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We’ve semantic-drifted a long way. ‘Woke’ first hit my radar as a black activist term around Ferguson/BLM in 2014. Feels like yesterday. It’s gone from a brain-dead obvious thing to be to a brain dead obvious thing to avoid being.
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People who are not woke: blacks, whites, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans, gays, trans people. People who are woke: a small minority of college-educated, disproportionately white, disproportionately wealthy people + educated, professional middle class minority rent-seekers
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Back then, to me it meant “being alive to structural iniquities that lead to black kids getting arbitrarily executed by cops” Now it means “power-tripping sociopaths trying to leverage mob-control powers to take over sclerotic institutions”
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You’d have to be a true asshole to not be woke by the first definition. You’d have to be pretty gutless patsy not to resist and reject woke by the second definition. The semantic drift from woke (2014) to woke (2019) is so extreme we shouldn’t use the same word for both.
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Yeah, I mean no. 2. We don't have good terminology for the amorphous, shape-shifting set of claims that this ideology makes use of it in pursuit of institutional, in large part because the effort manipulates terms such as "diversity" to disguise its character.
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The right is obsessed with "PC" around "things you can't say". The actual weak point of the wokeleban, worth attacking, is around the approved language you MUST use. For example: I avoid using terms like "person of color" and "ally". Every use is a vote for woke-authoritarians. twitter.com/vgr/status/117…
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The thing is, since the leaders stay in the shadows hiding their authoritarian intentions, they exercise power via their mooks using their designated shibboleth-language. You can weaken them by simply not using language they want used.
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For example, there is really never any reason to use aggregate-solidarity terms like PoC, WoC, and LBGTQ if you're not trying to promote an active solidarity-based tactical agenda. You can just be more specific, and use unloaded situation-specific language.
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The expansive and labile construction of the micro-aggression was invented in order to catch out those deft enough to adopt your strategy. So one must also be swift in anticipating and updating one's algorithm to avoid those.
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