I don't have the data to back it up (aka, feel free to ignore this comment), but I'm suspicious that there might be a more general trend here.
For a large class of societal problems, the general approach has been funnel energy into building awareness, channeling that awareness into action, and using that action to build yet more awareness.
It seems plausible to me, that an unintended side effect of this activism funnel could be that awareness of an issue is inversely proportional to how bad the issue remains.
As a trans person in a non-american country, where HRT is easy to access and societal stigma is low, I've found it notable how trans activism seems to be at it's peak now. Just when it's least needed.
I suspect that might be the case with lots of movements.
This seems plausible. I tried to think of counter-examples where activism did indeed die down as the problem was vanquished, and the only one that came to mind was anti-tobacco campaigns but then I realized the energy shifted to campaigning against vaping.
I'm going to skip all the racial elements and just concentrate on the cheer portion! Amazing athleticism. Mind blowing choreography. I think the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles should feature both cheerleading and marching bands as uniquely American efforts that are truly emblematic of merit, skill, resourcefulness above all else.
When I was still using Instagram I was following a male cheerleader who posted his training, and then usually a final video of him throwing a young woman into the air. He was an absolute unit- muscular and really powerful, and his training was awesome- all squats, Olympic lifts and movements that you don't see gym bros do that much like ghetto Glute Ham Raises/nordic curls. Huge respect for him and anyone who trains like that/can do that.
Get Out is a film that I probably would have watched if it wasn't for the discourse. "Actually, white people who voted for Obama are the real villains" is such a ridiculous thesis that it made me disinclined to see the movie, even though the film itself was probably entertaining and possibly even insightful.
I had a similar experience with Black Panther, which I did see. I really wish I could have been ignorant of the discourse surrounding it, much of which was either really dumb ("Killmonger was right" - no he wasn't, did you even watch the movie?) or over-the-top (critical praise to the point it was nominated for Best Picture).
What's odd is that I actually think Get Out is a great movie that works really well as thriller/horror cinema...so long as you ignore the attempted racial messaging.
Love this piece, but I'm not sure you got the idea that Massachusetts is some bastion of racial tolerance. The Boston desegregation/bussing dumpster fire happened a quarter century *after* Lovecraft County takes place. You think it's crazy that a group of black people would get side-eyed in a diner full of white Massholes in the 1950's? I saw that happen in 2018! New England as a whole is probably the least racially integrated region of the United States.
I didn't intend to imply it was a bastion of racial tolerance, but it's certainly not the first setting I'd choose to host a pickup truck full of homicidal racists who are triggered by a quaint black family.
Maybe not my *first* choice, but as someone who lived there for a decade and a half, far from implausible. There are more hair-trigger shotgun-toting pickup truck types out there than you might expect, especially in the rural areas.
And while I didn’t watch the show, I’m assuming it took some inspiration from the fact that Providence native H.P. Lovecraft was notoriously racist.
And as someone who now lives in Providence, I find myself once again in the position of reminding Massholes that Rhode Island is not a suburb of Boston but in fact a different state altogether.
Lovecraft was also decades before the show is set and was an entirely different breed from the shotgun-toters (and in fact still celebrated by his native city, which surprised me quite a bit given the politics of the locals). If he was the inspiration, the showrunners really botched the source material.
As a Brown alum who is actually *from* Providence and for awhile had a Facebook profile pic of me dressed in all black next to Howie's grave (I was a goth, therefore we are friends and I can call him that), I can assure you that the historical racial politics of that corner of New England are pretty uniform. Thank you for defending the honor of my hometown, though. I'm glad you like it!
You're gonna have to argue with someone else about the show; as I said above, I didn't watch it and have no dog in that particular fight.
I think that Wokeism was by and large an ideology of apologetics for the very specific failures of the late Obama era. Look at your scatter-plot of black wealth: it took quite a hit in the 2008 financial crisis, and didn't recover or exceed its former level until Obama was out of office. Thus, the Democratic Party and its surrounding ecosystem shifted to an ideological lens that deemphasized concrete material improvements in favor of cultural abstractions.
