This week, it occurred to me that a topic I wanted to write about was the word 'woke.' Immediately, I next thought, are you nuts! I mean, this is a hot button topic, very incendiary. I have tried to avoid such... but then regarding some of my other recent topics, maybe I haven't avoided it. Well, either way, I am about to tackle what being woke means-- to one group or another. Also, how i feel about the word.
I started by looking for definitions online... not easy since it has various supposed meanings depending on who is putting them out. There is a racial context evidently originally to be woke, which meant "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination".
Then, there is the current usage of it by the intellectuals or those who consider themselves such-- ''well-informed' or 'aware', especially in a political or cultural sense.' And I assume by those who created the definition in terms of what you are aware of.
Where it comes to how I see the word woke, it basically comes down to those who have used it and what I think about what they've done or said. In general, I dislike the word, though what it should mean is positive as being socially aware and seeing where prejudice (a biased view as to what is true) might be still influencing too much of our culture.
Recently, we've seen where a dean at a university law school attacked a judge, who had been invited to speak, by spending his time tearing him apart as she saw it. The students who were in the audience also blocked listening to him. Very woke since he was the bad guy in their eyes.
Which led me to think of a word (which I also had to look up its meaning when I first began reading it), which I think has shaped at least some of how woke changed. Intersectionality, the theory regarding the overlap of social identities-- race, gender, sexuality, class, and how it contributes to a systemic oppression and discrimination as it's experienced by individuals. Mostly that's what woke and intersectionality seem to be today-- looking for oppression and ways to right wrongs that they see as past but also still ongoing.
What it seems to me happens when people claim to be woke is they see there is one way to see what is fair-- to not be woke is to be wrong. Woke has often gotten to a point of not only being unwilling to listen to other viewpoints but to block others from hearing them also.
How can you be culturally aware if you only know one side of a cultural issue? To those claiming to be woke, it appears, there is only one side and the other side is bigoted, misogynistic, white supremacist (even if they are of another color), destructive. etc. No wonder they won't listen to the other side, to them it's evil.
Where it comes to racial wrongs, it is in history and still seen today-- the question being how do you fix it? I thought that affirmative action was intended to address past unfairness, as well as other laws, where it comes to race, but it isn't even discussed today. I think it's still out there, but is it? Now it's about reparations-- first for blacks but maybe soon for many other areas where people there have been mistreated, like to the LGBTQIA (initials keep being added to that one) community. As it is used today, woke goes beyond race to gender identity where some don't like the words woman or man and want to refer to all as they/them/etc.
What I thought made this subject interesting for me, as a writer, is how this wokeism, which seems to be wide across the land, applies to the books we write, which often, when historical, were based in a very different time than our own. How do you stay historically accurate and still satisfy the desire to not offend?
When I got interested in defining how I see my own writing-- ethically speaking-- and how today's cultural climate might influence me or other writers, I saw it as a separate blog, way too complicated to add onto more length here. Hence, it'll be next Saturday.
In the meantime, if you have definitions for how you see woke, I'd appreciate it being put into comments here-- pro or con.
