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Comment by raspberry1337 | Hacker News Reader

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One day an AI will be able to give a meaningful definition of that word.

From wikipedia[0]:

    Woke (/ˈwoʊk/ WOHK) is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination".[1][2] Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.[3][4][5]

As is common among the right, people refuse to comprehend the language or engage with it in good faith in an attempt to sabotage progressive dialogue and poison the well of discourse by inverting the narrative (see some of the dead comments in this thread.)

But the odd thing is how many people claim not to know what "woke" means who also seem to know exactly what "anti-woke" means. How can you be against something without a definition?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03043754221126279

[2] https://www.politico.eu/article/macron-education-minister-je...

[3] Morgan, Marcyliena (2020). "'We Don't Play': Black Women's Linguistic Authority Across Race, Class, and Gender". In Alim, H. Samy; Reyes, Angela; Kroskrity, Paul V. (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Language and Race. Oxford University Press. pp. 276–277.

[4] https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...

[5] https://theconversation.com/where-woke-came-from-and-why-mar...

"It's not happening and it's a good thing"

The motte and bailey / smug gaslighting combo that is characteristic of today's discourse on the left.

They know what it means, it just makes their bigotry obvious if they can explain what it is while claiming to be fighting it.

A large number of people think empathy and sensitivity to others is bad, and we should refer to it with a pejorative term. That's... not a great sign.

I think a lot of the reason people reject political correctness/"wokeness" is because it gives the appearance of empathy and sensitivity while at the same time not acknowledging others' humanity. It's an artificial substitute to real empathy.

It might be a bit of a regional thing, as the US and Canada don't have the same pisstake culture we have in Australia/NZ/SA/Britain, but speaking from experience I can assure you that there is nothing more dehumanising than someone using politically correct language to describe the particular minority I happen to be a part of in an academic way, or refusing to make jokes at my expense because they're "too offensive".

Is that what you really think it means?

That's the end result of hyper competitive individualistic capitalism

A small but overly financially and socially influential group of people believe they can hide behind "empathy and sensitivity" to promote government mandated discrimination, corporate-government collusion of mass censorship, and the sexual abuse of children. What is in fact a great sign is that more and more people are quietly discussing among themselves as to whether they shouldn't harm that small group of woke individuals in order to secure their own safety and liberty.

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