Then Trump winning in 2016 solidified wokeism and culture-war stuff as central issues of politics, even as the economy actually recovered in 2016-2024, even despite COVID.
I mean the alternative theory is that structural racism is real and has been real for a while, and people weren't free to talk about it before.
Sexism was worse in the 50s than now, but people are complaining more about sexism than they did during the 50s. There's a correlation (people are complaining more because the culture is more willing to hear them), but that doesn't mean people complaining about sexism are fundamentally confused about what the problem is.
I really don't think "wokism" is a good word to use here. Like it or not, "woke" is a word that means a lot of different things to different people. In fact, asserting that there's one unified "woke" ideology is itself a non-obvious political thesis!
Also, if you're trying to signal thoughtful analysis about an ideology, using a word that is never used by the people with that ideology but commonly used by people talking shit about them sends the wrong message.
I used to thread much more careful about this in the past but eventually changed my mind that the linguistic aversion on my end was unwarranted. I need some word to use to describe the shift in the racial discourse that I detailed with specific examples, and Wokism remains the most fitting way to convey my meaning. If you have alternative vocabulary to suggest, please do so!
My recollection: it was initially a niche but serious term until 2017 or something, then it became common among social justice activists (2017-2019?), then it rapidly became a term of mockery, and retreated from serious use (2019-2020). I don't think I've seen the term used seriously by its proponents since 2021.
The main ambiguity I see is that centrist/non-woke left people/media use the term differently from right-wing people/media. Centrists see it as a specific brand of identity-obsessed, virtue-signalling, race/gender-conscious and censorious politics. Right wing media sometimes call any left-leaning causes, from climate-change to abortion rights to trade unions "woke".
"Here is a video of you beating your wife last year."
"'is never' doesn't equal 'has never been'. I have beaten my wife but no longer do."
I feel fairly confident that almost everyone would interpret the statement "no socially progressive person ever describes themselves as 'woke'" to mean "no socially progressive person has *ever* described themselves as 'woke'" and not "no socially progressive person *currently* describes themselves as 'woke', but many of them used to".
I acknowledge some ambiguity, but according to my understanding of how people use the term, "I never" in the present simple is primarily negating a habit. e.g. "I never drink" is by default, understood as “I don’t drink as a rule”, allowing for past exceptions.
So I think the wife beater in your example might be justified in saying that, if he indeed only beat his wife once, a year ago. It would also be incorrect for him to say the present simple "I beat my wife", as it was a one-off.
Even admitting this, my read of Olivier Faure's comment was that woke people do never and *have* never described themselves as such. Perhaps he might clarify which meaning he intended.
I thought Get Out was darkly funny and it often poked fun at how empty some of the virtue signaling of liberal whites was. There’s a whole lot of people in coastal blue bubble areas with “in this house we believe” signs who say the right things in public but actually vote against things that would increase stuff like multi-family housing in their neighborhoods. I’m sure they were made quite uncomfortable by the movie if it didn’t go over their heads.
Well done. Through no effort of my own - I was a hapless teen at the time - I became a member of an integrated step-family in the 70s. We lived a few blocks from ‘East Compton’ and the high school down the block I attended was uniquely integrated while the community went through a demographic makeover. Years down the road I managed to parlay a higher-than-average aptitude for comfort in mixed-race settings into a couple long stints of inner-city LA high school teaching. I needed a job and didn’t approach it with white savior intentions. Meanwhile race relations and discourse shifted. Am still processing the disconnect, but don’t need Hollywood’s help. Your analysis and commentary are a nice addition to the ongoing effort. FWIW here’s a couple pieces I wrote last fall about the fast times at Lynwood High: https://open.substack.com/pub/jsartchr/p/place-notes-schooled-at-the-wood?r=7as1j&utm_medium=ios
I don't have the data to back it up (aka, feel free to ignore this comment), but I'm suspicious that there might be a more general trend here.
For a large class of societal problems, the general approach has been funnel energy into building awareness, channeling that awareness into action, and using that action to build yet more awareness.
It seems plausible to me, that an unintended side effect of this activism funnel could be that awareness of an issue is inversely proportional to how bad the issue remains.
