steeler wrote:

this is a quick version of the intellectual groundwork for wokeness
the good thing about this video is that you can find the sources yourself
hope this helps

 steeler wrote:
Woke isn't an insult, it's an aspiration. 

Hey all!! Just found out I’m woke… all this time
I just thought I was good at history.

— Jon Stewart (@jonstewart) March 31, 2022

The problem, as I see it and as I alluded to in an earlier post, is the inaccurate use of woke as an umbrella term for what, for the most part, are disparate advocacy movements. Almost always, the use of the word is as a pejorative, which speaks for itself. It is not a monolith. There is no all-encompassing “woke agenda.”

 kcar wrote: 
It's there. And still there. I was planning on responding to that question myself but things happened like some overblown responses to questions not asked.  The only thing missing was Ronald.  Kinda said to myself why bother, too much chaff flying around.

kcar wrote:
I tried to take your points quite seriously


 mnordman wrote:

Your reply and your summation of my previous post as "walls of condescending BS" are puzzling. Would you think I was taking you seriously if I agreed with everything you stated? Was it condescending or insulting for me to closely question your assertions and ask you for clarification? I was and am being quite honest when I wondered whether you were a ChatGPT exercise: you fail repeatedly to engage in serious discussion or develop your ideas such as "The denominator we should be looking at is "per crime-committing capita" or "per capita-interacting-with-police". ". At times your posts lose logical direction and you seem stuck on relying on 1-2 examples to draw sweeping conclusions. 

Was I sarcastic? Yes. Condescending? No, I really don't think so. If condescension bothers you so much, try not to dish it out with comments like:

"Difficult for me in an obnoxious rainbow communal fart sniffing echo chamber, i just want to, but i don't want to, punch back. I can try to ignore the asshatery."


I agree with Steely_D. I'm not interested in turning this discussion into a "You're a so-and-so" back and forth. I'd like to stick to discussing wokeism and responses to it You, mnordman, recalled that Steely_D "...had asked 'does that help create society, or fragment it into us/them?' " 

(I looked but couldn't find where Steely_D asked this question, but let's move on...)

The very act of pointing out unfair inequalities and injustices is disruptive and divisive IF you have a group of people who believe the status quo is fair, just or filled with opportunities to fix unfair inequalities. Civil Rights activists in the '60s were regarded as malcontents, malingerers, Communist sympathizers and troublemakers merely for marching and protesting. The FBI actively surveilled Martin Luther King, Jr. and others as a result. However, groups within a very diverse movement found common ground with LBJ and members of Congress to pass landmark legislation to redress or strike down laws that allowed for explicit segregation, political disenfranchisement, etc. I think most of us would agree that laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1965 were good things for the country in the long term, but that discrimination still exists today. Remember, however, that groups like the Black Panthers rose at the same time and were less interested in peaceful integration than they were in organized confrontation. 

Don't expect social protest movements to speak with one, coherent voice and promote one constructive, wholly beneficial program. Similarly, the groups opposed to those social protest movements aren't likely to be always reasonable, fair and constructive in their opposition. 

At one extreme on the left, you have lunacy like Stanford University's Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.  From The Independent: 

The harmful language list went viral in late December when major media outlets reported about the website, ridiculing some of the words as campus wokeness ran amok. While some observers praised the thoughtfulness behind the language initiative, others expressed concern that the website represented a banned words list, and that it could pose an affront to free speech.


At one extreme on the right, you have Governor De Santis's initiatives in Florida. Note that for all the concern that people will be punished for using politically incorrect  or socially insensitive speech, right-wing legislation efforts to combat language and behavior associated with social justice movements have actual fines, vocational discipline and prison times attached to them. 

https://www.nbcnews.com/politi...

https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...


Personally, I agree with retired Democratic political strategist James Carville: 


“It used to be that were kind of free traders and anti-Russia and pro-military and for entitlement reform,” Carville said. “Well, that’s all out the window. The only thing they have that unifies them is cultural resentment — ‘Let’s all attack the trans kid’ or ‘We shouldn’t tell seventh graders there are gay people because then they’ll never know.’”


The only way for modern-day social justice movements to succeed, I think, is to increase their political organization and ally themselves with left- and moderate-wing politicians. Street protests are not going to do much in the long run. Cancelling and/or boycotting people or companies for unjust behavior only goes so far. Demanding that people speak only in politically correct ways or avoid speech that might trigger or be hurtful to others is a sure way to provoke resentment, backlash and weariness. 



@Mnordman: 



You and kurtster (AFAICT) think wokeism is "very obviously divisive and doesn't help" (your words). You don't think that wokeism could be "a continuation of the liberal civil rights movement of the sixties" and state that "the illiberal woke took a shot at repealing CA Proposition 209, that's the anti-discrimination constitutional amendment, the sort of thing the civil rights movement fought hard for." 

