They'll complain about anything and everything anyway, regardless of merit.
Make them complain about good things
Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
Make them complain about good things
Well let's take a moment to talk about the narratives around police reform, defunding the police, and so on.
prospect.org
The Premature Narrative on Democrats and Crime
Today on TAP: As they keep counting votes in Los Angeles and elsewhere, last week’s claim of a backlash to criminal justice reform is disappearing.
prospect.org
Tom doesn't come off that bad in that interview. He just seems to be saying that at the time, people were fine with characters being gay, but not actors, so they were fine with him in the role. Now, there is more acceptance of LGBT people in Hollywood (notice how I said more, not that it's a 100% thing), so there's no reason to cast a straight guy in a gay role, and he personally wouldn't feel comfortable accepting the role for that reason.
He also makes the point about authenticity, which I think is very true, although I don't necessarily think it's a problem with actors so much as it is a problem with writers and directors covering topics they don't really understand.
A bigger problem is that straight actors who play queer characters, or cis actors who play trans characters, tend to be doing it for a very particular reason. Namely, it wins them Oscars. They get labelled as "brave" or "courageous," because there's a subconscious acknowledgement that a cishet actor playing a queer or trans character is doing something humiliating, they're sacrificing their public image for their art by daring to look gay. But they also get to show up to collect their Oscar as a totally normal cishet man or woman and be unconditionally accepted as such. They don't face the same questions over whether they are relatable to audiences, or whether they can sell a mainstream movie that an actual trans or queer person would.
It's a patronizing attitude that treats the really gross ways queer and trans people are perceived by the world as a source of drama which actors can put on when they need to suffer for their art and then take off when they need to be taken seriously again. It's particularly offensive to trans people because it feeds into the idea that trans identities are performative (and not in the Judith Butler sense), that it's just a form of dressing up .
And this isn't to blame Hanks. I think he's correct. I think there's a phase where that kind of exploitation is necessary because it's literally the only representation you're going to get. But he's also correct that we should be past that phase now.
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So, Marvel recently decided to do a What If? storyline in their comics. This time, the scenario was "What if Miles Morales became Thor?" This is why you need to have a consultant on staff if you are going to be a white guy writing a mixed-race character. Or at least, someone who can tell you, "Dude. No."
I think my favorite part of this debacle is that the writer has Miles Thor say "By Odin's fade" when Odin is bald. And still has a beard!
"Because this gaggle of ignorant white people knows absolutely squat about black culture before then and can't be assed to check with anyone who does."
Has become? The witch trials and crusades were the same way. Jesus discusses the same thing in the Bible
That was a really good roast of the Post.
A bastion of wokeness on the eastern coast.
Of roastings of Post, I love Bill's the most.
And I too wish wokeness would become a ghost.
Alas, this is wokeness, a parasite host.
Be a long time before it's gone, been toast.
Well, wokeness is a lot like porn, in that it's hard to define, but one knows it when they see it. Certainly there's been a lot of occasions where people have claimed something is "woke" and I have to wonder what kind of kool-aid they're drinking.
That said, if I had to define wokeness as an actual philosophy, the following tenents would broadly apply:
-The most important thing about you is inherent traits rather than personal traits (or, what you are is more important than who you are), and the best way to treat individuals/society is based on said traits. Usually, this is racial (e.g. wokeness explicitly rejects ideas such as individuality and colour-blindness - see White Fragility for instance), but can be expanded to other areas (in essence, explicitly anti-liberal). Often this manifests into obsessiveness over representation and quotas, and the knots that arise (e.g. calling Asians "white adjacent.")
-Intent doesn't matter, impact does (and associated standpoint theory)
-Hyper-sensititivity to everything and anything (which isn't exclusive to wokeness, but it's certainly a trait)
-Individuals can be sorted into good/bad and/or oppressed/oppressor. There are no shades of grey, and any attempt to do so is problematic (see The Coddling of the American Mind)
-While I'm not sure if this is 100% true, wokeness often falls into the realm of luxury beliefs, in that the people who are most woke tend to be well off. It's why, at least in the US (as far as I can tell), ultra-progrssives tend to be more woke than working class (there's parallels in Oz too - there was a book I read this year that delved into the phenomenon, though didn't frame it through wokeness, you can see the book thread for my review of it)
-Cancel culture is usually associated with wokeness, but this isn't 1:1 - cancel culture has no set political affiliation, so as insane as some students in the US seem to be (and workers), this isn't inherently woke.
So, in a sense, the WaPo stuff fits wokeness in that it has:
-Hypersensitivty
-Impact matters more than intent
-No room for shades of grey
It's a mindset I've seen crop up, and I can't say I find it an appealing philosophy. Far as I can tell, it's mostly reserved for the US and UK, so on an individual level, I have little to worry about wokeness here, but, well, this is the woke world thread.
Ah, so Bill Maher, Jimmy Dore, Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin are woke. Trump would be the wokest thing that's ever happend
Wow. Just realised that Dave Rubin is the least woke of this group
My feeling from decades of media watching, all the way back to the 80s, is that "woke" (or "political correctness" as it used to be) is almost always far less significant than it is usually presented to be.
There are two reasons for this. For a start, a lot of what is badged as "woke" (or "politically correct") is simply the gradual evolution of society which is broadly accepted by younger generations and will become the status quo, no matter how much fusty oldsters with outsize representation in media rail against the dying of their light. After that, it's that those same fusty oldsters spend their time deluging media with every trivial instance - or completely made up falseness - to try to stoke outrage and create a social backlash to changes or just demean their political opponents, leading people to assume it's far more prevalent and serious than it is.
