Go Woke? What's "Woke"?
In the Social Justice War of the last decade, the definition of 'woke' has, as have many terms, been redefined to mean whatever the whims of the speaker need it to mean. Part One of a series.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade (or are a Boomer who uses neither cable or streaming and only uses the Internet for work if at all), you’ve probably heard the phrase, “go woke, go broke.” This four-word petulant tirade was invented by dishonest imbeciles who don’t like the cynical tokenism many corporations have been indulging in over the last ten or so years, and which has been amplified in the wake of the disastrously failed 2016 marketing campaign intended to put right-wing extremist, war criminal, and career corporatist Hillary Clinton in the White House. Being imbeciles, however, they don’t actually understand that it’s tokenism, so they’ve invented the lie—helped along by Wall Street marketing campaigns that are surprisingly effective—that Hollywood, that cesspool of “communist degeneracy” is actually pushing some kind of liberal-leftist political agenda.
According to these brain-dead dunces, the purveyors of “woke” filth are infecting our minds with a mental virus designed in a Chinese laboratory and released into multimedia to instill guilt in the white population over crimes supposedly (read: actually) committed by our white ancestors, emasculate men, turn women into tattooed rainbow-hair-dyed whores, and transform children into pedophile eunuchs through a thing anti-woke-ists call “(trans)gender ideology.” Using this diabolical scheme to turn our nation into a land of weak, effeminate castrati, the imbeciles argue, the “Global Elites” (read: International Jewry—sound at all familiar?) hope to control us all by forcing us to recognize and respect the existence and rights of others who aren’t like us “normal” folk, at the expense of said “normal” folk. Egads! Is there no limit to their evil!?
And it all starts with going what the morons have come to call “woke”.
What is this “woke” about which these idiots endlessly rant and rave? I don’t know. It sounds pretty awful. Fortunately, I have this thing called a dictionary, which contains these things we call words, and in this dictionary that contains words, there are more words that are used to define what the other words are commonly understood to mean. Few people read dictionaries anymore. They should, because accurately defining words and understanding what those definitions are helps us to understand how and why those definitions should be applied. Understanding how and why definitions should be applied helps us recognize when, where, how, and most importantly, why definitions are not applicable to a given word. Properly understanding whether a definition accurately describes the word to which it is attached helps us to understand when we are being lied to. As a result, we are able to understand that we are being lied to, and why.
So I looked up the word ‘woke’ in my dictionary, and this is how it is defined:
chiefly US slang
1a: aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)1
Huh. That doesn’t match at all what I’ve been told “woke” really is. I don’t see anything pertaining to white guilt, weakening men, making women into hair-dyed tattooed whores, castration, or to turning anyone into pedophiles. It’s like right-wingers have been lying to us about what “woke” means—quite likely because that’s exactly what they’ve been doing: lying to us.
This is not at all surprising to anyone who is actually woke. All right-wingers lie. There is not so much as a single right-winger who ever intentionally tells the truth. These subhuman savages are paid to deceive the public. It’s their entire career. It’s literally their job to lie to us. That’s why definitions are so important, and why accurately comprehending and applying those definitions is so crucial to understanding what lies are being told to us and, importantly, why they’re being told.
Unfortunately, as I’ve stated, few people bother anymore with reading dictionaries. Definitions and accurately applying them are outdated, or so I’m supposed to believe. Words mean now whatever one, at any given moment, needs them to mean. Words are now defined—and redefined—to suit one’s personal whims and agenda.
Take, for example, the word ‘terrorism’.
noun : the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion2
That’s the correct and original definition. In the wake of the neocon-driven “war on terror” following the destruction of the World Trade Center in 2001, however, ‘terrorism’ has come to be redefined as anything opposing U.S. imperial hegemony. Mere resistance to acts of genuine terror is now called terrorism, while actual terrorism is now called merely politics. For instance:
Democrats and Republicans alike are guilty of exploiting fear of nuclear annihilation, among other alleged threats both real and imagined. Lyndon B. Johnson did it in 1964, and George W. Bush did it in 2004.