AFAICT you mischaracterize Proposition 209. When passed, it prohibited affirmative action programs in CA. From Ballotpedia: 

What was Proposition 16?

See also: Changes to the California Constitution

Proposition 16 was a constitutional amendment that would have repealed Proposition 209, passed in 1996, from the California Constitution. Proposition 209 stated that discrimination and preferential treatment were prohibited in public employment, public education, and public contracting on account of a person's or group's race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. Therefore, Proposition 209 banned the use of affirmative action involving race-based or sex-based preferences in California.^<6>

Wikipedia notesthat 


The initiative (The California Civil Rights Initiative or Proposition 209) was opposed by affirmative action advocates and traditional civil rights and feminist organizations on the left side of the political spectrum.



Politico sheds more light on the matter: 

Background: Public entities have been barred from taking race, gender or other personal identifications into consideration during admissions, hiring and awarding of contracts since 1996. That year, voters passed Proposition 209, a measure supported by Republican Gov. Pete Wilson and former University of California Regent Ward Connerly.

The law is a holdover of conservative policy in a state that has since elected a Democratic supermajority, and it has been blamed for racial enrollment disparities at the UC and California State University systems and a decline in public contracts awarded to businesses owned by women and people of color.

State lawmakers placed Prop. 16 on the ballot, believing they had a unique window of opportunity to repeal Prop. 209. A strong majority of California residents said they backed the Black Lives Matter movement after a summer of racial justice activism in response to the police killing of Floyd in Minneapolis.

Despite facing little opposition and polling that showed a significant majority of Californians believed racial and gender equality were among the most pressing issues this election, the Yes on 16 campaign failed to make significant inroads with voters. The campaign lost despite having support from the Democratic establishment and raising $31 million from liberal donors and foundations, compared to $1.6 million against.

 mnordman wrote:

Politics follow trends and fashions as much as the apparel industry.
The trend was woke, and even had some top democrats falling the mold of what meant...but I think/hope we are seeing a pull back from those extremes.
Yet, and again, that doesnt mean we stop addressing the problems that the "woke" group attempted to address.
We have made great strides, but we are not done with racism, bigotry...etc. (probably never will be).
How do we deal with the underlying causes for black communities being over-policed?
Homelessness, drugs, crime, mental illness...
How do schools deal with an 8 year old who wants to come to school wearing a dress?

The answer is most likely not legislation, or defunding, but improving and re-educating. 

 Steely_D wrote:

Difficult for me in an obnoxious rainbow communal fart sniffing echo chamber, i just want to, but i don't want to, punch back. I can try to ignore the asshatery.

You had asked "does that help create society, or fragment it into us/them?" To me, it's very obviously divisive and does not help. And its bizarre how "as a black person" you must have a particular point of view otherwise "you ain't black" in the words of Joe Biden. Incredibly divisive. The LA Times calling Larry Elder the "black face of white supremacy".  Elected members of government calling Clarence Thomas an "uncle tom". Black people that go counter narrative are consistently disrespected, calling Roland Fryer a "dismal scientist". How on earth is this woke crap not divisive?

Lots of supporters of the woke think it's a continuation of the liberal civil rights movement of the sixties. I don't know how to square that thought with the fact that the illiberal woke took a shot at repealing CA Proposition 209, that's the anti-discrimination constitutional amendment, the sort of thing the civil rights movement fought hard for. Good luck to anyone that tries to point this out to a snobbish prickly wokester.

sorry, I guess i was feeling a little punchy

 mnordman wrote:

I don't know this guy, or the data he looked at...but I don't doubt that crime/homicides end result is true. ..an unintended consequence as cops react to heightened scrutiny.
And then there is the antipolice movement that got into the democratic party during the BLM /defund protests...
crime and homicides in most cities have increased. Some of this is due to the pandemic, fentanyl, opioid, meth addictions..but also an unintended consequence of putting police under more scrutiny. 

ps, the answer isnt to not investigate bad cop behaviour...but to do it more surgically, and not through mob mentality. 

 mnordman wrote:
Of course on a Dilbertarian channel too. Woke goes against muh liberty!

I was enjoying this discussion, but it's veering towards personal stuff and meta-analysis, which is less interesting. Is there a way to take this back to the topic of wokeness?

 rgio wrote:
"Yes, it's all my fault. You have all the answers and I'm entirely wrong. Woke is going to destroy America. Thanks so much for warning us. Should we start building concentration camps to round up those woke undesirables?"

You mean this question?

here's the "dismal scientist"

 mnordman wrote:

Easier than answering the question I guess.

 kcar wrote:

Not really. The ratio of seriousness to personal insult was near zero.

 mnordman wrote:

Wow. I expected more engagement from you. I tried to take your points quite seriously but look where that got me. 

