What is "woke" in 2024

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I wouldn't claim to have all the anwers, because you're asking tough questions. But not having answers doesn't disqualify anyone from having legitimate criticisms, correct? So...

Equal opportunity has to start with our school systems. We have to dramatically increase our budgets for education. We also have to be honest about cultural problems. In many school districts kids just don't bother showing up, that's on the parents. But when a kid gets a high school degree (for example), that has to have meaning. It can't just be a "I sometimes showed up" award.

OTOH, it also can't be a "I thrived in an environment that didn't fit a lot of other people" award. A lot of people do badly in school for reasons that have nothing to do with their knowledge, skills, or how well they'd do outside of high school.

Next we have to look for things like motivation. Given two applicants with equal education, the one with more motivation ought to be the one who gets hired.

And this is one opportunity for implicit bias to impact what happens.

A candidate who's a bit guarded because they recognize that they're outside of the social group of the interview panel and is trying to read the room will come across as "less motivated" than a candidate who recognizes the panel as part of their peer group and is enthusiastic right away.

What creates bad outcomes are proportional hires, e.g. "well the local community is 40% black, so we must have 40% of our employees be black". Or women or other ethnicities.

And you think that if a company is in an area that's 40% black but, say, only 20% of all employees and only 5% of managers are black, this shouldn't be a sign for the company to have a hard look at whether they have internal issues that contributed to this outcome?

Should we also make cultures proportional? How about height or weight? How do we know what categories we should be striving to balance in terms of equal outcomes.

It's generally based on what people are typically duscriminated against. Also, practically, there are usually categories spelled out in relevant legislation.

It seems to me we should get everyone a good education and then do our best to be color-blind, sex-blind, ethnicity-blind, and so on.

... and so ignore diversity, which can create problems.

You kinda shrugged off lived experience earlier, but lived experience really is a form of expertise. No matter how unbiased your hiring process is (or think it is), if it ends up that the lived experience of all the decision-makers in the room only covers a narrow range, then they will fail to see problems or implications that would have been picked up if the group had been more diverse.

IOW, diversity is a strength and a reasonable goal in its own right.

 

[Stevicus]

What is "western education," and what is "western society"? The location listed on your profile is the US. Do you think your own country's education and society are similar enough to, say, those of Romania or Bulgaria, which is also a Western country, to be grouped with them under the same label in a discussion about social and educational nuances? What about, say, Greece and Sweden, given the many differences between them in social, educational, and cultural aspects?

Your above posts make it sound like "western education" and "western society" are well-defined entities that could be talked about as one unit, but considering that a significant number of Western countries strongly differ from each other in terms of many social, educational, cultural, and political aspects, I don't see how the grouping would be meaningful in this specific context.

well it's a rough blanket term, with some contradictions and imperfections, but I think that it refers to countries that decided to take heavy influence from rome, greece, and ancient israel (for the bible). Countries north of those 3 places, ranging from britain to russia, decided to take heavy influence from there. I've been trying to figure out why since I started foruming and reading. Western countries all seem to also recieve influence from a secular tradition after the middle-ages, with debatable influence from their own seperate mythologies, which might sometimes be similar. To figure that out, people try to study the ancient connections in indo-european languages, which might have similar words for different old gods, for example

Maybe it's not the greatest term, but it's what we got

I've heard it said that the world is not really divided between East and West, but North and South. There's a lot of truth to that.

The "East/West" dichotomy might also be related to the schism between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. "West" might defined by languages which use Latin-based alphabets. Culturally, religiously, and linguistically, they share many commonalities. We still use the dead language of the ancient Roman Empire in many different contexts, and up until relatively recently, learning Latin was required in schools (as it was for my father).

"West" may also refer to the countries of Western Europe which were the main instigators of the ages of exploration and colonialism. By that time, the Eastern Roman Empire was no more, consumed by the expansionist Ottoman Empire. This is what propelled the Western European states to seek out new trade routes to the East - but they found America instead. The Church was still involved in that, as the Pope declared in 1493 that all of the newly discovered lands be divided between Spain and Portugal, essentially giving control of the continent to Western European states (although other Western powers, mainly France and Britain, also started to get in on the act).

