"... a jolly piece on Black vernacular expressions in 1962 in this newspaper called 'If You’re Woke, You Dig It.'... It was after 2010 that 'woke' jumped the fence into mainstream parlance. Erykah Badu’s
'Master Teacher' seems to have at least planted a seed, and then those 'stay woke' salutes on Twitter in 2012 were in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing, upon which the expression was truly set in stone.... 'Stay woke' on white people’s T-shirts is a sign of coming together.... But... then why is wokeness now something so many people are more likely to disavow than own? Isn’t that the same old thing, a rejection of Blackness?
A rejection, yes — but of a kind too typical of what happens to words all the time to fit a race-specific narrative. We understand this when we see that the real wind behind its wings in the early 2010s was that 'woke' served as a handy, nonpejorative replacement for 'politically correct.' I remember that term used straight, without dismissal and only a hint of irony, in 1984. A white college friend, very much of the left, used it with a quiet sprinkle of irony, but sincerely. ('Of course, you know this if you’re' — smile and two-millisecond pause, signaling 'you know' — 'politically correct.') He meant that a certain complex of leftist beliefs — i.e., the ones called 'woke' in 2012 — were obviously the proper ones for any reasonable person to have, that they signaled a higher awareness.
In a view like that, there is, inevitably, a certain self-satisfaction. And in some of those holding this kind of view, that self-satisfaction will express itself in dismissal and abuse of those ungifted with the third eye in question. The result will be resistance...."
I think 1984 was the year I first heard the expression "politically correct." It's an easy year for me to remember because it was the year I moved to Madison. People who lived east of the state capitol liked to say they lived on "the politically correct east side." They were proud of where they lived and intended a putdown of the presumably more conventional people — more corporate people — who chose the west side.
McWhorter doesn't come right out and say it, but the answer to the question how woke became an insult is that it was used as an insult: Those who self-indentified as woke meant to insult those who didn't agree with them. That makes people want to insult you in return, and throwing your own word back in your face is the simplest reflex. It's sarcasm. You just say the same thing they were sincere about but you say to be mean. It's low discourse, but it's so easy.
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I attended a famously liberal college, where it was just assumed that everyone was left-of-center to some degree or other. "Politically correct" wasn't really an insult, but an ironic jibe you would make toward someone who was getting too strident in announcing their opinions (today it would be called "virtue-signaling"). "Oh, you're so politically correct," one student would say to another, fully aware that they shared essentially the same view.
I don't see that rejection of "woke" and its use as an insult is racial. It never occurred to me until this moment that it might have any racial tone at all. I think of it as the whole panoply of leftist ideas. My mental picture is of a young white person with an angry expression.
It is not impossible that I have simply been obtuse and McWhorter is correct. He is very knowledgeable about language and knows buckets more than I do. I listen to both his old and new language podcasts with pleasure.
"then those 'stay woke' salutes on Twitter in 2012 were in the wake of the Trayvon Martin killing,"
Trayvon Martin was a criminal thug who attacked a Hispanic man for no justifiable reason, and tried to kill him.
Fortunately the law abiding Hispanic was armed, and managed to shoot and kill Trayvon Martin before Martin killed him.
"Woke" is an insult because people who adhere to its tenants are disgusting and dishonest people.
I came across the phrase "politically correct" in childhood used by former Trotskyites (such as my mother and some of her friends) to describe positions held by those who supported Stalin's show trials. My impression it represented a kind of political Lysenkoism in which if you spoke and thought correctly you could adjust reality to achieve the socialist dawn. I thought it came from the writings of Lenin somewhere but I'm not finding it on Google. The Village Voice drama critic, Arther Sainer, used the term in a struggle session in his play about the Weather People who blew up the 11th St Townhouse some time in the 70's. I remember it because someone said they hadn't heard the term before.
"You just say the same thing they were sincere about but you say to be mean."
What they're "sincere about" is being racist pigs (a racist is someone who treats / judges people differently based on the color of their skin, or where their parents are from), being lying hypocrites (the BLM riots were "mostly peaceful". The invasion of the Senate Hart Building in an attempt to block the Senate from confirming Kavanaugh was appropriate and justified. The assaults on the Wisconsin Legislature building during the Act 10 "protests", with all the destruction they brought about, and done for the purpose of blocking the WI State Legislature from passing. law they don't like? That was appropriate protest.
But the Jan 6 "insurrection", where the police invited the protesters to enter, where there was very little vandalism and / or destruction, and where the only person killed was killed by a rogue police officer? That's "the greatest assault on American Democracy since the Civil War!"), and pushing policies that are such complete and utter crap that they have to try to censor everyone who disagrees with them, since they know they can't win an honest debate on anything.
"Woke" is an insult because the people who are "woke" deserve to be insulted for being "woke".
is it not interesting that in this realm of politically >>> /correctness? <> \rightness?
"How ‘Woke’ Became an Insult"
It's funny! MOST left wing descriptions become insults, that the owners don't want to be called
Commie
Red
Socialist
Pinko
Progressive
Liberal
Left Winger
Seriously, how many people in america identify with Liberal? Let along Communist?
