I’ve been meaning to deal with this major example of progressive rhetorical legerdemain for some time, and like so many of my aspirations, it had fallen prey to my short attention span and disorganization. Today AM Golden, in reviewing “Old Indy” or whatever the movie is called, asserted that it wasn’t “woke” but said the meaning of that word was elusive.
It really isn’t. “Woke” began in ebonics (the politically-correct term for careless and defiant bad English embraced by the urban African-American community is apparently now “African-American Vernacular English” or AAVE, yet another example of the Left’s “it isn’t what it is” addiction. AAVE is just poor grammar that makes the speaker sound uneducated) and described someone who had seen the light (Hallelujah!) about racial injustice and how the United States is intrinsically racist. Rev. Wright, Barack Obama’s mentor, was preaching “wokeness” when he told his congregation “God damn America!”
Gradually white progressives appropriated the term and made it more general, so that while Black Lives Matter could claim the mantle of “wokeness” for a while (until its real nature as a Marxist, manipulative scam started dawning on sufficient numbers of observers), “woke” came to mean the enlightened realization that the entire progressive agenda, from abortion on demand to reparations to trans-athletes clobbering biological females in sports to income redistribution to crippling the economy while pretending we are preventing a climate change Armageddon to letting illegal immigrants swarm across our borders without consequences to declaring shop-lifting a non-crime to eliminating voter identity requirements to making “hate speech” a crime.…I can go on like this forever, but I’ll stop now…are all “on the right side of history” and undebatable, correct, good and virtuous, and anyone who dissents is, well,
…what Joe said.
Unfortunately for the self-described woke, they over-played their metaphorical hand, and absurdly, recklessly so. “Woke” agenda items like defunding the police and making Americans and their kids wear useless, and even harmful, masks were serially exposed as terrible ideas, and “the woke” began having a strong stench of arrogance, intolerance, incompetence and totalitarianism about them. Their political adversaries and clear-eyed cynics began using the term as one of derision (the same phenomenon has occurred throughout history—See: “hippies”), and it became an effective rebuke. This is, again, the Cognitive Dissonance Scale at work…
… for as “woke” sank below the mid-point on the scale, the people, political figures, activists and pundits anchored to it began sinking too.
First, the response from people like Joy Reid was to call the denigration of “woke” racist, since the term originated in the black community. That didn’t fly, however, especially since those making that claim call everything racist that they find inconvenient. The new strategy (a memo went out or something) is to claim that the word they adopted themselves as a badge of honor, wisdom and moral superiority is meaningless.
Nice try, but uh-uh. No, “it”woke” has a meaning, and that meaning was defined by the excesses and irresponsible conduct and rhetoric of those who once promoted it. “Woke” has come to describe knee-jerk proponents of whatever extreme progressive beliefs, positions and agenda items that have been accumulated and connected to the Left’s ideology, regardless of facts, logic, common sense, history, human experience, likely consequences or their obvious foolishness, frequently in order to be considered virtuous in the judgment of their peers rather than as the result of any serious thought or analysis.
It’s a damning description, and well-earned. Use it well.
Ethics Alarms 
Unfortunate and ridiculous this essay even had to be written. But such is the effect of talking point memos and their ridiculous points. Stupid ideas are seeded into the zeitgeist by the senior management of the left and they spread like wildfire via the usual channels and, presto change-o! they’re legitimized by virtue of their ubiquity. Grrr.
In actual Engl9i8sh, “woke” is not even a word.
But neither is “shizzle”…
I must confess to experiencing sheer delight knowing it has backfired spectacularly, allowing it to become a hilariously ironic, ultimate Lefty pejorative.
If that’s mean-spirited and unethical, guilty as charged…
I wrote about this!
https://humbletalent.substack.com/p/defining-woke?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
“Scientists discovered this as they studied Zebras and got confused about which individual zebra was which, because all the zebras just blend into the herd. So, they tried to fix this by tagging a zebra with red paint so they could keep track of it. Guess what happened?
The Lions killed the tagged Zebra. A tagged zebra stands out from the herd so lions can tell it apart and focus the hunt on it. If a Zebra gets separated from the herd it loses the benefit of it’s camouflage, at which point the lions can focus on it, target it, and kill it.
This is a great analogy for the game the woke are playing. Once a worldview is named and defined, it can then be pointed out, highlighted, and subjected to criticism. Once you can *IDENTIFY* a worldview or set of ideas you can focus on it and criticize it.
Naming an idea lets us separate it from the herd of other ideas. The woke don’t want us to label to their ideology because if that happens we can tag examples their ideology with a label when we see it. This lets us to highlight it, point it out, and examine it when we see it”
Basically… They’ll never settle on a name because whatever we eventually call it will slide down the dissonance scale because their worldview is deeply unpopular. Instead of addressing that, there’s this never-ending rhetorical cup game where they bitch about semantics to avoid the conversation about how dogshit their ideology is.
I agree with everything you said, but also see AM Golden’s difficulty in deciding when it applies to media. The problem there is that often the wokeness is associated with a meta-analysis: if there was one story about an old male hero passing a torch to a younger female, that wouldn’t be notable since at least the 90s. But when it happens over and over, people understandably start to read wokeness into it. But does that make an individual movie woke just for having that, when the same movie in 1996 would have been innocent?