As a trans person in a non-american country, where HRT is easy to access and societal stigma is low, I've found it notable how trans activism seems to be at it's peak now. Just when it's least needed.
I suspect that might be the case with lots of movements.
This seems plausible. I tried to think of counter-examples where activism did indeed die down as the problem was vanquished, and the only one that came to mind was anti-tobacco campaigns but then I realized the energy shifted to campaigning against vaping.
John Stossel has a related video "The Crisis Industry: How Activists Profit from Panic
“U, G, L, Y, you ain't got no alibi,” regularly breaks out in my head unprompted because of that film.
I'm going to skip all the racial elements and just concentrate on the cheer portion! Amazing athleticism. Mind blowing choreography. I think the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles should feature both cheerleading and marching bands as uniquely American efforts that are truly emblematic of merit, skill, resourcefulness above all else.
When I was still using Instagram I was following a male cheerleader who posted his training, and then usually a final video of him throwing a young woman into the air. He was an absolute unit- muscular and really powerful, and his training was awesome- all squats, Olympic lifts and movements that you don't see gym bros do that much like ghetto Glute Ham Raises/nordic curls. Huge respect for him and anyone who trains like that/can do that.
I love weightlifting but I wish acrobatics also was more of an established fitness avenue. It feels much more well-rounded.
Get Out is a film that I probably would have watched if it wasn't for the discourse. "Actually, white people who voted for Obama are the real villains" is such a ridiculous thesis that it made me disinclined to see the movie, even though the film itself was probably entertaining and possibly even insightful.
I had a similar experience with Black Panther, which I did see. I really wish I could have been ignorant of the discourse surrounding it, much of which was either really dumb ("Killmonger was right" - no he wasn't, did you even watch the movie?) or over-the-top (critical praise to the point it was nominated for Best Picture).
What's odd is that I actually think Get Out is a great movie that works really well as thriller/horror cinema...so long as you ignore the attempted racial messaging.
Love this piece, but I'm not sure you got the idea that Massachusetts is some bastion of racial tolerance. The Boston desegregation/bussing dumpster fire happened a quarter century *after* Lovecraft County takes place. You think it's crazy that a group of black people would get side-eyed in a diner full of white Massholes in the 1950's? I saw that happen in 2018! New England as a whole is probably the least racially integrated region of the United States.
I didn't intend to imply it was a bastion of racial tolerance, but it's certainly not the first setting I'd choose to host a pickup truck full of homicidal racists who are triggered by a quaint black family.
Maybe not my *first* choice, but as someone who lived there for a decade and a half, far from implausible. There are more hair-trigger shotgun-toting pickup truck types out there than you might expect, especially in the rural areas.
And while I didn’t watch the show, I’m assuming it took some inspiration from the fact that Providence native H.P. Lovecraft was notoriously racist.
And as someone who now lives in Providence, I find myself once again in the position of reminding Massholes that Rhode Island is not a suburb of Boston but in fact a different state altogether.
Lovecraft was also decades before the show is set and was an entirely different breed from the shotgun-toters (and in fact still celebrated by his native city, which surprised me quite a bit given the politics of the locals). If he was the inspiration, the showrunners really botched the source material.
As a Brown alum who is actually *from* Providence and for awhile had a Facebook profile pic of me dressed in all black next to Howie's grave (I was a goth, therefore we are friends and I can call him that), I can assure you that the historical racial politics of that corner of New England are pretty uniform. Thank you for defending the honor of my hometown, though. I'm glad you like it!
You're gonna have to argue with someone else about the show; as I said above, I didn't watch it and have no dog in that particular fight.
I think that Wokeism was by and large an ideology of apologetics for the very specific failures of the late Obama era. Look at your scatter-plot of black wealth: it took quite a hit in the 2008 financial crisis, and didn't recover or exceed its former level until Obama was out of office. Thus, the Democratic Party and its surrounding ecosystem shifted to an ideological lens that deemphasized concrete material improvements in favor of cultural abstractions.
Then Trump winning in 2016 solidified wokeism and culture-war stuff as central issues of politics, even as the economy actually recovered in 2016-2024, even despite COVID.
