Woke.
Here is how Merriam
Webster's Dictionary describes it.
Aware of and actively attentive
to important societal facts,
especially issues of racial
and social justice.
Now, it's a word that we all hear
a lot of these days.
And Wolk was coined by black activists
to bring attention to racial injustice.
But these days, conservatives
are working overtime to redefine it,
to suit their political ends,
so much
so that it may very well
have lost all of its meaning.
Take, for example,
this noted conservative
who this week
struggled to come up
with her own definition
Would you mind defining?
Well, because it's come up
a couple of times.
I just want to make sure
we're on the same page.
So, I mean, Woke is
sort of the idea that
I
this is going to be one of those moments
that goes viral.
I mean, Wolk
is something that's very hard to define.
And we've spent an entire chapter
defining it.
It is sort of the understanding
that we need to retool,
totally reimagine and
redo society
in order to create
hierarchies of oppression.
So I it's hard to explain
in a 15 second soundbite.
And she was absolutely right.
It did go viral.
But beyond that viral moment,
the issue
actually is what she said at the end,
which is
how complicated is it to define Wolk?
Here's
her follow up tweet
explaining her actual definition.
She says,
It's a radical belief system
suggesting that our institutions
are built around discrimination
and claiming
that all disparity
is a result of that discrimination.
It seeks
a radical redefinition of society
in which equality of group result is
the endpoint enforced by an angry mob.
Now, to me,
one of the issues here isn't so much
that she couldn't do it in that moment.
It's really
that the definition
that she's putting forward
is one
that has
been created by conservatives
in the last couple of
I mean, let's
call it 18 to 20 months
since the summer of 20, 20
And it's been created
in order
to sort of attack
the idea of social injustice
as a concept, it seems
I always understood.
Well initially when this term came about,
I understood to be understanding
our nation's history
to inform us about societal barriers.
Currently
it seems,
however, that sort of become a catchall
to form certain politicians to appeal
to the grievances
and anger of certain voters.
In times that are convenient to those
certain politicians.
I've heard it in debates ranging
from why
certain topics
shouldn't be taught in classrooms
to why certain banks have failed
in the past couple of weeks.
Which to me says that you are kind
of picking and choosing this word
for when it's convenient to you.
I want to bring Ramesh in on this
because I,
I understand
that you are probably more sympathetic
to Bethany's definition
then than some other people might be.
But I think the question is
if it's so hard to define.
Does it just kind of come to mean
whatever anybody wants it to mean?
Well,
that's the nature
of a lot of political terms, right?
I mean, conservatism and liberalism
or ultra maga
Republicanism, as President Biden
likes to say,
all of these things are sort of fuzzy
concepts
and different
people are going to give you different
definitions of it.
I do think that we should try
to be as precise as possible
when we're arguing about a specific thing
to talk about that specific thing
and not to go straight
to this abstract term.
I think, though, that
that the the general phenomenon here
that people who are complaining
about wokeness
or talking about is an actual turn
that has happened
on the left side of our politics
towards a heightened sensitivity
of course.
There's such a thing as oversensitivity,
and that's what the criticism
generally amounts to.
And to your point about
kind of the specificity or lack thereof,
I just want to play for a little bit
what we're talking about when this
we talk about a buzzword.
I mean, this has become
the ultimate buzzword
on the 20, 24 campaign trail
We will end work.
I think it goes back to this Woke
Mind virus
that's infected the left
and all these other institutions.
This work
self loathing has swept our country.
It's in the classroom,
the boardroom, in the back
rooms of government.
He's the first man
to surrender his presidency to a woke mob
that can't even tell you what a woman is.
So putting aside the definition
for a second.
That to me says
as we're moving forward toward 2024.
This is going to be a central component
of that race.
Oh, absolutely. And it already is. Right.
As you were saying,
it has become very much
this catchall pejorative term
that conservatives
in particular like to use.
And particularly
when there's even
just like a whiff of an issue
having to do
with race or gender
or sexual orientation,
inclusivity, diversity issues.
Republicans in particular
have been using the term to go
after liberals and Democrats
whenever they feel like
there is a situation
where they're sort of trying to meddle
in your personal life. Right.
So, you know,
they're trying to teach our children
this or make our children
eat this in at schools.
So, yeah,
it is definitely going to be
a hugely defining
sort of tool
that Republicans use heading into 20, 20,
so that my curiosity will be
as we go toward 20, 24.
Once this gets
beyond the Republican primary,
what do real people
who are living their lives
think about this?
Are they waking up in the morning
and thinking, wow,
my kid's school is too woke?
I think that that's
just an open question.
I don't have an answer to it,
but we'll see how that turns out.