Here, I'll post this again in the hopes that it will sink into your mind and push you to think a bit harder on this subject: 

For Mr. Fryer, who has spent much of his career studying ways society can close the racial achievement gap, the failure to punish excessive everyday force is an important contributor to young black disillusionment.

“Who the hell wants to have a police officer put their hand on them or yell and scream at them? It’s an awful experience,” he said. “Every black man I know has had this experience. Every one of them. It is hard to believe that the world is your oyster if the police can rough you up without punishment. And when I talked to minority youth, almost every single one of them mentions lower-level uses of force as the reason why they believe the world is corrupt.”

 kcar wrote:
good bye

Final thought of the evening, mnordman. An excerpt from the NYT piece. Emphases are mine:

Mr. Fryer wonders if the divide between lethal force — where he did not find racial disparities — and nonlethal force — where he did — might be related to costs. Officers face costs, legal and psychological, when they unnecessarily fire their guns. But excessive use of lesser force is rarely tracked or punished. “No officer has ever told me that putting their hands on inner-city youth is a life-changing event,” he said.

For Mr. Fryer, who has spent much of his career studying ways society can close the racial achievement gap, the failure to punish excessive everyday force is an important contributor to young black disillusionment.

“Who the hell wants to have a police officer put their hand on them or yell and scream at them? It’s an awful experience,” he said. “Every black man I know has had this experience. Every one of them. It is hard to believe that the world is your oyster if the police can rough you up without punishment. And when I talked to minority youth, almost every single one of them mentions lower-level uses of force as the reason why they believe the world is corrupt.”

Why did BLM and wokeism occur?      "And when I talked to minority youth, almost every single one of them mentions lower-level uses of force as the reason why they believe the world is corrupt.” "

 mnordman wrote:

If you cherry pick to focus only on the issue of comparing Black deaths at the hands of cops with White deaths at the hands of cops, then Roland Fryer's study might support your conclusion. But as R_P posted, a USA Today article (yes, he provided a link! You should try it!) notes that there were considerable objections to Fryer's study. From the piece: 

Phillip Atiba Goff, a professor of policing equity at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and cofounder and president of the Center for Policing Equity (CPE), said the paper was conducted "casually" and draws conclusions that go beyond what the data supports.

“If you haven’t read all of the literature and don’t understand what you’re looking at, you end up in a position that doesn’t look good,” Goff said.

...

Goff is one of the authors of “The Science of Justice: Race, Arrests, and Police Use of Force,” a report also released in July. The CPE report analyzes 12 law enforcement departments within the National Justice Database that are geographically and demographically diverse. The data revealed that racial disparities in use of force persisted.

While Fryer focused on the data available for police shootings and claimed no racial bias exists in those cases, the CPE did not reach that conclusion.

...

The CPE report acknowledges three problems with measuring police force: measuring "excessive" force against all force, measuring differences in police use of force, and measuring force incidents as unchanging rather than constantly changing. Goff said Fryer neither acknowledges these concepts nor deals with them as problems.

Fryer’s paper has also received criticism for his focus on the Houston Police Department, which Goff said is unfair. He explained that the issue isn’t the data, it’s how broadly the data is generalized in its interpretation.

From a NYT article on Fryer's work. Did you deliberately cherry pick the issue to focus only deaths at the hands of police?

Such results may not be true in every city. The cities Mr. Fryer used to examine officer-involved shootings make up only about 4 percent of the nation’s population, and serve more black citizens than average.

Moreover, the results do not mean that the general public’s perception of racism in policing is misguided. Lethal uses of force are exceedingly rare. There were 1.6 million arrests in Houston in the years Mr. Fryer studied. Officers fired their weapons 507 times. What is far more common are nonlethal uses of force.

And in these uses of force, Mr. Fryer found racial differences, which is in accord with public perception and other studies.

Mr. Fryer also explored racial differences in force from the viewpoint of civilians, using data from a nationally representative survey conducted by the federal government. Here, he found racial gaps in force that were larger than those he found in the data reported from the officers’ perspective. But these gaps were also consistent across many different types of force.

You wrote: 

"The denominator we should be looking at is "per crime-committing capita" or "per capita-interacting-with-police". "

It's a bit late and I'm getting punchy, but it strikes me that your two proposed metrics irretrievably skew the analysis. Blacks IIRC are far more likely than whites to be convicted of crimes than Whites, and have a far greater rate of interaction with police. Forgive me if I don't provide evidence for those assertions but your bad habits are rubbing off on me. 

@mnordman: Actually, I still think that you ARE "doing the same sort of broad-brush sweeping condemnation of people pushing against different forms of discrimination in this country", as I stated in a previous post. 

