A Response to the Woke Ideology

This post was inspired by a comment on my Wikipedia user talk page found here. The conversation was getting to be too tangential to our "work" of building an encyclopedia, but I felt the need to publish my reply nevertheless, so I took Wikipedia's advice and wrote it down in a blog.

I agree that WP:RS mostly disagree with my viewpoint.  Trying to find any WP:RS secondary sources that discuss the woke mind virus and coming up pretty short, even though the internet is chock full of primary sources that use it, to me shows that there are some gaps in the secondary sources.  Maybe I just have to wait a few months for the sources to catch up.  My ideology isn't something I would want to willingly re-arrange just to conform with what a consensus of Wikipedia editors defines as WP:RS.  That doesn't mean I'm here to push my point of view--I do enjoy just editing for the sake of editing.  But it also means that I'm going to have a set of eyes that's going to see things differently than you in certain cases--which is a good thing.  I used to be much more in alignment with what I'd read in the New York Times, but the world seemed a lot more mysterious then, like the pieces didn't fit together in my head, and I couldn't quite achieve an internal consistency.  For example, I would be at a protest rally shouting in a cop's face and then go home safe and sound thanks to the front line servicemembers who are instrumental in making the US a decent place to live.

My interlocutor wrote that being woke is about being kind, decent, tolerant, and helpful, and (I'm assuming) opposing Donald Trump, since he is a member of the set of pathological liars, traitors, racists, misogynists, criminals, and rapists.  I'm going to give several examples here that show that this is actually false--that the woke ideology has gone astray from these important values[1] and that opposing woke is actually the decent and kind option.

Nowadays, I read ''woke'' more as a cynical way to leverage skin complexion and sexual preferences to make other people feel bad so you can consolidate power in a world where there's already enough cynicism.  The fact that woke people have a problem with Martin Luther King, Jr., is instructive.  It's like they gave up on brotherhood and equality and now they just want to take whatever they can get.  I'm in the "I Have a Dream" camp--that we can coexist and cooperate without giving a damn about complexion. Not that you can't dress and talk and wear your hair the way you want to, but that your personal identity isn't something we're going to use to get ahead or to put other people down.

Meritocracy is the idea that anyone who works hard can succeed.  It's meant to be a source of hope and inspiration to people who don't have a pot to piss in but maybe they have a library card (or a computer) and have all this knowledge at their fingertips, and that educating oneself is the way to get ahead.  There are nearly the same proportion of black people in the middle class (46% of blacks) as there are white people (52% of whites).[2]  Some of the black nationalities that come to the US actually out-earn US whites once they get here.[3]  Apparently a lot of black people agree with me about the benefits of education, hard work, and family values.  So much for the idea that it's skin complexion holding people back.  I think it's actually pretty kind to promote an awareness that self-improvement is how you get out of poverty.

Sex is the biological trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing organism produces male or female gametes, and the hard-won federal protection for women's sports means that females have the right to their own separate competitions.  The right to free speech is in the US Constitution, but the law doesn't require anybody to listen to speech that they disagree with if they don't want to (or don't care), and it's actually much more mean and nasty to try to force another person to use language that doesn't align with their own ideas and perceptions than it is to use one's own mouth to say words that might offend other people.  That being said, I personally choose to call people by whatever name they want to be called, and pronouns are names.  And I do not think that a woman should be legally required to carry a child in her body that she does not want to carry, any more than a random bystander should be legally required to rescue another person whose life depends on their willingness to help.

Progressives fought ardently for decades to enshrine universal free childhood education in the US, but nowadays we are supposed to easily disregard the significant learning loss that children suffered due to school closures during the pandemic while progressive adults were out doing mass demonstrations in response to the death of a man whose heart disease and fentanyl use must have contributed at somewhat to his death while in the custody of people who were human and imperfect but mostly just trying to do their jobs and get home for dinner like all the rest of us.  

And the casual disregard for democracy in sidelining a president who was re-nominated a few months prior by millions of people, and then demonizing a man who was duly elected by a popular majority of our fellow citizens including taking all the swing states and still not being able to understand (or care?) as to why people would vote against the candidate who puts them in a "basket of deplorables".  I didn't vote for Trump, and the big tech companies have the right to ban whatever users they want to, but I don't think the government should be trying to influence what information people are allowed to share with their followers.