Right-wingers are fixated on their racist and misogynist culture wars, and they needed a shorthand catch-all to identify their "enemies" in their bogus "war". Over the past two years, they've taken the term "woke" and twisted it back on progressives. "Woke" was coined by African-Americans to express their growing awareness of disturbing events in America: the Malignant Loser's authoritarianism, rolling back voting and civil rights, economic inequality, and violence against African-Americans, among other things. In the mind of the right-winger, that awareness is a bad thing. But get a winger to define "woke," and they have no clue how to respond coherently (even though they know what it really means). From Crooks and Liars' Susie Madrak:
"Columnist Bethany Mandel was on Briahna Joy Gray's show Rising to plug her new book, "Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation," which she co-wrote with Karol Markowicz.
'Would you mind defining woke? It's come up a couple of times and I just want to make sure we're on the same page,' Gray said.
'So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um ....This is gonna be one of those moments that goes viral," she said. [snip]
'Woke is something that's very hard to define and we've spent a whole chapter defining it. It's sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression. It's hard to explain in a 15-second soundbite.'
Wait, you mean identifying injustices and wanting to fix them? The horror!
Maybe Bethany should not throw around banana Republican talking points without actually thinking about them." (our emphasis)
Briahna Joy Gray has exactly the right approach: before they're allowed to rant about "wokeism," make the right-wingers define it first, and correct them when they do. Fortunately, so far the American people think "woke" is a positive term. Progressive media, politicians and influencers need to aggressively reinforce it in the minds of Americans, so that more will question why right-wingers are so opposed to social and economic justice and fairness.
BONUS: What he says --
Woke was a positive term used by folks (mostly black) who wanted to be aware of things larger and more important than themselves and their own experiences but is clearly just a slur when used by Bethany Mandel and others. There's no reason to pretend otherwise. https://t.co/gibvcn64Mo
— @ijbailey (@ijbailey) March 15, 2023
She can define "woke" just fine. But she doesn't want to expose herself. Woke, to her, is a code word that people like her can use to tap into certain listeners' bigotries while not having to explicitly defend the propriety of those bigotries.
— Brando Simeo Starkey (@BrandoStarkey) March 15, 2023
