irnatural Call me 'Woke'. I've been called worse.
My co-host wrote an article last week accusing the "woke mob" of something and the "woke left" of something else. I'm not assigning intention to those words, but I am thinking about why there was anger and outrage.
People get their backs up when they hear that phrase and I get it. "Woke" is coded language for: "too sensitive" or "too progressive," and it's used casually and freely as a way to throw shade at someone.
The weaponization of "woke" is strategic. It's a lazy insult used to shut down dialogue. It's used to brush aside concern for others, to make decency look like rigidity and turn awareness into a punchline. When calls for fairness, for example, are mocked as "wokeness," it moves the focus from whatever the issue is, to the supposed flaws and weakness of the people raising it.
But the word "woke" doesn't bother me. I'm not especially left-leaning in my views, so maybe it's not supposed to be targeted at me. However, at the most basic level, I think it signals being awake, not in a self-righteous way, but in a conscious one. It can sometimes mean recognizing injustice when it's in front of you, staying alert to inequality, and refusing to drift through life pretending everything's fine when it may not be. Being "woke" is sometimes accompanied by calls for empathy. Being caring sounds ok to me.
It's a term most often pinned on those who are perceived to lean left politically. It's used to discredit and stereotype an entire chunk of the political spectrum. People eager to use it as an insult can be resistant to introspection, which is ironically -- the opposite of being awake.
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Language and words evolve, and maybe "woke" will fade away eventually. But the impulse behind it isn't going anywhere. So while the word "woke" doesn't bother me, the effort to make caring seem radical...does.