Well, the big reason I'm skeptical is that the group of people who don't like "wokeism" seem to have pretty diverse identities. It's hard for me to see many similarities between irreligious business magnate Elon Musk, vaguely Catholic political blogger Andrew Sullivan, and my full time Baptist preacher cousin-in-law - I'm not sure I could identify any other policy question they all agree on.
I don't want to necessarily defend "woke" as a term, but if you pinned me down, I'd say the difference between woke and left is that Noam Chomsky isn't woke. He thinks free speech is very important and signed onto a famous letter on the topic of "cancel culture" and why it's bad. I don't think he has or would identify as anti-woke, but the general phenomenon of ideological capture in mass communications is something he's always talked about and opposed at length.
So you agree with me, that left and woke is not the same thing.
Whats odd thou is, (1) there is no clear definition of wokeism, like its an arbitrary stereotype used by demagogues and (2), that woke is often displayed on the other side of right/conservative. This makes it a strong indicator of propaganda. A surface, people can project their negative emotions to, which is another red flag in terms of populism. Even you used it indirectly, to refer to your peers "not liking woke", which is why i asked.
I am not defending wokeism too. One core value of the left is equality and solidarity. When you define wokeism as some LGBTQ-stuff, it would be just a subset of these values. So being woke does not make you left.
This is my answer to, what is the difference between woke and left.
On one level, sure, I'm definitely with you. The term "woke" is vague, subject to toxic stereotyping, and it'd be nice if people didn't use it.
But I don't think we can overlook the pressures that push people towards it. The problem is that a lot of movements that get grouped under "woke" self-identify with vacuously positive labels that can't be negated. If I go around telling people "anti-racism is bad", they're going to think I mean "racism is good", and they're not going to believe me when I clarify that I'm referring to specific policy ideas promoted in books such as Ibram X. Kendi's famous How to Be an Antiracist. Unless you're talking to people who are so politically engaged you can name-drop specific authors to start with, I'm not sure what term other than "woke" you could use.
I was about to write "The Problem we both have is mislabeling" but then i realized that we dont have the same problem.
From my perspective, conservatives/rights often stand out with blatant and harmful falsehoods. Even in your last post is a central self contradiction.
>movements that get grouped under "woke" self-identify with vacuously positive labels that can't be negated
>If I go around telling people "anti-racism is bad", they're going to think I mean "racism is good"
Looks like your "anti-racism is bad" statement is not meant to be negated. I think, what you meant is "racism is bad but what you are doing is too", which, from my perspective, is not equivalent to "anti-racism is bad". Your mistake here is, that you use their "racism"-label and invert it, to make it suit you. By doing so, you reduce the conversation to labels and discard similarities between you (which is actually the most harmful part).
A slight difference in phrasing is deciding if i agree or disagree with you. Is it my fault or yours?
"Anti-racism is bad" is meant to be negated. It would be totally reasonable for someone to respond by saying "well, I actually think anti-racism is good, and here's why".
There's a risk of labels getting in the way, no doubt. But there's a lot of things that seem straightforwardly impossible to reason about without labels. How could we discuss what the abstract principles of race relations in the US should be without identifying and naming the major strains of thought on that topic?
Black people were discriminated in the US from the beginning. This discrimination continued long after civil rights reforms in public and private institutions.
Even if you could magically eliminate racism in every human brain on earth with a snap of your fingers, the socio-econimic factors, inherited from the beginning would continue to be disadvantageous for blacks. So the racism back then, even when not present in minds today, would persist. This is called systemic racism, because we discriminate indirectly, not by skin color but by education, vocabulary, human capital in general. And on top, racism will of course prevail in minds.
From that, you can easily advocate for some sort of compensation, some kind of counter discrimination, anti-racism.
I find that term troublesome too, because you actually asking for support for all poor people, not just blacks, but i would never call it a ideological label and bad, because i can see the reason behind it. Using it as a label and associating it with (group) identity is unfortunate but not my mistake.
"woke" has a clear definition and origin in black activism. Like a lot of concepts from black activism, it became co-opted by well meaning white liberals, encompassing many other forms of progressive activism and eventually became more about virtue signalling than productive activism, much less black allyship.
Then, like so many other progressive and left-activist terms, it got co-opted again and inverted by the right into a general pejorative, indicating nothing other than mockery and caricature of the left. But it definitely came from somewhere and it at least used to mean something.
It's fundamentally a difference about the economy and the value of material change vs. cultural change. The left proper wants liberation for all oppressed groups, including the largest, the working class. Leftists recognize that groups that are more marginalized under capitalism/imperialism (national/ethnic minorities, etc.) will benefit disproportionately, but want a rising tide for everyone (except the bourgeoisie). That is to say, leftists have a commitment to intersectionality and the liberation of those with marginalized identities, but the fundamental, sine-qua-non thing that makes one a leftist is anti-capitalism.
The woke "left" is different; it's largely a phenomenon of the petit bourgeoisie, and is not opposed to capitalism, or oppression more generally; the woke instead want representative members of generally marginalized groups to be proportionally represented in the existing power structures, without any significant change to those power structures. The reason the woke come off as so strident and belligerent is that membership in the professional-managerial class (PMC) is increasingly precarious, and US educational/cultural institutions overproduce people with the qualifications for entry into/maintenance of that class position, relative to the dwindling size of that class.