Keith Olbermann, back in the 2000s before Trump Derangement Syndrome rotted his brain, rightly expressed outrage at how the words ‘terrorist’ and ‘terrorism’ had been redefined to suit the depraved authoritarian agenda of the Bush-Cheney regime. The ad was political cynicism at its lowest, just as it had been when the Johnson campaign ran the Daisy Peace Girl ad four decades prior, and hardly limited to one political party. But the misappropriation of the term had, and still has, lasting detrimental impact on communication.
Words are supposed to have meaning. Take away those meanings, or change them to suit whatever whim you might have at any given moment, and communication becomes impossible. How are we to understand what ideas someone is trying to convey to us when the words meant to convey those ideas aren’t understood by either the listener or the speaker to mean what they’re supposed to?
When you’re unable or unwilling to correctly apply definitions to words, you may count on right-wingers to step in immediately to apply definitions of their own, and those definitions aren’t what is commonly found in those archaic dictionaries you don’t like to read. Right-wingers have been shaping the national discourse for decades, riding their agenda on the backs of generations who long ago ditched their dictionaries and decided that words no longer have to mean what they were once commonly understood to mean.
Now, “woke” is used by the extreme right to mean anything in multimedia that contains a character, actor or actress, or story in which white heterosexual cis men are relegated to comic relief or punching bag status, which is then marketed to the public as “representation” for minority groups previously, supposedly excluded from traditional hero-protagonist roles.
The actual definition of ‘representation’ is this.
1 : one that represents: such as
a: an artistic likeness or image
b(1) : a statement or account made to influence opinion or action
(2) : an incidental or collateral statement of fact on the faith of which a contract is entered into
c : a dramatic production or performance
d(1) : a usually formal statement made against something or to effect a change
(2) : a usually formal protest
2 : the act or action of representing : the state of being represented: such as
a : representationalism sense 2
b(1) : the action or fact of one person standing for another so as to have the rights and obligations of the person represented
(2) : the substitution of an individual or class in place of a person (such as a child for a deceased parent)
c : the action of representing or the fact of being represented especially in a legislative body
3 : the body of persons representing a constituency3
Which, again, isn’t what right-wingers—or, for that matter, the target demographics for cynical corporate marketing campaigns—claim it means.
‘Representation’ in the multimedia sense of the word doesn’t mean the mere presence of non-white, non-gender-conforming, non-heterosexual, non-male characters or performers. Were that the case, cinema would be loaded with examples of “representation” no sane person would find remotely positive. For example, see 1933’s King Kong. You can hardly call the depiction of Black-skinned island natives as ignorant superstitious savages worshiping a giant gorilla and sacrificing girls to it on a regular basis ‘representation’—especially when most (if not all) of the actors playing those parts were white guys painted and dressed up to appear to white audiences like what they were told Africans of the modern era still are.
That’s not what ‘representation’ in multimedia means, and it’s not what ‘woke’ means. If you can’t or won’t correctly apply the proper definitions to these words, I am sorry to say that the far right most certainly won’t, and it doesn’t, because it wants you ignorant and unable to know when it is lying to you, and therefore unable to demand any alternatives to the existing status quo.
The reality is that the extreme right needs us all to have a warped understanding of the word ‘woke’ so that it can maintain the existing status quo. As long as it is maintained, those who presently wield power are able to hold on to it a little longer. In order to maintain that hold on power, the masses must be kept ignorant and stupid, unable to recognize the con for what it is. The far right knows that when the con is fully exposed, it has no other illusions with which to keep us asleep, at which point the party for right-wingers is well and truly over.
In my next entry on this topic, I’ll explain the difference between what is really woke and what the extreme right falsely calls “woke”, and why the distinction is important. Stay tuned.