and push the people on the fence away.
For the record, I'm not saying that the ideas behind the words are bad*, but the phrases themselves act as a litmus test; If anyone questions the phrases, the divide has occurred, and they're a fascist (another word which is used far too often).
Many of these are so easy to correct for, "Reform the Police", "Black Lives Matter Too" are the most obvious and easy changes.
There are those who'll say that conservatives are going to complain about it anyway, and many of them are set in stone, but there are far too many people going to the right, as a result of the left making fools of ourselves.
The strength of the right is that they'll accept anyone who isn't left. Proud Boys, Neo-Nazi's, and KKK are tolerated by the right because their strength is in numbers, not ideas.
*I support the ideas behind all of them, but how they are perceived by conservatives is not how they were intended to be understood.
EDIT: The conversations about liberal and liberalism have been draining. There is one definition which is practically synonymous with progressivism - this is what I meant, not Liberalism.
Not a single person on the left has ever said math is raciat. That was something Tucker Carlson wholesale made up after we started asking why black kids did worse in school. As for "black lives matter" I'd say that's pretty self-evident, and the only possible rebuttal ("don't white lives matter too?") has a one sentence counter ("obviously. but white lives aren't under threat right now.")
More to the point, respectability politics in general is a trap. We could have better slogans, that's true, especially in the "getting people on our side" phase, but compromising what we believe in to be more palatable to moderates, even in the slightest, is unacceptable. "Sure, I'm cool with trans people (maybe I'm even trans myself), but neopronouns are where I draw the line" is their in. Once conservatives see that we admit some point is too far to our side, once they see the bubble of people we protect can shrink, they won't stop until it's shrunk all the way.
I wouldn't go so far as calling those people leftists (same as tankies aren't leftists) but "math is racist" is definitely a thing that happens. People were suing in Canada that the tests to become accredited as teacher includes maths tests, and because some statistic somewhere showed that black folks score statistically lower on maths, they claimed that the requirement to pass it is racist. That completely ignored that they could re-take the test as often as they pleased and that plenty of education was given to prospective teachers that enabled them to pass those tests. A lower court agreed with the claim of racial discrimination, the constitutional court then struck it down pretty much saying "lulwut" in legalese.
No, maths is not racist. The people claiming it is racist were the racists here, thinking that being black makes you somehow inherently incapable of passing those tests, so much that you can't even pass them with studying. Also I bet the disparity in maths scores by skin colour vanishes if you control for socio-economic status but the complainants would've needed maths to understand that so they didn't.
OTOH, optically those kinds of fucks are associated with leftism and I'd say it's important to openly respond to that kind of silliness with "lulwut" before the courts get around to doing it.
As to black lives matter: I think it was a strategic mistake to oppose "all lives matter". The slogan, that is, not the racist fucks. Instead, it should've immediately been appropriated by the movement precisely to define it and to leave no doubt in anyone's mind that you don't mean "non-black lives don't matter", which is understandably a reading lots of people had because they're projecting their own racism, or just racist realism.
“Sure, I’m cool with trans people (maybe I’m even trans myself), but neopronouns are where I draw the line”
Neopronouns are an enby thing, not trans and yes I'm completely fine with calling you they/them and have no issues with your ingroup using as many different pronouns as there are members, but I'm not going to fucking remember all of them. I very much draw a hard, red, line at "difficult on purpose" as that would validate people's vulnerable narcissism, "prove that you don't hate me by jumping over random hoops I come up with". Leftism is not the defence of maladaptive personality traits.
Just to shoot myself in the foot, the meaning behind "math is racist" is a nuanced discussion, but it wasn't the left who distilled the idea down to "math is racist", it was Fucker.
My problem is with phrases which fail to capture the meaning behind the words, phrases which are vague or easy to strawman, and phrases which are needlessly imflammatory.
There are many more which bother me but I'm drawing a blank. Thanks metacognition
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Liberal != leftist. Also, the right wing could not care less about optics, because they are the ones who dictate what is acceptable. Why would we play by their rules, especially since they always change them?
Oops, my bad, I forgot liberal means something different in America. I meant it as a synonym for left.
Why would we play by their rules when they always change them?
Common misunderstanding is we're playing the same game. The game they're playing is "own the lib-tards". At the moment, we are scoring own-goals and it's fucking embarrassing.
And as aforementioned, it's the own-goals which are causing people to switch sides.
The game the left is playing is "who has the best idea", which doesn't matter to the right, because they're either deliberately taking us out of context, or believing on face value what is being said by those who are consciously misunderstanding.