In the latter case, one might compare perceptions of crime and immigration. Interesting studies have revealed that even as people think crime is modest and decreasing in their local area, they believe nationwide crime is spiralling out of control, or that areas with about 2% immigrants think the country is overrun and 30% of the population are foreign-born. They form this dissonant view because they can see their local area with modest crime and barely any immigration, but they rely on the media for the rest of the country, and if they read the wrong media what they read is crime and immigrants (and especially crime caused by immigrants) rampant everywhere.
Of course, "woke" serves another function, too: which is to keep people looking at stuff that doesn't really matter so they don't look so much at the stuff that does matter: the meat and veg of what should be political discourse such as their jobs, public services, etc.
"Woke" for many years was a slang term used by black Americans to indicate an awareness of things. To be woke is to be awake to reality of things going on, and those who don't understand what is going on are asleep. It was very similar in use to calling most people sheep while the select "woke" few are not sheep. The internet suggests "woke" is being aware of injustice specifically.
But the "woke" things that inspire this thread are not that, "woke" has taken a meta-step to mean something different. Picture for a moment a bougie, white person like a politician or newscaster telling people to "stay woke", using that same slanted grammar to try and fake a connection to the black community, and take in the cringe of that situation. That's the type of thing complaints of "wokism" are aimed at. People aren't complaining about awareness of racial injustice. They're complaining about corporations or political groups cynically faking the ideas of social movements to try and manipulate their audience and advance their own interests. The Miles Morales as Thor example above is a pretty perfect (literal) illustration of "woke", you've got a white author co-opting language and imagery from the black community in a sad attempt to display how much they appreciate diversity at Marvel. That's not someone personally aware of injustice and social issues, that is someone aware of the concepts of injustice or social issues and trying to use them to advance their own brand, and it's just embarrassing and ignorant in the end.
But the "woke" things that inspire this thread are not that, "woke" has taken a meta-step to mean something different. Picture for a moment a bougie, white person like a politician or newscaster telling people to "stay woke", using that same slanted grammar to try and fake a connection to the black community, and take in the cringe of that situation. That's the type of thing complaints of "wokism" are aimed at. People aren't complaining about awareness of racial injustice. They're complaining about corporations or political groups cynically faking the ideas of social movements to try and manipulate their audience and advance their own interests. The Miles Morales as Thor example above is a pretty perfect (literal) illustration of "woke", you've got a white author co-opting language and imagery from the black community in a sad attempt to display how much they appreciate diversity at Marvel. That's not someone personally aware of injustice and social issues, that is someone aware of the concepts of injustice or social issues and trying to use them to advance their own brand, and it's just embarrassing and ignorant in the end.
So, what you're saying is that the problem of "wokeness" is one of cultural appropriation?
Like, the problem is bougie white people adopting the language and mentality the black community has used to deal with marginalization in a way that is insincere or shallow?
I mean, that definitely happens. People in positions of privilege have always adopted the aesthetics of marginalization in order to make themselves seem more interesting, and it can be pretty cringey (or funny) from the perspective of the people being emulated. It definitely happens in activist communities as well, and it's something I (and a lot of people involved in activism) don't like and will happily call out.
But, are the people complaining about "wokeness" actually closer to those marginalized communities than the people being criticized?
As funny as it might be to imagine some affluent white person going around telling the fellow kids to "stay woke", I'm not sure that's actually the problem. If it were the problem, if the point is that these people are misusing or appropriating words they don't understand, then it would be pretty hypocritical to keep describing those people as "woke" when you (supposedly) know that these people are doing it wrong.
Bear in mind I have very little personal knowledge of AAVE because I'm white and not American, but as I understand it the reason why black civil rights activists adopted the phrase "stay woke" was in reference to racial consciousness, because in order to engage in activism you need racial consciousness. Our society that wants to imagine itself as meritocratic and egalitarian, and that cops exist to protect people and enforce a necessary standard of law and order, and a lot of people buy into that even if it means denying the obvious reasons why cops keep killing black people. Staying woke, in that context, means being willing to question the society around you.
So, when we talk about performative activism. When we talk about corporations slapping rainbows on everything for a month or white comic book writers creating stereotypical and insulting black characters in the name of diversity. What exactly is the problem there? Why shouldn't we believe that corporations sincerely care about social justice, or that those comic book artists just want to celebrate black culture? That's what they want us to believe, so why isn't it true?
Oh right, because a basic level of political consciousness will tell us that corporations are inherently exploitative institutions that exist only to maximize their own profits, and that white people using stereotypes to avoid humanizing black people is a manifestation of racism. The problem which you're describing isn't that people are too "woke", it's that they sometimes don't have enough awareness to see through even these really transparent gestures or to avoid making them in the first place. If anything, that's not "wokeness", it's a lack of "wokeness".
Whatever you might feel about individual uses of the term now, the people who brought it into activist spaces weren't cringey white people, they were black activists using vocabulary that was natural to them, and by using it to describe white people whose politics you don't like or think are insincere you are participating in the abuse of that vocabulary just as much as they are. It doesn't come across that you want people to be more respectful about the origins of the language they use, it comes across that you think the language itself is meaningless and the problem is that some people take it, and the concepts it describes, seriously.
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