What is "woke"?
Example of 'Woke', non race, non class issue: Relative Age Effect.
If you are born in November you have almost no chance of becoming a star athlete, if you are born in January your chances are triple.
Noone designed the system to be unjust, but noone throught about ensuring it's fair either, and for decades noone questioned it.
That's what 'Woke' people claim to 'detect'. Sometines it's right, sometimes it's wrong.
They had great propaganda, which is not the same thing.
Find 10 people opposed to “woke” and you’ll get 12 or 13 distinct explanations/criteria for the term.
If you substitute “poopyhead” for “woke” across the internet it won’t substantively change the meaning of anything you read.
You gave a different definition to upthread.
If you want a more detailed analysis of current usage, https://ctrlzmag.com/series-what-is-woke-4-the-decline/
It is used to elide facts and specifics, like measurable and persistent racial disparities in social outcomes including education. Instead we are invited to consider whether a given person or policy is “woke”, which is not objectively measurable in any way.
Woke policies have a societal/political agenda in terms of ethnic and other favored groups. That is by definition tribal thinking.
All policies represent agendas and have implications for groups within society, including policies implemented in the past that we live under today. To different perspectives, any given policy will have different upsides and downsides. Moving forward is about finding balance, consensus, or compromise among these perspectives.
Applying a simple label like “woke” is an invitation to ignore this complexity in favor of binary (“is this woke or not”) or linear (“how woke is this”) modes of thought. It’s also an invitation to prejudge the merit based on a sense of whether an idea comes from inside or outside the tribe.
It’s like trying to troubleshoot a space station by focusing on whether solutions seem “cool” or not.
The counter argument would go something like this:
Structural racism and sexism are so deeply embedded in society that it's hopeless to try to eliminate these tendencies directly. Not only are these tendencies complex, systematic, and often unconscious, they are also difficult to impossible to measure. Outcome on the other hand is easy to measure.
If you start with the hypothesis that at least a large chunk of differences in outcome are a result of differences in opportunity (including hidden ones), then addressing outcome directly is the most effective way to try to combat bias. One way to do this is to eliminate societal systems and programs that seem to lead to outcomes (either positive or negative) that differ statistically from the baseline race and sex distribution in society.
The root of this debate seems to be biological determinism. The "right" (loosely defined) side of this debate argues that once overt racism and sexism are removed most of the remaining differences in ability and outcome that manifest are biologically innate. The "left" (again loosely defined) argues that this is at best unproven and point to the reported subjective experiences of women and minorities in which they report continuous low-grade racism and sexism that remains even after racism and sexism of the overt codified variety are removed.
"Biological determinism" is a huge red herring here. There are lots of causally-relevant factors wrt. social outcomes that have nothing to do with either biology or perceived prejudice/discrimination (however defined). Biological differences might explain some of the different preferences across genders (the broad 'people vs. things' orientation that even seems to show up in experiments with infants), but they're realistically irrelevant to anything else that the "woke" actually care about.
Who lives in a country where three white men can murder a black jogger, and it requires a international outcry for the police to prosecute?
As I understand "woke", it does mean trying to equalise "opportunity"; it just recognises that "opportunity" in the sense of "something offered" is not the same as "opportunity" in the sense of "the chance to do well", and tries to correct that.
In this particular case, does it make sense to take away gifted and talented programmes? There is clearly equality of opportunity offered. But a woke response might be to also identify individuals in disadvantaged groups who would be at that level were it not for their disadvantage and help them get there.
Much of this applies almost equally to Slav kids in America (when you account for what their origin countries were like) yet they seem to do pretty well compared to Blacks. So I think there's reason to be skeptical about your claim that "we've offered plenty enough to the Black community and it hasn't helped, so equality of opportunity itself must be the problem". We haven't done nearly enough for true equal opportunity to be achieved, and this goes equally for both mainstream society as a whole and the Black community itself which has often pushed in counterproductive directions.
"Woke is an English adjective meaning 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). 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 left-wing ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.[0,1]"
[1]https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-hist...
Unfortunately like most terms associated with progressivism, feminism or race, almost no one here ever uses the term in good faith, understanding either its history or taking its purpose at face value, and it's simply become another anti-leftist pejorative.
> the left’s insecurity about genetics is partly why so many have fallen completely for the critical theory cult, leaving reality far behind, and sustaining this new (and false) consensus at this point solely by punishment of dissent
That's pretty much the summary of wokeness.
Source: Am leftist who is secure about genetics, though would prefer less methylation of my particular genes.