I mean the alternative theory is that structural racism is real and has been real for a while, and people weren't free to talk about it before.
Sexism was worse in the 50s than now, but people are complaining more about sexism than they did during the 50s. There's a correlation (people are complaining more because the culture is more willing to hear them), but that doesn't mean people complaining about sexism are fundamentally confused about what the problem is.
Of course structural racism is real. That doesn't mean structural racism caused structural racism discourse.
The narratives in the episodes on Korea in Lovecraft were downright ridiculous too
I didn’t make it past the first episode, that was more than enough for me.
I really don't think "wokism" is a good word to use here. Like it or not, "woke" is a word that means a lot of different things to different people. In fact, asserting that there's one unified "woke" ideology is itself a non-obvious political thesis!
Also, if you're trying to signal thoughtful analysis about an ideology, using a word that is never used by the people with that ideology but commonly used by people talking shit about them sends the wrong message.
I used to thread much more careful about this in the past but eventually changed my mind that the linguistic aversion on my end was unwarranted. I need some word to use to describe the shift in the racial discourse that I detailed with specific examples, and Wokism remains the most fitting way to convey my meaning. If you have alternative vocabulary to suggest, please do so!
https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
>using a word that is never used by the people with that ideology
Lies. Transparent historical revisionism.
"Is never" doesn't equal "has never been".
My recollection: it was initially a niche but serious term until 2017 or something, then it became common among social justice activists (2017-2019?), then it rapidly became a term of mockery, and retreated from serious use (2019-2020). I don't think I've seen the term used seriously by its proponents since 2021.
The main ambiguity I see is that centrist/non-woke left people/media use the term differently from right-wing people/media. Centrists see it as a specific brand of identity-obsessed, virtue-signalling, race/gender-conscious and censorious politics. Right wing media sometimes call any left-leaning causes, from climate-change to abortion rights to trade unions "woke".
>"Is never" doesn't equal "has never been".
"I never beat my wife."
"Here is a video of you beating your wife last year."
"'is never' doesn't equal 'has never been'. I have beaten my wife but no longer do."
I feel fairly confident that almost everyone would interpret the statement "no socially progressive person ever describes themselves as 'woke'" to mean "no socially progressive person has *ever* described themselves as 'woke'" and not "no socially progressive person *currently* describes themselves as 'woke', but many of them used to".
I acknowledge some ambiguity, but according to my understanding of how people use the term, "I never" in the present simple is primarily negating a habit. e.g. "I never drink" is by default, understood as “I don’t drink as a rule”, allowing for past exceptions.
So I think the wife beater in your example might be justified in saying that, if he indeed only beat his wife once, a year ago. It would also be incorrect for him to say the present simple "I beat my wife", as it was a one-off.
Even admitting this, my read of Olivier Faure's comment was that woke people do never and *have* never described themselves as such. Perhaps he might clarify which meaning he intended.
I thought Get Out was darkly funny and it often poked fun at how empty some of the virtue signaling of liberal whites was. There’s a whole lot of people in coastal blue bubble areas with “in this house we believe” signs who say the right things in public but actually vote against things that would increase stuff like multi-family housing in their neighborhoods. I’m sure they were made quite uncomfortable by the movie if it didn’t go over their heads.
Well done. Through no effort of my own - I was a hapless teen at the time - I became a member of an integrated step-family in the 70s. We lived a few blocks from ‘East Compton’ and the high school down the block I attended was uniquely integrated while the community went through a demographic makeover. Years down the road I managed to parlay a higher-than-average aptitude for comfort in mixed-race settings into a couple long stints of inner-city LA high school teaching. I needed a job and didn’t approach it with white savior intentions. Meanwhile race relations and discourse shifted. Am still processing the disconnect, but don’t need Hollywood’s help. Your analysis and commentary are a nice addition to the ongoing effort. FWIW here’s a couple pieces I wrote last fall about the fast times at Lynwood High: https://open.substack.com/pub/jsartchr/p/place-notes-schooled-at-the-wood?r=7as1j&utm_medium=ios
Also this: https://open.substack.com/pub/jsartchr/p/place-notes-my-all-american-city?r=7as1j&utm_medium=ios