Personally I think the answer is anti-discrimination legislation. To be precise, the chilling effects of it. If someone goes against the "woke" it may not be illegal itself, but it means everything they do will be subject to more scrutiny and they risk being judged more severely for the same misstep. Thus anti-discrimination legislation, I conjecture, gradually select the woke to the top of the elite.
ironically, you're making a perfect argument for natural selection in evolutionary studies selecting... people who will eventually deny the existence of natural selection.
I wonder if this is also an end stage of a lot of other systems of knowledge.
Initially I was skeptical of this model because it only explains administrators’ fervor, but as I thought through the knock-on effects, I think it probably does a decent job of explaining faculty and student zeal as well, at least over time.
Your reasoning applied to the 1960s would say that students only opposed the Vietnam War because their professors told them to. You should ascribe more agency to university students.
Much more likely that their professors just taught them biology and how to operate lab equipment.
Graduate students especially are incentivized to come up with new ways of seeing the world. That’s what writing a dissertation is all about. This is the same mindset carried over from biology to a social issue normally seen as unrelated.
Edit: Those who are downvoting without replying, have you been to grad school, or are you just imagining what professors spend their time telling their students?
Perhaps it's also interesting to imagine the societal changes if law and policy prohibited discrimination based on being disadvantaged by class, wealth and income. We may well edge towards a genuinely more equitable society, rather one that just pays lip service to it based on one's identity.
Though it's unlikely to ever happen, given the economic and political system we exist in. It would disadvantage the wealthy and well-connected too much for them to permit it.
In mine, he died "in obscurity" in Russia in 1976.
Unless of course the sources that say so are disinformation from the ruling class.
I have no sense of scale for that. Is that high? Low? If it's high, does it necessarily mean it's influential too (e.g. it can be cited and then rebuked in other papers)?
Competing over conformity is the Olympics sports of our time and boy is society keen on participating.
Edit: and anybody who has ever dealt with an HOA knows that the silent majority is absolutely a real thing.
The average person in ‘the silent majority’ is against all the ‘wokeness’ but won’t actually fight it. They’ll prefer to reassure themselves that no one truly believes it while doing virtually nothing to confront those who are pushing it.
As far as your HOA example goes, I’ve found most people really do not like being in one, but are relatively helpless when it comes to actually changing the association’s rules.
I think it’s not evenly distributed IRL and that has some people feeling like “woke” is just some Republican boogeyman. Also, people seem to be forgetting the #MeToo and #BLM eras surprisingly quickly—woke ideology spurred nationwide protests and riots and somehow that seems to be getting memory-holed.
As far as Me Too and BLM being "memory holed" that has more to do with the movements themselves. They each started with very real sparks but were both consumed rather quickly by movements that bore little resemblance to those sparks. They abused their support for unrelated and often self serving objectives and made themselves irrelevant as a result.
Previously, she worked at a non-profit which was also not DEI affiliated but was obsessed with DEI stuff. Again, no one was openly critical of anything remotely DEI related.
I’ve had similar experiences at every company I’ve worked for as a software engineer.
I’m not arguing that our experiences are THE experience, but there are definitely a lot of places that take DEI super-seriously. My thesis isn’t “DEI is taken super seriously everywhere”, but rather that how seriously it is taken isn’t evenly distributed across the country or across industries.
Even still, I’m somewhat optimistic that this ideology won’t be adopted in its current form because it’s so inconsistent and often counterfactual, and I believe in a sort of “truth floats”. Moreover, our society is already “less woke” (or whatever term you prefer) than we were in the BLM and #MeToo eras.
Honestly, my biggest concern is that proponents of woke ideology are pretty successfully framing it as the only alternative to Republican anti-wokeness or otherwise as the best way to “own the conservatives”. At least that’s the impression I get from debates I’ve had.
Not a very scientific poll by any standard of course and I'm sure it's a biased selection in all sorts of ways, but it doesn't seem that common of a viewpoint to me.
I think the reason that you don't get a lot of pushback is that accusations of racism, transphobia, ableism, etc. are completely toxic, no matter how bullshitty they are. If you have to say "I'm not racist" then you've kind of already lost. It's a "cheat code" for winning the argument; the ultimate "stfu hammer". And you have to ask yourself: do I really have anything to gain by engaging on this and what do I risk losing?
Does structural racism then exist in the U.S.? Undoubtedly so in some places, especially those that were most influenced by Latinx norms and by the homegrown culture of oppression in the South. But to call it ubiquitous to the U.S. as the "woke" almost always do is to deeply misunderstand the nature of it.
I don't think it's unreasonable for people to primarily focus on their own country in their own time. Historical context is important, sure, both to understand the cause of today's problems as well as put things in perspective. But in the end, I'm not so sure if it really matters all that much when discussing contemporary issues in e.g. the US or Europe.
I mean, you can look up how the ancient Greek treated their women and suddenly you will find that modern feminists from the 70s didn't have all that much to complain about either, never mind contemporary countries like Saudi-Arabia. It's interesting to learn about it for all sorts of reasons, but in the end ... not really all that directly relevant when discussing the status of women in your own country.
Of course it matters. Even if we only consider those who seemingly have no concern at all for the plight of oppressed people outside of their own society - it's a natural experiment that lets us witness the real, actual consequences of structural racism in their purest form, and over the very long run (a time-span of several centuries in fact). Which is kinda important when you attach so much relevance to it as a causal factor. It lets us compare and contrast outcomes, and find out whether other things might also be relevant.
I'm not so sure it's that easy; unabashed naked racism such as Casta is quite a different thing than what we might call "subtle racism" as currently exists in countries like the US, but also Europe. Both the effects and the solutions seem quite different to me.
