Why 'woke' replaced 'politically correct'

[Nevilledog]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/01/18/woke-cancel-desantis-academics/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/9rgrX

The parade of articles lamenting the dire state of free speech on college campuses can seem unending. Every week, it seems, there’s some exploration of how students attempted to constrain an important conversation or how a heavy-handed professor tried to proscribe particular subjects or how administrators made some reprehensible decision poisoning the well of academic inquiry. There were 3 million staff and 19 million students at degree-granting colleges and universities in 2020, so there’s a vast field from which anecdotes can be harvested. You’re going to get a one-in-a-million occurrence at least 22 times a year, if you will.

But this pattern is not new. Before the scourge of college campuses was threats to free speech broadly or “woke” reappraisals of vernacular more specifically, the purported threat was “political correctness.” When I went to college in the early 1990s, this was already something of a punchline, the idea that garbagemen needed to be referred to as “sanitation engineers” and so on. Even without the amplification of the internet, there were still laments about what the college kids were doing to discourse.

“At Stanford University, the Student Conduct Legislative Council is proposing to amend the university’s fundamental guarantee of free speech,” one essay read. “The new rule would punish speech that directly insults and stigmatizes individuals on the basis of race, sex, national origin or sexual preference.” The author lamented that “the ‘politically correct’ view on campus these days seems to favor curtailment of speech,” a complaint that could be plucked from Twitter today instead of its actual point of origination: the New York Times in 1989.

The broader pattern of pointing to colleges as corrupt or corrupting goes back even further, really. In 1951, William F. Buckley became a celebrity largely on the strength of his excoriation of his recent alma mater, “God and Man at Yale.” Any angle predicated on what the still-heavily-teenaged population of colleges is doing is not a novel angle.

*snip*

[bucolic_frolic]

1. We are the Enlightened, they are reactionary dimwits

[TheRealNorth]

2. I think the reason is...

Last edited Wed Jan 18, 2023, 07:13 PM - Edit history (1)

In the early 2010's, liberals started using the word "woke" to describe being self-aware and of the past history that led to or influenced current societal injustices. Basically, Conservatives did to "woke" what they had done to the word "liberal"- they take some extreme cases and brand the entire movement or idea using the extreme cases.

[Nevilledog]

3. Here's an interesting article

A history of “wokeness”

https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy

Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics.

In the six years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.

On the left, to be “woke” means to identify as a staunch social justice advocate who’s abreast of contemporary political concerns — or to be perceived that way, whether or not you ever claimed to be “woke” yourself. At times, the defensiveness surrounding wokeness invites ironic blowback. Consider the 2020 Hulu comedy series Woke, which attempted to deconstruct the identity politics behind ideas like “wokeness,” only to garner criticism for having an outdated and too-centrist political viewpoint — that is, for not being woke enough.

On the right, “woke” — like its cousin “canceled” — bespeaks “political correctness” gone awry, and the term itself is usually used sarcastically. At the Republican National Convention in August, right-wing Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) scolded “woketopians,” grouping them together with socialists and Biden supporters, as though the definition of a “woketopian” was self-evident.

*snip*

[The_Casual_Observer]

4. They have platforms in every possible social media, bible colleges, churches

And it isn't enough for them. Fuck them.

[flying_wahini]

5. And most Repugs are just regurgitating whatever Faux news says and don't even know

What it means. Frankly I am fine with Woke as opposed to being Asleep at the Wheel.

[onethatcares]

6. "the arc of the moral universe is long"

and if you read those words and the 10 or so after. You will have to question your own stance in the world.

Damn it, we should be better than this.

[TheRealNorth]

7. I don't believe that there is any force (God, spiritual, or otherwise)....

That guides humanity to being more just. I understand that it may be comforting to some to believe so, but I just don't.

[onethatcares]

8. and the neat thing is

You can believe whatever you'd like to .

Peace to you and yours