It’s a similar problem to multiracial families. There’s nothing wrong with them individually, they exist and don’t necessarily affect the story being told, the wokeness comes in comparing them to every other show which also features a multiracial family… Then it begins to feel like something is being shoved down our throats.
I had the same problem when trying to tell a friend whether the movie Encanto is woke or not. By itself, it’s a Disney movie with a female protagonist set in Columbia… Probably less intrinsically woke than Mulan, which no one had a problem with back in the day. But it’s clearly part of Disney’s efforts to be multicultural — the cast is full of authentic Latina/o voice actors, and the music is by woke royalty Lin-Manuel Miranda — so for my friend, who can’t tolerate a whiff of wokeness, is it going to annoy him? Not if he’s just watching that specific movie, but probably if he’s viewing it with the larger cultural context in mind.
That’s what I was trying to figure out.
Wokeness, as practiced, is dangerous to our country and to the cohesiveness of our culture. But we have run the risk where anything that appears in a movie that is something the Wokesters would support is labeled as Woke even if it isn’t necessarily so. It’s not Woke to put a strong female in as a sidekick to a heroic male character. It’s not Woke to make an aging heterosexual male character grumpy and bitter. It could be Woke to put a strong female character in because you feel you must in order to push a “Tough Girls Rock” agenda and because you want to have so-called “Representation”. Part of me wonders if Wokeness is a progression of the old label Political Correctness? I do remember people having a problem with the Environmentalism and anti-European Colonialism of “Pocahontas” and with the female protagonist of “Mulan”. It just wasn’t called Wokeness then.
Like our host’s reply to my comment on the original thread, we just expect Disney to go full Woke on everything that we assume Wokeness without even seeing it. That’s sad. Disney may not be trying to do that with every film but, because it seems it’s trying to do that a lot, we see it everywhere. So there’s a reactionary response to films and programs before they are released because of that assumption.
It doesn’t help that Progressives are trying to label the agenda listed above in this entry in terms of harmless and beneficial education. For example, Progressives (as well as their friends in the media who write the headlines) argue that Conservatives don’t want students taught about slavery. Some of the far Left even mislead the public by claiming that the history of slavery wasn’t taught at all in schools.
But what the conservatives oppose isn’t that students are taught about slavery. We were all taught about slavery. What is opposed is the teaching that the United States was formed in order to perpetuate slavery and systemic racism. What is also opposed is teaching everything through the lens of racism and slavery. My sister told me a few months ago, “I had no idea that George Washington took his slaves’ teeth for his dentures.” as if that was an important detail that was willfully withheld from students from the moment they first heard the apocryphal story of the cherry tree. No, students aren’t taught about obscure facts like that. Schools can only give an overview of history in most cases. But any halfway decent biography will include that information. My concern is that my sister – and, doubtlessly, many others – seem to think that this is a significant piece of data that is deliberately kept from 7th graders in order to brainwash them into not understanding the so-called systemic racism that has existed in the U.S. since the beginning.
In terms of films, like you have pointed out above, Emily, seeing a multiracial family in and of itself isn’t necessarily Woke. But when every family is multiracial, it’s hard not to think an agenda is being pushed (I haven’t seen “Encanto”, by the way. Is it any good?).
I guess I need to know how to define Wokeness in a way that balances the agenda-pushers themselves and the reactionary opponents. Can we come up with a definition that isn’t just a list of what the proponents push?
With regards to woke, I think the definition based on what wokeness pushes is actually fine, but I think as a quality of media it needs to be addressed as multi-layered. It can be a sin of moralizing (does the story feel like it’s trying to teach us a Very Important Lesson?); of creativity (is this a plot element we’ve seen a dozen times before because it makes the woman/POC character look better?), and of shoehorning/attention grabbing (are there elements that serve absolutely no purpose beyond showing off how progressive the story is?)
In this sense, it’s similar to any ideology. Stories can be overtly Christian, in which case people who don’t like that won’t like them. They can have various levels of Christian influence and symbolism, from the barely noticable thematic influence of Lord of the Rings to the Christ-sacrifice symbolism that pops up in a ton of stories, to the overt allegory of Chronicles of Narnia. We can note these are Christian elements, while downgrading the work based on how heavy handed, overused, or out of place they are.
“Christian” by itself is a broad, multifaceted ideology that encompasses a lot of what we’ve inherited as western civilization, but it’s still a relevant lense to analyze things through. In the same sense, “woke” is a broad and multifaceted lense that encompasses much of the good that’s come from civil rights activism and old-fashioned environmental conservationism, but that doesn’t make the designation invalid, just nuanced.
With regards to Encanto, it’s very good. It’s different, entering the realm of Disney magical folktales on a smaller scale, more mystery story than action/adventure, and it feels fresh and creative without feeling like it’s trying. It doesn’t break the formula because it’s cool to break the formula, it breaks the formula because it’s a totally different kind of movie, so the formula doesn’t apply. The music is mostly great with only one real “okay Miranda, we know it’s you” song. The characters are engaging and carry the plot. It almost totally avoids the “I know that thing” reference humor that makes so much animation annoying these days.
I’d happily recommend it to anyone interested in a family friendly musical/fantasy, regardless of their age.
If we need an unmistakable example of “woke” infecting a recent Disney product, we have to look no farther than the recent revival of the movie “Willow” as a TV series. It was so obviously bad that it was canceled after only an eight episode run, with few bothering to try to defend it. The movie was a favorite of our kids, but even they couldn’t stomach this revival.