And that is a mistake. It all started with someone saying, “I’m not racist.”
Makes one wonder if racism today in civilized countries is more of a personal choice. And if so, is that ideologically acceptable in a free and democratic country?
I was born in a rural white monolithic culture that included bias and prejudice, but not necessarily racism. Can one still living there say, “yeah, I’m a racist, but it’s mostly because of where I live and who I come into contact with?”
“Woke” is godsend to the establishment as a tool in the tried-and-tested “divide and conquer” strategy to keep everyone at their throats over surface-level issues, such as race and gender, instead of uniting on the serious issues that most working people can agree on like rising living costs, a deepening rich-and-poor divide, and endless wars. It’s also a godsend to the media, but old and new, “left” and “right”, because of the emotion and hysteria these stories create and the revenue they ultimately generate from audiences on both so-called “sides”.
Stupid people are generally happier people. Maybe there is a connection to the woke topic. Man, I really am a stupid idiot. but as long as I haven’t woken up, that’s fine with me. Who wants to be woke anyways? freaks?
This is quite common with contentious social phenomena, where one of the ways of taking the bite out of an issue is to coopt or debase its meaning. Subversion of meaning is a question of power: neutering others’, and reclaiming ours. We can thus sleep soundly after slaying phantoms we conjured up with a slip of the tongue.
I doubt this (‘cancelling’) is unique to Woke 2.0, the manifestation being debated here. I think phenomena like ‘ostracisation’, ‘blacklisting’ and ‘shunning’ are as old as the hills. Examples: in the states there was McCathyism and Salem, in the USSR denunciations, etc, if you think woke is extreme . Choose any country across time you will find it.
Work 2.0 is a culture, a performance. Who is performing what for which audience?
Compared to the Canadian university where I was, the Taiwanese university I’m at now is like a tropical island after years in the tundra.
No walking on eggshells, fear of offending someone accidentally, requirements to sit through social justice/woke/DEI statements
or training, no “academic” presentations about microaggressions or people’s hair, biting of my tongue, being called an asshole because I didn’t bite my tongue, etc.
. Choose any country across time you will find it.