The West might also be characterized by parallel political movements and cultural trends which influenced each other, such as the direction towards liberal democracy, revolution, reactionism, industrialism - with information and published works being exchanged back and forth among the states within that geographical proximity. They were learning and copying from each other, especially as scientific knowledge, technology, and industry started to expand. Of course, it wasn't always friendly. They fought each other a lot as well, and this also provided an incentive towards creating better weapons technology.

A key difference between what is "West" and "Westernized," in my opinion, is that all of these political and economic changes took place in the West incrementally, over the course of centuries, which gave the populations time to get accustomed to it. The countries which might be considered "Westernized," whether colonized by the West or otherwise under some degree of Western influence and hegemony, these changes happened rapidly, and were often done in a brutal, heavy-handed manner, with total indifference to the cultural values of the local populations.

 

[icehorse]

And this is one opportunity for implicit bias to impact what happens.

A candidate who's a bit guarded because they recognize that they're outside of the social group of the interview panel and is trying to read the room will come across as "less motivated" than a candidate who recognizes the panel as part of their peer group and is enthusiastic right away.

Agreed, but in terms of motivation I was thinking of demonstrated activities and achievements, not good interviewing skills. For example, I once heard that a student with average grades was accepted to Yale because in high school they built a functioning suit of chainmail armor.

And you think that if a company is in an area that's 40% black but, say, only 20% of all employees and only 5% of managers are black, this shouldn't be a sign for the company to have a hard look at whether they have internal issues that contributed to this outcome?

"I think" maybe that's the case, but maybe it's not. I think that too often there is a sort of slavish devotion to quotas.

It's generally based on what people are typically duscriminated against. Also, practically, there are usually categories spelled out in relevant legislation.

Well I'm only 5'9" and I feel oppressed because of height-ism. Where's the equity for me?

You kinda shrugged off lived experience earlier, but lived experience really is a form of expertise. No matter how unbiased your hiring process is (or think it is), if it ends up that the lived experience of all the decision-makers in the room only covers a narrow range, then they will fail to see problems or implications that would have been picked up if the group had been more diverse.

IOW, diversity is a strength and a reasonable goal in its own right.

I'm a fan of diversity. But DEI often warps true diversity in strange ways. Don't you think that diversity ought to include diversity of thought?

 

[icehorse]

What is "western education," and what is "western society"? The location listed on your profile is the US. Do you think your own country's education and society are similar enough to, say, those of Romania or Bulgaria, which is also a Western country, to be grouped with them under the same label in a discussion about social and educational nuances? What about, say, Greece and Sweden, given the many differences between them in social, educational, and cultural aspects?

Your above posts make it sound like "western education" and "western society" are well-defined entities that could be talked about as one unit, but considering that a significant number of Western countries strongly differ from each other in terms of many social, educational, cultural, and political aspects, I don't see how the grouping would be meaningful in this specific context.

The context of that quote was from a California higher education document.

But fair enough, I think woke-ism is occurring mostly in the US, Canada, and western Europe. There might well be exceptions.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

First off, I think it’s important to understand that almost all categorization schemes are imperfect. I’m not a fan of identity politics (IP), but IP all too prevalent in society these days, and I admit that when I call someone “woke”, I’m guilty of using IP. So all of the following ideas are approximations and I’m sure imperfect. But I think demanding perfection in this context falls into the trap of making the perfect the enemy of the good.

==

There is at least one political spectrum that runs from the far left, to the moderate left, to the centrists, to the moderate right, to the far right. I would say that there are sets of ideas or beliefs commonly associated with each of these positions on the spectrum. For the sake of discussion, let’s say that for each stop on the spectrum we could enumerate 20 beliefs, most commonly associated with that stop.

Most people will not fall cleanly into a single stop on the spectrum. An individual might align with 15 of the 20 moderate left beliefs, but also believe a few far left ideas and a few conservative ideas. The same can be said of other domains. For example, we know that there is at least one religious spectrum that ranges from hard atheist to religious fundamentalism, with many stops in between.

In other words labels such as “far right” or “woke” or “hard atheist” or “religious fundamentalist” are almost always approximations of an individual, and every individual will believe some things that are inconsistent with whatever label we ascribe to them.

