Woke Movies
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Yes, guys, it’s true that what we call “wokeness” now has its roots. To Kill A Mockingbird, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, several Star Trek episodes, etc.
However, wokeism is new. I’ve defined it as “a system of thought and behavior characterized by intolerance of free expression, policing the speech of others, enforcing approved beliefs through boycotts and denunciations, and proving one’s own superiority to oneself by denouncing the supposed dogmatic shortcomings of others. There’s a pernicious doggedness to resisting the notion that there exists more than one way of looking at things which hinders the free exchange of ideas and further divides society.”
I think true wokeism started when people started correcting others’ diction (in its sense as word choice, not pronunciation): “Don’t say negro or colored, say black,” “Don’t say retarded, say intellectually challenged (or whatever the right word is nowadays),” and I’m not recommending we go back to using negro, colored, or retarded. That’s not the point. The point is the presumption of a right to police other people’s language on behalf of people not even in the conversation.
In other words, it goes way beyond presenting challenging ideas about race, gender, people with the various challenges, etc., to being preachy and proposing and taking direct action to damage or ruin those seen as outside the dogma.
Invite Camille Paglia to speak, or a representative of the Israeli government, or even a mainstream (not MAGA) conservative, and self-righteous students and even faculty will raise a ruckus until, sometimes, their talks have to be cancelled.
The wokeists operate off a kind of figuative Little Red Book and if someone says something contrary to the dogma in the book, they do so at their own risk.
That is the difference between the roots of wokeism and what we today call “woke” or “wokeism.”
Noel,
It is certainly not wrong to study and to speak against injustice against anyone, including injustice on the grounds of immutable traits.
Where Wokeism goes wrong is assuming that individuals living today in American and Western society either bare victimhood or bear guilt for injustices committed by and against individuals long since dead.
Wokeism also goes wrong in it’s Neo-Marxist Frankfort School notion that everything in society is a power relationship and power struggle between “the privileged” vs. “the oppressed,” that anything bad that happens to “the oppressed” is automatically “disparate impact” created by “the privileged.” In fact, many factors go into both outcomes of success and failure, as Sociologist and Economist Thomas Sowell has written about in many volumes.
For more credible reading about slavery and the slave trade than the 1619 Project, there is Basil Davidson’s The African Slave Trade and Lerone Bennett’s Before the Mayflower. Both show that African chattel slavery went back further than 1619 and wasn’t just practiced by Europeans.
For every African Animist bought by a European Christian, there was usually a Arab Muslim broker who did the selling and an African Animist King who captured the slave in tribal warfare. The indigenous tribes of North America not only enslaved each other as spoils of tribal war, but also bought and held African slaves from Europeans.
There were very few clean hands innocent of slavery in ancient times and in some Third World nations and in Red China, chattel and systemic slavery still exist. We should all be glad that what Frederick Douglass called the “foul, haggard, damning scourge” of chattel slavery is no longer among us here in the U.S.A. Rational minds can keep all this together in the head just fine.
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