Waking up from 'wokeness' with a disapproving hangover
To be ‘woke’ is to be PC in online politics, but the gatekeepers are nightmarish
A few years ago, the word "woke" was simply the past tense of "wake". But in recent years the word has come to frame a very popular philosophy: that of unlearning old ideas, of decolonising our minds, of freeing our minds from the shackles of culturally imperialist, colonial and patriarchal thinking.
While the word can be traced back to the 1970s, it gained social media traction during the #BlackLivesMatter movement and it has since transcended the African-American context and usage - it is now used on social media by (mostly young) people from all walks of life to represent critical and progressive thought.
To be "woke" is to be sociopolitically aware and to question everything.
I consider myself a member of the often mocked and not-all-that-popular "Woke Twitter": my tweets - on the rare occasion that they're not utterly useless rubbish - are often about gender, feminism, racism and smashing patriarchy.And I've learnt a lot from people on Woke Twitter: about ableism and ableist language, about acknowledging my own privilege as a heterosexual woman, about how white supremacy still frames some of my own beliefs and thoughts.
Woke Twitter is important because it calls out discriminatory occurrences, be it whitewashing in Hollywood, racism in advertising or misogyny in our political landscape. It often speaks truth to power, through hashtags such as #OscarsSoWhite and #MenAreTrash, for example.One of my personal favourite examples of how silly wokeness can be is when some of us get criticised for tweeting about wanting to be rich or wanting to bag a rich man: apparently you can't be woke and a capitalist at the same time.
That's rather idiotic: there's nothing wrong with wanting to have nice things. As Madonna said: "We are living in a material world." And while I agree and understand how damaging capitalism has been to the poorest of the poor among us, I am not ashamed to say that I love money and all the things it buys. Does that mean my Woke Card should be revoked? I don't think so, but many would disagree.
My issue with the prescriptive nature of wokeness is that it leaves little room for disagreement. Critical thought is becoming groupthink: one "wrong" tweet and you'll also be lumped with the "problematic" folk.
There is no room for nuance or subtlety. It's rather absolutist: it's very black and white, with no middle ground. If there's no nuance, then there's no more learning. If we cannot acknowledge that not everything can and should fit into a neat little box, then are we really thinking as critically as we claim we are?Watching Wonder Woman doesn't mean that we agree with the politics of its lead actress.
But to publicly say that in some circles is tantamount to endorsing the slaughter of Palestinians.
Wokeness on social media has become like performance art: everyone is Marina Abramovic but their art isn't really saying anything. We have the right vocabulary but we're not saying anything meaningful with those buzzwords. Of course we should interrogate the society we live in, but we also need to know when we're getting downright ridiculous.
That's always the danger with movements or schools of thought - after a while they start feeling like a parody of themselves, and they become much like the very thing they are meant to be against.Woke talk, short and simple
Ableism
Discriminating against people with disabilities. Ableist language in particularis the usage of words such as 'crazy', 'dumb' or 'insane' (which are discriminatoryagainst people with mental challenges, for instance).
Cishet
Someone who is cisgender (someone who identifies as the gender they were born)and heterosexual.
Intersectional
Acknowledging and regarding race, gender and sexuality as part and parcel of the feminist movement. It's not feminist if it's not intersectional...
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