The only way to win both games is to stop giving them ammo and present our ideas with a modicum of sanity.
Well then you shouldn't use them as synonims because they are fundamentally different ideologies.
Again, why would we care about their game and scoring goals in it or not when we know they can move the goalposts at any time? The whole optics game is rigged in their favour, so don't play. Leftist ideas are sane, they are the ones misrepresenting them as insane, no matter how logical they are. They have massive funding and a giant media machine to push it. Fuck them.
Do what is right. Simple.
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Liberals are right-wingers all around the world, not only in america.
I know you probably mean well, but guess what? I do not care about how right-winger feels and I will not water down my opinions to please them.
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The left gets massacred for prosaic slogans like "Black lives matter" and "Trans rights are human rights" while the right straight up chants "Jews will not replace us" and nobody bats an eye. So I don't think the left's tone is the problem here.
And yes, for the record, black lives matter and trans women (note, no hyphen) are women.
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.Those of us on the left needs to be more concerned with our optics and police ourselves better.
I think we already police each other far too much. We need to police the right better.
What puts you on the left, by the way?
Catch-phrases like "all cops are bastards", "defund the police", "~~math is racist~~", "black lives matter", "trans-women are women" etc., do not help to promote ~~liberal~~ progressive ideologies and push the people on the fence away
They're meant to get a reaction and spark conversation.
Many of these are so easy to correct for, "Reform the Police", "Black Lives Matter Too" are the most obvious and easy changes.
"Reform" and "defund" are not the same things. People tried "reform the police". That didn't work. It isn't a good rallying cry.
Defunding the police also makes more sense when you realize that the police are over-funded in the first place.
*I support the ideas behind all of them, but how they are perceived by conservatives is not how they were intended to be understood.
What do you think that the ideas behind them are? Because I have a feeling that you don't understand the meanings behind some of these slogans.
There's a lot to unpack behind something like "trans women are women", but that's supposed to be the start of the conversation, not the end.
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Conservatives would not change their minds. They listen to whatever their talking heads tell them, and they would turn that around and make a counter protest. That's all conservativism is.
There are no "sensible" right-wingers, they've had their values thoroughly corrupted by a media-machine designed to split the worming class against itself. Changing optics would do nothing, so instead the left should focus on continuing grassroots efforts.
Also, liberals are not leftists, liberalism is pro-capitalism.
I'm feeling like you're deliberately misunderstanding me.
The people I'm appealing to are centrists. The last thing we need are more votes for Trump. It was too close last time, and it'll be too close this time too.
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"Black Lives Matter Too"
Only someone operating in bad faith would claim this isn't what "Black Lives Matter" means.
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It's really kind of pathetic that people who aren't even operating in good faith are so damn good at completely capturing and re-defining words/phrases that originated on the left.
It speaks to the impotence of the left to be unable to control their own fucking narratives while the right-wing jack booted thugs are able to twist the narrative with seemingly no effort at all or attempt to even make their false narrative make sense.
See: COVID and "My Body, My Choice."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.
The phrase stay woke has been present in AAVE since the 1930s. In some contexts, it referred to an awareness of social and political issues affecting African Americans. The phrase was uttered in recordings from the mid-20th century by Lead Belly and, post-millennium, by Erykah Badu.
I guess the history of the word in the black community doesn't matter? Because racists co-opted it, we have to wipe away the black history of this phrase? Because @Custoslibera@lemmy.world seems to be implying the history of the phrase does not matter, because of how it is used now by fascists operating in bad faith.
I hear what you’re saying, but if I may provide an extreme example… Try wearing a sauvastika in the western world these days and what do you think the response will be? Once a symbol of abundance and prosperity became the most prominent hateful symbol for generations. Decades after the annihilation of Nazi Germany and the swastika is still given their interpretation. I don’t have an answer as to how to prevent this from happening all over again like it is to a lesser degree with vocabulary such as this is describing.
No, that’s not a good example at all. This is closer to Orwell’s Newspeak, in which the government makes a word mean its opposite in order to force a change to the way people think.
A more relevant example is the use of the term “fake news.” The term was originally coined to talk about Trump making up “facts” on the fly that were completely disconnected from reality. Then Trump started using the term to refer to news articles he didn’t like.
He was even asked at one point if by “fake news” he meant the story wasn’t true. He said no - he meant he thinks it’s not something the media should be talking about, true or not.