You have repeatedly offered up one example (mostly without sufficient explanation or even links/documentation) and used that to make sweeping conclusions. 

1. You posted a day ago: 

"Wokeness takes us farther away from that world where there is no discrimination on the basis of race/gender."

I ask: Really? Do you have evidence for this? Just because people are pointing out injustices and inequalities based on race and/or gender, it doesn't mean that they're trying to permanently split the population into distinct groups, either by geography or jobs or positions of power. For the most part AFAICT those protesters are trying to get rid of those injustices and inequalities so that there is less or no discrimination based on race/gender. 

The Civil Rights movement of the 60s and the Women's Lib movement of the 70s didn't create a happily-ever-after Land of Fairness of Equality. BLM, #MeToo and Transgender movements are not looking to subjugate and segregate, say, straight White men. They're trying to achieve less discrimination and intolerance for minority groups. 


2. You posted a day ago:  

"They (Occupy Wall Street) were segregating groups by race (yes really) and did this creepy thing where a speaker would speak a sentence, then the assembled audience would repeat it back. Bizarre, cultish. This was my first early glimpse of "wokeness". "


Again, you take one example and make sweeping, unsupported conclusions. 

Do you have evidence/links that OWS segregated groups by race? If so, what was the context? As for the call-and-response behavior you  describe, that's been part of protest movements and even church sessions for decades. Was Barack Obama's repeated phrase of "Yes we can!" scary wokeness to you? Because his audiences would repeat it back all the time. Scary! Marxist! </sarcasm>.


3. You posted a day ago:

"There is no wage gap, that's been debunked. See Christina Hoff Sommers for an explanation."

No, champ. You summarize her for the rest of us. Or provide links. If you want to be taken seriously here, you have to back up your assertions with evidence. 

And Again: one instance and you're ready to draw a sweeping conclusion about the entire complex matter. Do you seriously think that the thoughts of Christina Hoff Sommers are the last, best and only words on the subject? 


4. You posted a day ago: 

"See Wildred Reilly's TABOO - 10 FACTS for an explanation."

Are you just lazy? Or are you latching on to whatever article/study/book seems to confirm your bias and concluding that the matter's closed? 

I'm beginning to wonder whether you're just a ChatGPT exercise. 


5. You posted a day ago: 

"Have you examined what the woke academics actually say? It's not good. From a paper entitled "Does Critical Pedagogy Work with Privileged Students'':


One paper, and the whole damned woke movement is the Devil's Work. And Maoist to boot! Did not know that.  


6. You  posted a day ago:

"Have you examined any thoughtful critiques of the critical social justice ideologies? Something that helped me to understand what's going on was a paper by a pair of sociologists in 2014."

I suppose it's easy to let one paper make up your mind for you if you don't want to think too hard...


7. You posted a day ago: 

"At the end of the day, I can't help but notice that something is seriously off with it all and I think you have a sugar coated understanding."

Yes, it's all my fault. You have all the answers and I'm entirely wrong. Woke is going to destroy America. Thanks so much for warning us. Should we start building concentration camps to round up those woke undesirables? 

kcar wrote:

       @kurtster and mnordman:  Where are you getting this notion that wokeism is going to lead to segregation?



kurtster replied:

It is already happening based upon my observations. And before continuing any discussion with you on this, what if it just might be real ?
If this was really happening would it bother you ? Answer that and I'll know if it is even worth me bothering to continue.


 kurtster wrote:

Quickly, because 

1. I don't see wokeism leading to segregation, now or in the future. 

2. It's hard for me to get bothered about a hypothethical that strikes me as unrealistic and unlikely. 

By segregation, I gather you mean a separation of one group or groups from another, imposed by the government and backed by the rule of law. I have no interest in discussing self-segregation wherein a group or groups voluntarily segregates itself from other groups. By this definition, Amish self-segregate. Ethnic and racial groups do self-segregate in America to some extent. 

AFAICT what you're worried about is that wokeism will permeate our laws to the point that people will be forced to live only amongst people with whom they most closely identify in terms of race or gender identity. I don't see that happening because we have legal and constitutional safeguards against such an event, although admittedly de facto segregation does still apparently happen in the US against the will of the minority group involved. 

Also, segregation in the US has in the past occurred when majority groups impose segregation on minority groups. I don't see wokeism being used to segregate minority groups against their will—wokeism is trying to work towards ending that behavior. I also don't foresee the day when minority groups supporting wokeism achieve ruling power and impose segregation on majority groups. Maybe that occurs in the fever dreams of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity but who knows with such blatant LIARS and fear-mongerers. 


"Answer that and I'll know if it is even worth me bothering to continue."

So I think/hope I've answered your questions. Thus I don't think it's worth the trouble for you to continue.