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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

Then why do I never hear woke language IRL? People who I associate with are overwhelmingly left of center and under 35 BTW, so sample bias is actually making this a stronger indication of public opinion.

Edit: and anybody who has ever dealt with an HOA knows that the silent majority is absolutely a real thing.

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The key is that it doesn’t take ‘a majority’ to affect change. Activists just need to be in positions of power, or put pressure on those that are.

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 lived in Chicago and I heard woke stuff all the time at work (we had some pretty insane DEI meetings and posters around the office), among friends, at church, and of course protests/demonstrations/riots on the streets.

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.

I work in an environment that has a lot of focus on DEI, training, posters etc. Unless you're standing in front of the equivalent of a polit officer the language is used mockingly. This isnt some right wing coven but a mix of perspectives. This mocking stems from the shared recognition of the absurdity of the issue.

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.

My wife works as a marketing consultant for major US corporations (including but not limited to FAANG). In pitching to companies, her company explicitly (and cringeingly) advertises their diversity—race, gender, nationality, languages spoken, etc and their commitment to DEI. Her company holds DEI meetings internally and with clients where they basically cite disparities out of context and get collectively (and performs timely) angry about them. To be clear, her company is not in the DEI space, it’s just a competitive advantage to get contracts. In meetings with her coworkers (1:1 or group), no one is mocking DEI at all—there are lots of True Believers and others who just don’t want to rock the boat (including my wife, for better or worse), but no one is openly critical (subjectively, people are definitely afraid to be seen as failing to toe the party line).

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.

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