> those who seemingly have no concern at all for the plight of oppressed people outside of their own society
That seems rather strong. It's not a matter of "not caring", it's that situations in other countries are complex so I don't even understand them, and usually can't really understand them properly even if I tried as I don't speak the language. Besides, what am I supposed to do about something like women's rights in Saudi-Arabia or the plight of native people in the Brazilian rain forests? Post something on Twitter about it in English? Yeah, that'll fix it for sure...
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As a general comment: these terms are always "relative" to a degree. I grew up fairly poor in Western Europe; we never had money for anything, lived without electricity as a child for a while, didn't have things like car, computer, holidays, new clothes, etc.
If we compare my situation to various communities in, say, Nigeria I was "rich": clean running water easily available, good free education, good free health care, never truly went hungry, was never homeless, etc. By comparison, I was still "rich". Even in my own country I'm sure many people have had it much worse. Never mind if we start looking at the full historical context and start comparing against people 100, 200, 500, etc. years ago.
In spite of all of that, "I grew up poor" is a fairly accurate and reasonable description in the context of growing up in Western Europe.
Similarly, you might take issue that structural racism in the US is small compared to something like Casta (or Jim Crow, or many other things), and that is certainly true, but it's not a contest, and for the experience of contemporary people growing up and living in the US ... it doesn't really matter that some other people had it even worse.
The two are causally linked, though. Overt racism as in Casta gives way to subtler and more structural issues over time. But everything we observe about those places, even today, seems to suggest that these structural issues are highly relevant there.
> Post something on Twitter about it in English? Yeah, that'll fix it for sure...
It's called raising awareness. In fact, there's more merit in doing so wrt. issues that most are unaware of. Everyone and their dog knows about structural racism in the U.S. by now; very few seem to know or care about the issue as it occurs elsewhere, and in far more problematic forms.
> In spite of all of that, "I grew up poor" is a fairly accurate and reasonable description in the context of growing up in Western Europe.
Socio-economic marginalization is in fact very different from absolute poverty and deprivation of the kind we might see today in Nigeria. One of the more surprising facts about countries where absolute deprivation is a real concern is the varying correlation between it and social marginalization. People in the historical past were surely living in material deprivation by modern standards but, by and large, they had a rich and tight-knit social life; they were not marginalized as most people in relative poverty might be nowadays in the West.
I see the tide is starting to turn a bit on this, these accusations don't have the same power that they used to. Probably because of far too many "boy who cried wolf" situations.
For example, women saying that they want to keep female-only spaces for their dignity and safety are often accused of being transphobic. Many are shrugging that off and saying: if that's transphobia then so be it, proves my point. And increasingly, people are agreeing with them.
Women can push back against accusations of transphobia because they can respond with accusations of sexism. Since there are accusations on both sides, this doesn't show that accusations are losing power.
This is generally how language works. People at the edges of understanding propose a lot of new ideas and reframings, and some gain broader footholds in popular use.
I’ve been on both sides of this debate because sometimes the innovators push beyond what I think makes sense. But they are innovating.
I asked someone with schizophrenia and they thought this pretentious comment was hilarious in the midst of a thread on ableism.
schizophrenic:
2: contradictory or antagonistic qualities or attitudes
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/schizophrenic
Perhaps your friend would prefer to be referred to as having schizophrenia spectrum disorder as that is now the more accurate term.
Lot of that going around.
If you look up "retard" in Merriam-Webster, it says "informal + offensive : a foolish or stupid person"
If you look up "schizo" in Merriam-Webster, it says "a schizophrenic individual".
If you look up "psycho" in Merriam-Webster, it says "a deranged or psychopathic person —not used technically"
Think about this and you will become enlightened.
(I should make it clear that I agree with you if you think the idea of policing "schizo" and "psycho" like people police other terms is impossible, absurd. They can't be destigmatized or merged into "neurodiversity". All I really wanted or expected to do was shock some awareness.)
You didn’t shock any awareness, though — the idea that you could in this case is based in your perception that you knew more than me (or that this was a competition in who could be more ableism-aware) which is likely based on your own lived experience where it is probabilistically most likely to be true. We are in the long tail here though where it is not only possible but fairly likely that the person you’re talking to is at least as much of an outlier as you are, and where someone else may have already come out the other side of an extended and overwrought diversity awareness education of trauma-informed everything and be thoroughly done with it.
Your offense at the term and/or your friend’s reaction was based on your own outdated associated definition and/or your assumption of what you understood my definition to be, my understanding, and/or my awareness.
People often think they are “smarter” because others make concise comments and the big brains, instead of assuming competence, assume that every corner of the discussion that wasn’t fleshed and rounded out in the original comment is an opportunity for a brilliant unique thought, discovery, or observation of theirs that is unknown to the commenter. That’s often not the case.
Ah, that's just it - I assumed you were "ableism-aware".
I believe in the spirit of the XKCD cartoon "Ten Thousand" (https://xkcd.com/1053/) and do not think it's ever appropriate to shame people for not knowing what "everybody" knows. Much less assume strangers are ignorant so that I can inform them.
"Ableism-awareness" is common. "Schizo-awareness" is nonexistent, as is, I think, proven by the mainstream dictionary you linked to.
When I was studying biology as an undergraduate, there were a number of religious students who vehemently disagreed with evolutionary theory, but would work under - in their minds - the assumption of this fiction being true in order to get decent grades.
The same may well be true of students being taught that woke gibberish like "egg parent" and "sperm parent" are the correct terms to use. Or they just accept it as technical jargon as they would with all the other domain-specific language used in their course.
So don't assume the general public will stand up against insanity as much as you would like them to.