==



With all those caveats and disclaimers in place, below is a list of beliefs ascribed to the far-left / woke, in 2024. The more of them you agree with, the more “woke” you are. And again, no one is perfectly woke or perfectly far right or moderate. These are all rough approximations.

Far-left / woke beliefs:

1 - Free speech is less important than protecting people from being offended.
2 - Protecting personal liberties is less important than protecting people from being offended.
3 - The world’s people and societies should be viewed from an “oppressed vs. oppressor” perspective.
4 - White people have privilege, and are racist by default.
5 - White cultures are more colonist and imperialist than non-white cultures.
6 - An individual’s “lived experience” should have as much or more weight in public policy than broad statistical facts.
7 - There is an intersectional or oppression hierarchy and any criticism of the “most oppressed” people’s ideas or activism are by default “phobic” or “racist” in some way.
8 - Objectivity, critical thinking, and logic are tools of the oppressors.
9 - The DEI perspective and DEI initiatives must not be criticized.
10 - Diversity (in DEI), is based on race, gender, and sexuality more than on diversity of ideas.
11 - Inclusion (in DEI), is based on race, gender, sexuality, and conformity to woke beliefs, non-conformists are excluded.
12 - Equality (in DEI) means equality of outcomes, not equality of opportunities.
13 - The concerns of the most oppressed are more important than the concerns of the less oppressed.
14 - Cultural appropriation is a significant problem in society.
15- People’s immutable identity characteristics are more important than their behaviors.
16 - The only cultures that can be criticized are western cultures.

I completely appreciate that you are speaking in generalities, and I appreciate that you went out of your way to point out the limits to these sorts of discussions.

FWIW, I think you did a good job summing up what is considered "woke" in 2024. It's really too bad that the term has been hijacked. It originally meant that someone had awakened to the existence of injustices in society, some systemic, others not. But the far left has become so incredibly unreasonable and outrageous, that no one wants to be associated with them anymore.

This was the one that I liked the best:
8 - Objectivity, critical thinking, and logic are tools of the oppressors.
I think some people may be unaware of the things going on in education that say that math is racist, and learning logic or scientific thinking means having white culture imposed on us. SMH

'Math is Racist' Crowd Runs Rampant in Seattle, Portland

The math war has been raging for years on the West Coast, where progressives have almost total control over school curricula.

www.newsweek.com

 

[Stevicus]

I had not heard of this before, but apparently, there's a right-wing "mockumentary" called "Am I Racist?" Since it appeared to be related to the topic of this thread, I thought it might be of interest.

One Writer Dares to Review ‘Am I Racist?’

Though the anti-DEI film from conservative media site The Daily Wire has become one of the highest-grossing docs of the past decade, top entertainment outlets have declined to review it — until now. Guest columnist Joel Stein ventures to a (not-so-packed) theater in Burbank and tries to keep an...

www.hollywoodreporter.com

The producer is compared as a conservative "Borat" (who I was never really fan of). Apparently, it's getting little attention from the media.

For whatever reason, there are films that we in the entertainment media fail to notice. In the case of the documentary Am I Racist?, that whatever reason is that we’re liberals. Not one mainstream media company reviewed the film — the first theatrical release from Ben Shapiro’s conservative media company The Daily Wire — which has been in the top 10 for two weeks. So The Hollywood Reporter enlisted someone who doesn’t care if he loses all his friends. That person was me.

The film is a Borat-style comedy in which podcaster Matt Walsh puts on a disguise and tells subjects he’s documenting his anti-racist journey in a movie (though never revealed in the doc, he reportedly told his marks his film would be called Shades of Justice). His disguise consists of a man-bun wig and skinny jeans. I could not believe that this was what he thinks a liberal wears in 2024. I was surprised he didn’t carry around a latte and a plate of sushi.

Apparently, one scene has them getting people to sign a fake petition to paint the Washington Monument black and renaming it the George Floyd Memorial.

However, Walsh does gain access to the prominent DEI experts he hopes will embarrass themselves, and they largely comply. He gets Robin D’Angelo, author of White Fragility, to give his Black cohort $30 out of her wallet as reparations. He is a waiter at a Race2Dinner event, hosted by Regina Jackson and Saira Rao, where white women pay to be yelled at — and definitely get their money worth. When he isn’t doing irrelevant bits (dropping plates, overfilling water glasses) and gets out of his way, his subjects do indeed skewer themselves.