For his fans and for the media in general, it’s come to mean “false,” but that’s an inversion of the original meaning, which is that Trump was inventing “facts,” mutated to Trump thinking the media shouldn’t be reporting on his extensive dealings with Russians, and finally being interpreted as challenging whether those fully documented and verified meetings even really happened.
You’re not wrong.
I did completely gloss over the fact this term existed long before it was co-opted by the right.
I’m wrong about that for certain.
If I was to make an excuse I suppose it would be that I just don’t hear leftists using this term much in its original form. It has been twisted and hijacked and that is sad.
Maybe we should take it back but IMO I’d rather just call an issue what it is rather than create umbrella terms that encapsulate a variety of really complex topics.
If it’s a feminist issue it’s a feminist issue.
If it’s a representation issue it’s a representation issue.
If it’s a systemic racism issue it’s a systemic racism issue.
I’d rather we call it what it is than ‘woke’ but fully open to criticism of this position based on the fact this is ignoring its origin.
You're also not wrong, it is widely used on the right to discredit it.
I appreciate your thoughtful reply, and I hope you didn't feel like I was trying to act like you're a bad person or something. I've definitely done similar things, and glossed over origins. I guess I was just thinking about it, and trying to not minimize the history of it.
Also, considering black Americans are only something like 12% of the total population, of course more right wingers are using it because there's sadly apparently more shitty right-wing dinguses in the US than there are black people. Which means traditional use of "woke" is simply just drowned out by the right.
Anyway, cheers.
Haha no I didn’t think you were saying I’m a bad person.
I honestly don’t mind if you did, I’ve been called much worse.
I’m genuinely appreciative of being called out. Challenge what anyone says IMO.
I really was ignorant of how far back the term was used (I was aware of the 2010’s usage etc) so it’s important context for me to learn this.
So much of black American culture is squashed and by me saying that ‘you shouldn’t use woke because right wingers use it’ is in some ways me being racist or at least culturally imperialist.
To be clear though that wasn’t my intent when I made up my original comment about ‘woke’ I was really just expressing my frustration that the right have adopted it so wholeheartedly seemingly every time it’s mentioned it’s always a ‘wink wink nudge nudge’ you know what we really mean when we say it and I’m pissed off about it to the point whenever I hear anyone use the term I immediately try to get to the bottom of what they really mean when they use it because invariably it’s the racist/sexist/xenophobic etc usage rather than the originally intended one.
If it’s a feminist issue it’s a feminist issue.
If it’s a representation issue it’s a representation issue.
If it’s a systemic racism issue it’s a systemic racism issue.
I see how that makes sense on the surface. In effect, though, intersectionality is a vital thing to keep in mind.
Otherwise we end up fighting the same enemies separately, basically wasting time, energy and public attention by competing against each other when we should be cooperating.
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racists literally intentionally and vociferously assert their conviction that the black community doesn't matter, so, yes literally that. if something originated in the black community, or was prominent in black history, that makes it MORE susceptible to being hijacked by fascists, because that makes it a tantalizing target to them. not only do the ethnonationalist scum get to steal something, they ALSO get to debase and undermine one of their favorite targets while they do so. of fucking course they're going to hijack it.
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My local political scene is using French, not English nor AAVE. And yet there is a which-hunt in the academia to exclude the "wokes" and the "islamo-leftists". Sorry if my proximate political realities are more important than etymology.
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fascists should just say they hate feminism or lgbt whatever instead of hiding it behind the word woke, the pussys
They know they can't afford to go completely mask-off just yet.
damn, well they should get a higher paying job then /s
Good news! Many do openly hate feminism and the LGBT community?
Oh, fuck, that's not good news at all.
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Meanings of words and the way they are used change over time especially when their is an active movement to change the meaning to harm others. I have no idea if woke could be taken back by left for its original purpose or if it's too far gone but OOP is not wrong. That is how the word is used now most of the time. This doesn't make its original definition irrelevant but it does make it difficult to use around the general public. You can't simply ignore a co-opt
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Bigots are bigots are bigots
Back in the day woke was used to describe people that pretend to care about issues without any understanding of it
Like “we have to use clean coal to fight climate change” would have been considered woke
The term was sarcastic, no idea when it became mainstream
Memba when it was "virtue signalling"? Fash love mental gymnastics to try to turn being an asshole into a moral imperative.
And before then it was "political correctness"
The overbearing censorship of any idea that doesn't wholeheartedly agree with those of the community moderators is toxic af
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