A "woke" claim asserts that some widely accepted and seemingly race-neutral practice is actually racist, whether in its intent or its effects. These arguments are often made in terms of disparate impact. Gifted and talented education disproportionately benefits white and Asian students.
I appreciate the neutral and factual explanation of the term, as a reader from Europe, with English as third language. And I do not understand the downvotes, both to your explanation or to the equally neutral question.
The definition of "woke" is like the definition of "hipster". Whatever these words might originally have meant in some narrow context, they are now used as vague condescending insults for a broad range of people the person speaking doesn’t like.
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.
That's not right. Woke is an adjective form of SJW (Social Justice Warrior) and almost exclusively used by people who disparage people interested in social justice in a sneering way. It is meant to be insulting but it does have meaning.
It’s not that these words have no meaning. The problem is that the meaning is vague and changes depending on the speaker and context, so that to the reader/listener it is generally impossible to tell quite what meaning is intended. The word says more about the identity politics of the user than it does about the target.
“Woke” is in practice a vague pejorative that people use to redirect a conversation from critical thinking to tribal thinking.
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.
If there are specific complaints about a policy, we can consider those directly. No need to apply a reductive label. The top comment was quite specific.
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 downvotes are because this person is unfairly presenting a single perspective on what the "woke" term means. If you aren't willing to present other perspectives and engage with them in good faith, then you're a propagandist.
It is much better to read a single factual and accurate explanation, than to read two biased perspectives from two shitheads on the opposite sides of political spectrum.
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.
Results matter as much as Intent does - communists had great intent, and where did it get them. Neoliberals have great intent and volumes of theory, all they have to show for it is a stangnant economy and rising inequality.
I am going to present a sane and rational counter-argument for completeness. I am personally undecided on some of these issues.
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.
> 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.
"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.