He also often succeeds at making DEI instructors seem like grifters. D’Angelo got a $15,000 fee for being in the documentary; the Sesame Place mom took $50,000; the Race2Dinner hosts got $5,000. Walsh even gets people to pay to attend a DEI seminar he puts on (the Do the Work! Workshop), which concludes with him handing out whips so attendees can self-flagellate.

After the film, I talked to fellow audience member Lacretia Lyon, a stand-up comic and podcaster who had heard about the movie when Walsh was interviewed on Adam Carolla’s podcast. In addition to being interested in the topic, she came because she’s a member of AMC’s Stubs A-List, which allows members to see three movies a week. “I was surprised how funny it was,” said Lyon. A Borat fan, she thought Walsh nailed the undercover bits. “The narcissism was amazing to watch,” she said about the many DEI instructors who bragged about their superior sensitivity to racial issues. All of whom were women.

I have not seen the film. Not sure if I'm going to. I would concede that, among liberals, there has always been a certain number who might take the ideals too far and get into over-the-top craziness which satirists and parody writers can make fun of. There was a movie from back in the 1990s called "PCU" which also hilariously mocked political correctness.

But a key feature was that those who were "politically incorrect" were also a bunch of mostly liberal fun-loving cut ups, while they were opposed by the right-wing Republicans on campus who had to hide out in the shadows. We used to be able to make those distinctions back then, but now, I'm not so sure. Some people seem to assume that "politically incorrect" = "Nazi."

 

[Argentbear]

This was the one that I liked the best:
8 - Objectivity, critical thinking, and logic are tools of the oppressors.
I think some people may be unaware of the things going on in education that say that math is racist, and learning logic or scientific thinking means having white culture imposed on us. SMH

'Math is Racist' Crowd Runs Rampant in Seattle, Portland

The math war has been raging for years on the West Coast, where progressives have almost total control over school curricula.

www.newsweek.com

Realize you link is an opinion piece by a person with a long history of making false claims on this very topic.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Realize you link is an opinion piece by a person with a long history of making false claims on this very topic.

What?? A right-wing think tank reported a story while stripping it of all nuance in order to inaccurately portray the reality of a situation, and people believed it to be the case without looking into it??

I am shocked.

Shocked.

 

[SkepticThinker]

I have a son who is in the military and he is sick to death of all the woke craziness he endures on a daily basis. So it does exist. By the way, I wouldn't call him a conservative though he is more conservative than his brother, who is very liberally minded. I get along fine with both of them.

What's your son's definition of woke?

 

[SkepticThinker]

Again, for perhaps the sixth time this thread, are you aware of the messages detailed by the best selling authors Ibram X Kendi and Robin DiAngelo?

You were asked to provide evidence for this claim:

"Glad to hear it. But there are millions of people who identify as woke who do believe what I said in the OP."

Your response was the above.

Do the "messages detailed" by these authors you mention demonstrate somewhere that "millions of people who identify as woke" believe everything you said in the OP? If not, what are you talking about? Are you saying those two authors somehow represent millions of people?

 

[icehorse]

You were asked to provide evidence for this claim:

"Glad to hear it. But there are millions of people who identify as woke who do believe what I said in the OP."

Your response was the above.

Do the "messages detailed" by these authors you mention demonstrate somewhere that "millions of people who identify as woke" believe everything you said in the OP? If not, what are you talking about? Are you saying those two authors somehow represent millions of people?

Go back and read the OP again, because you're asking me to defend claims I'm not making.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Realize you link is an opinion piece by a person with a long history of making false claims on this very topic.

I didn't make a claim that the State of California defines math as racist. What I said was that there were those on the far left who made this claim. My link did document that.

 

[Argentbear]

I didn't make a claim that the State of California defines math as racist. What I said was that there were those on the far left who made this claim. My link did document that.

documented by someone with a long history of making false claims about that,.. the same false claims that he included in his opinion piece

 

[Argentbear]

Go back and read the OP again, because you're asking me to defend claims I'm not making.

hundreds of thousands of people believe in the list in the OP.

