Over at New York, Sam Adler-Bell says that he doesn't care about the word "woke." If you don't like it, fine. But if you believe in the principles behind the word, you need to quit using its pseudo-academic language with anyone other than your own circle of true believers:
This idiom — or perhaps communicative register — replaces the obligation of persuading others to adopt our values with the satisfaction of signaling our allegiance and literacy to those who already agree. In some cases, this means we speak in an insular language that alienates those who haven’t stewed in the same activist cultural milieu.
....When college-educated radicals speak for the left, they tend to speak in the language of “wokeness” — precisely as I have defined it — with distorting and destructive effects. This is due, in part, to the peculiar history of 20th-century campus radicalism. The victories of student activists in the 1970s onward — in creating departments and new curricula through which radical thought could be studied and taught — were pyrrhic. Conceived as beachheads in a broader war against capitalist society, radical departments became sepulchers for radical thought: places where wild ideas could be quarantined from the challenge of convincing anyone outside to believe them.
Ironically, this is an argument that conservatives have been making for decades. They say—correctly, I think—that the overwhelming dominance of the left on university campuses weakens progressives because they're never forced to learn how to persuade non-progressives. Conservatives, by contrast, who face a stewing cauldron of students and faculty who all disagree with them, learn fast that they'd better figure out how to make convincing arguments.
Conservatives probably overstate this point, but there's not much question that there's something to it. This is why it drives me nuts whenever some progressive says "It's not my job to teach you ______ ." Of course it is. Not only that, it's your job to teach others constantly, patiently, sociably, and in language they can understand. If you aren't willing to do this, you don't really care about winning support for progressive ideas.
Politics is all about persuasion, and right now progressives are doing a lousy job of it. We need to up our game.
What language of wokeism, though? Is it the being aware of discrimination and inequality (the actual definition of woke)? Is it the being polite to others and not using slurs and being more inclusive?
The argument seems to be missing pretty much everything involving real people and real words.
So no, I don't see how conservatives have a point here.
I think the point is that in online progressive and social justice spaces, there are a lot of concepts and terminology and “rules” people seem to be expected to know. Even when these concepts are right, which is most of the time, being aggressive and piling on people who don’t know them isn’t helpful for convincing more people to support these causes. It’s like punishing them for their own ignorance. I can understand frustration on the part of activists, but part of the definition of ignorance is that ignorant people don’t know their ignorance. It can feel to them like progressives are just yelling at them for no reason. And if they ask what they said wrong or why it was offensive and the activist says “it’s not my job to educate you.” The person is not going to go away any more knowledgeable and they may think progressive activists are all mean.
I accept your definition of woke, and assert that anybody who is anti-woke must be a bigot.
Funny how the majority of the commenters seem determined to prove Kevin's point by acting out exactly the behaviors the article references. This must be intentional, not just comically unconscious, right? Right?
"College-educated radicals" are, if you use the standard dictionary definition of "radical", a vanishingly small minority. Most "liberals" and progressives" are far from being radical.