Can someone define woke for me?

It’s what he does. You showed an awful lot of patience.

 

Cool, another video I won’t watch. Maybe you should start a whole thread on it… oh wait… you love yourself so much you already did that.

I admire people who boundlessly power through their lack of cleverness with sheer volume of conviction. Bravo my man. Bravo.

 

It is stolen word used first by politically conscious African Americans then adopted by left wingers trying to be socially aware and now used by right wingers poking fun of that supposed awareness.

 

@wgbgator is correct IMO. The meanings of words can have dictionary definitions, but definitions are essentially social constructs. &, in society the "dominant paradigm" tends to subsume whatever it wishes. This act of subsuming IMO makes the DP stronger, or at least it can. That's not to say that minorities cannot do the same thing. That is the arg I've heard for AAs using the N word & I have experiences with woman turning slut & whore into badges of honor. In my circle in HS & beyond....slut was not an insult.

I would say a manifestation (evidence) of this is the fact that words for AAs, Asians, Women, Hispanics, etc. tend to have negative connotations that are hard to shake. This does not seem to be the case with words meant to be derogatory towards whites & men; the DP is a subsuming machine when it wants to be.

Lastly, the whole pt. of irony is to strip words (etc) of their literally meaning, hence a word like patriot becomes "patriot" which renders it a variable rather than a constant & guess who has the power to choose the variable value?

 

Apologies, I misread your question and didn’t answer accurately. Yes, the term typically meant to apply to black people, not necessarily non-blacks who also were aware. I don’t think there was a formal demarcation, though. I’m sure if you were a “down” white or other race person, it wouldn’t be frowned upon. Now… suburban soccer mom driving an SUV… yeah probably never would be considered woke.

But to be honest it wasn’t really used the way it’s being used now. At least not in my experience. You would tell someone “stay woke” but not really say “he is a woke person” or I am a woke person. It’s like the difference between telling someone to “stay alert” vs saying someone an “alert person”. Just sounds weird.

 

Originally heard it as “Stay Woke”. Probably referenced in shows like Oz or The Wire.

To me, it was a black on black term meaning to be aware of the ways black people are held down.

I don’t personally hear white liberals using it, despite the Right or Anti-Woke brigade, using it as a negative catch-all term for all things social justice, progressivism, environmentalism, cancel culture, etc, and specifically what they consider its extreme versions.

Basically a way to discount all of it per usual, as they identify with the opposite oppressing side of it.

 

What is "supposed awareness" and where did politically conscious African Americans steal the word from? FYI, I've never heard left wingers use the word. Nine times out of ten it's used by someone like you to disparage or ridicule empathy, respect and dignity shown to blacks by white people.

 

Here is a perfect video depicting the lib wokeness that actually happened in real life.

 

Get your tattoo. LMAO.

 

You should watch it, it's your people. Embrace your wokeness.

 

The physical state of not being asleep. Woke.

 

Not a fan of Nascar, do you want to try again?

 

Hmm, so do you think it is transitioning from its original usage to a parody of itself? That may be the best I have read.

 

You're asking has woke become a parody of itself? Don't ask me. I just know that when I hear Trumpists or other right-wingers like DeSantis use the word woke, disparagingly of course, I can't get past my disgust for them to figure out what they're talking about (if they even know themselves).

 

This wouldn’t match any definition of woke that I was accustomed to. If this is what you all consider a part of wokeness we are talking about two completely different worlds.

 

This is very subtly the best post of the entire thread. Disproves theories about word’s meanings disappearing.

 

The right calls any action that's done in an attempt to help minorities (blacks, gays, etc) "woke."

Example: Company announces they’re donating $10,000 to African-American charity.
The right: "tHat's wOke!"

They've even coined their own cute phrase "Go woke, go broke" which basically is them bragging about the fact that they will boycott any company/entity they deem to be "woke." It's why a large number of them absolutely hate the NBA and hated the NFL when the whole anthem-kneeling was going on. They're a very simple-minded group of creatures.

 

There is a bunch of hyperbole and broadbrushing from both sides in this thread.
The AA community used woke as mentioned above..”stay woke”…stay alert…stay aware.
The San liberal and especially social media caught on to it from shows like the wire and brought it mainstream. It did become the catch phrase of the moment several years ago..” you better get woke” showed up alo… liberals saying it to conservatives, blacks saying it to whites, etc.. it became over used and misused as almost everything does once social
Media is involved
Then the conservatives used it as a label for all things extreme left.
Some democrats have swung further and further left and republicans push back by going further right. In this the term “Woke” became a easy target and battle ground.
Groups on Both sides use it incorrectly and inappropriately.
I have no defense for how someon this thread act or post. We all need to stop making assumptions about others and the other political side of the aisle, we need to stop acting like those assumptions are facts and speaking as if they are. We need to stop assuming that every conservative is an extreme right and every democrat is extreme left.
A littl civility from both sides would be welcomed and a nice change.

 

Damon Linker attempts to define wokeness as practiced today as an extension of liberal Protestant Utopianism. FWIW


As a form of religious life, the social gospel movement looked back to the Puritans and their impatience with religious forms and emphasis on right behavior—and also forward to our own day, when activists often throw themselves into causes with a moral fervor that can only be described as missionary.

This is the sense in which I consider wokeness to be continuous with the multifaceted liberal tradition— not as an outgrowth of liberal politics but as the latest iteration of liberal Protestantism (or post-Protestantism).


Some will find this claim ridiculous because those who proselytize most fervently for woke causes so rarely do so for explicitly religious or spiritual reasons. Yet we need to remember the liberal Protestant tradition’s paradoxical (or perhaps dialectical) relation to secularism: As the light of the moral truth spreads throughout the world—with resisters publicly humiliated and shunned, and institutions reconstituted to enforce this truth—the Christian teaching reaches fulfillment, even if no one in the world actively affirms scripture, abides by ecclesiastical rules, or even thinks of themselves as members of a church.

To me, this explains a lot of what we see from wokeness: its combination of attacks on forms (structural racism, the gender binary) with the demand for public expressions of contrition and “allyship” with “marginalized communities”; its relative indifference to debating the nuances of public policymaking in favor of sloganeering and intensely moralistic calls to individual conversion; its conviction that those who disagree are not just wrong but evil; and its quasi-providential way of associating its agenda with the achievement of historical progress.

What “Wokeness” Is—and Isn’t