Likewise, you might disagree with the list in the OP, but hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people believe that stuff, and their beliefs have many impacts on society.

My argument is that hundreds of thousands or millions of people believe in the list provided in the OP

and so on and so on and so on

 

[IndigoChild5559]

documented by someone with a long history of making false claims about that,.. the same false claims that he included in his opinion piece

https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics
Instruction Exercises for educators to reflect on their own biases to transform their instructional practice

Frontiers | Acknowledging and Supplanting White Supremacy Culture in Science Communication and STEM: The Role of Science Communication Trainers

Racism remains a root cause of underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx scholars across STEM. It also contributes to a lack of diversity in scien...

www.frontiersin.org

Acknowledging and Supplanting White Supremacy Culture in Science Communication and STEM: The Role of Science Communication Trainers

 

[Argentbear]

https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics
Instruction Exercises for educators to reflect on their own biases to transform their instructional practice

Frontiers | Acknowledging and Supplanting White Supremacy Culture in Science Communication and STEM: The Role of Science Communication Trainers

Racism remains a root cause of underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx scholars across STEM. It also contributes to a lack of diversity in scien...

www.frontiersin.org

Acknowledging and Supplanting White Supremacy Culture in Science Communication and STEM: The Role of Science Communication Trainers

which has nothing to do with the point i made

 

[IndigoChild5559]

which has nothing to do with the point i made

Were you not challenging my assertion that people on the left did indeed have these ideas? So I gave you two books published by leftists on these very topics.

 

[LadyJane]

“If You're Woke You Dig It.”

A brief history of 'wokeness'

 

[ImmortalFlame]

I've been thinking about it, and I would like to propose a parenthetical subject of debate:

What is "Moke" in 2024?

Now, I am fully aware that many of you may not understand what "moke" refers to, and while no categorisation scheme is perfect, I believe that with logic, reason, evidence, logic, evidence, logic and reason, we can work towards an approximate understanding of the idea, and if I use as many big words as possible while doing so, it will certainly extemporaneously expand and elucidate our collective understanding of syllogism contemporary bifurcation liquidation.

So, with that out of the way, below is a list of beliefs ascribed to the far-right / far-middle / far-middle-right / moke in 2024. Keep in mind that these are contrafabuluous mixibilations:

1- Fascism is good, and also nice.
2- Minorities can shove it.
3- We should ignore oppression, if not completely devote ourselves to perpetuating it and denying its existence.
4- Ham sandwiches are better when served on silver trays.
5- Racism is good, and also nice.
6- If given the choice between being civil and being correct, always choose to be civil because being correct is harder.
7- Never ever ever explain your position in detail or be put in a position when you have to defend or even state your actual beliefs.
8- Ethno-nationalism is good, and also nice.
9- It's wrong to judge or slur people as a group, like those wokey, woke left-wingers on the woke left do.
10- Trans people don't deserve any rights (trust me, I spoke to a woman once).
11- Denying people rights based on their religion or country of origin is just how the world works and it's actually also good and nice.
12- It's perfectly normal and good to lie about and misrepresent opposing beliefs.
13- The best way to build bridges is with cheese.
14- Reading books is good, but it's better to just know the names of lots of books so you can make people think you've read them.
15- Constantly talk about data and science, but avoid using either at all costs (especially when they contradict you).
16- I hate Muslims.

So, now we all understand exactly what I am referring to when I refer to anybody saying literally anything as "moke". I am trying to suggest that they are engaging in some or all of the above, without actually having to demonstrate anything or engage in their argument in any way. With that in mind, I suggest we accuse people of being "moke" all the time, and any time they make an argument that could come across as, say, anti-trans, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, pro-ethno nationalist, etc.. we just call them "moke" and expect that word and all it's myriad (and now very clear and not at all arbitrary) implications become attached to them.

I think this will save us all a lot of time.

 

[ImmortalFlame]

Were you not challenging my assertion that people on the left did indeed have these ideas? So I gave you two books published by leftists on these very topics.

Have you read the books in question, and do you honestly feel that "math is racist" is an honest, nuanced and thorough summation of their actual arguments?