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Comment by elevenoh | Hacker News Reader

"Wokeism" is a pejorative catch-all term for all the negative aspects of trying to be against racism, so it's kind of true by definition, isn't it? Literally no one is defending "wokeism" any more than people are defending "racism", because the terms themselves are intended to convey something negative.

It makes the term kind of useless, wouldn't you think? It's a placeholder term for whatever you don't like.

The precise definition of the pejorative 'woke' can be debated, but I think we all can agree that "we know it when we see it".

And it is far from useless. IMO it accurately labels people who are either: 1. Taking liberal talking points to extremes for the sole purpose of attention seeking or 2. Naive, coming of age youth bumping against reality for the first time in their lives and use the distraction of politics and remote injustices to avoid confronting the "hard work" which will be required to thrive in the adult world.

Unfortunately, I think a lot of people implicitly or explicitly defend "wokeism" as interpreted in the most severe and uncharitable way.

I try to be charitable in my assumptions, but even then, it's hard to argue that it's safe to criticize any DIE or "woke" initiative. There always seems to be some risk in being fired/blacklisted or otherwise attacked for even modest criticism of the DIE movement.

It may seem that way, but I think that's because right wing media does a stellar job of surfacing extreme examples. Plus, right wing media fosters a collective sense of grievance, which I see in some of the comments here.

I don't necessarily think something is bad just because it belongs to one political side or another. Good and bad ideas exist on both sides of the aisle and the proportion of good to bad is always in flux.

I'm not convinced of those arguments. However, assuming I'm being charitable (which I will try to be to my utmost) and take these to be true, it's quite possible the right is correct when it comes to the worst excesses of "wokeism". Nothing about "they pick extreme examples" or "they foment a sense of grievances" means they are incorrect. Even if the problem is overstated, I still see it as a problem.

Not really, woke used to be a word people used to identify themselves with. [1] And Tyler Cownen recently wrote opinion piece on Bloomberg defending wokism. [2]

It is not "a placeholder term for whatever you don't like", not in any meaningful sense.

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

[2]: [Why Wokeism Will Rule the World](https://archive.fo/OaowM)

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