It's Not only, that opponates think that they are derogatory... The Pinkos themselves do!
Is Turn about, fair play?
Will i be abashed; if you imply that i'm a right-wing republican?
You Literally have to go completely around the corner, and call me a facist (which is a type of Socialism), to irk me
"Is a toast asked? 'The United States,' instead of the 'People of the United States,' is the toast given. This is not politically correct."
Supreme Court, 1793.
One of the main differences between woke and politically correct is that politically correct had an element of persuading the uncommitted. Woke is about loudly declaring your position correct no matter what those un-woke idiots say.
Become woke in the wake of Trevon. Makes sense.
I remember a saying that was supposedly said by blacks to each other. I think I heard it in “Do The Right Thing” - Stay black. Or it might’ve been in Jungle Fever.
I only learned last week that "woke" was a pejorative. I thought it was a complement, at least among those who are "woke". I'm just "asleep" while the footing underneath me shifts. Thanks, Ann, for keeping us "safe".
McWhorter is full of it, especially when he gets to here:
Thus in the broad view, what has happened to “woke” is a demonstration of negative associations gunking up well-intentioned labels. This is as common and even inevitable as germs. What can look like people deliberately seeking to confuse the rest of us with ever-morphing terminology is usually just a matter of trying to be seen plain.
This is completely false. The purpose of the euphemism treadmill is solely to confuse, a deliberate effort to stop people from quickly identifying the concept involved and accordingly making the correct association between the word and concept.
Negative associations aren't "gunk" or "germs" that simply go around randomly screwing up innocent words. After all, we don't have to replace the word for "car" every thirty years. Rather, it only happens to terms that point to a concept that the public has a negative opinion of, and it happens to any and every such term as soon as it's been in broad use long enough for people to readily identify it with the concept.
Doubt that it's about public attitudes to the underlying concept? Well, look what happens when, instead of desperately changing the word, you manage to actually change the public's image of the underlying concept. Both "gay" and "retard" were insults in the middle schools of 1991; thirty years later, one of them can be used in New York Times headlines as a neutral descriptor, and the other one is now called "the R-word".
The way "woke" became an insult is nothing more than that people started understanding what it means, just like "politically correct" before it. Its problem is entirely and solely that its meaning is now plainly seen.
I thought “woke” came as criticism of those who claim others have an “unconscious” bias that they needed to be awaken to become conscious.
Pretty much the way "Liberal" became a dirty word. People understood what it meant by the garbage people proclaiming being liberals and pushing terrible policies. Over time it became toxic to the point they had to change their label to "Progressive"
The same thing is happening to "Woke". It's associated with assholes and terrible policies. Its not that complicated.
Politically correct as a concept if not an English phrase dates back to at least 19290 and lenin. He said "it is not correct to talk about starvation in the cities under Bolshevism." (quote from memory)
He went on to say that talking about it undermined the revolution. There was no question that people were starving. That was factually correct. But it was not politically.
It was also in common use in San Francisco in the winter 66-67.people would, in all seriousness say things like "don't talk about how the Viet Cong murder village elders, man. It's not politically correct. It only helps lbj and the fascist oppressors,"
To the Right: "Politically Correct" = Nazi Commie speak. Its something you'd read in Orwell.
To liberals: "Politically correct" - proudly identifies you as a Good Little Boy or Girl in the Liberal Herd.
gilbar said:
It's funny! MOST left wing descriptions become insults, that the owners don't want to be called
Commie
Red
Socialist
Pinko
Progressive
Liberal
Left Winger
If I recall correctly, learning the name of a possessing demon is a key step in the process of exorcism.
(LOL - the things that pop into my mind! Wait, what?)
Nice takes from Gilbar and Biff! One problem with political fashions or correctness is that it is an ever changing definition like all fashions and progressivism. Negro was the proper term when I entered school as a child. Black was in fashion by the time I made it to Junior High (which became Middle School after I graduated) but African-American was taking hold by my freshman year in college. To be “correct” one has to continuously revise and extend the meaning of words that as humans we prefer to hold in our minds as fixed concepts. It is disorienting to work with terms that change meaning arbitrarily as elite fashionistas play with language.
"Woke" people demonstrated vicious, smug, intolerant, bullying. Woke is associated with social scolds, those who cannot mind their own business but instead demand that all others conform to the "woke" propriety - or else. That hasn't gone over well in the past, and isn't going over well now.
I first heard the term “politically correct” in the fall of 1969, in discussions among student radicals at MIT planning various anti-war and revolutionary activities. The context was someone would say something that didn’t adhere to the common radical viewpoint, and someone else would respond, in an ironic tone, that the first comment was not politically correct. It was ironic because the student radicals were all acutely aware of the problems with Soviet Communism and the Communist Party’s enforcement of a Party line from which deviation was punished, and they were consciously trying to avoid creating a similar system. How long-ago that seems! In any event, the term eventually made its way into wider public use.
Yes, the term was current as a semi-ironic categorization of people or ideas, way back in the early 70s, even in mediocre state U's in the Southland. If you were a history and/or polisci major, anyway.
As for "Woke," I'm agin it.
Woke...politically correct...
The worst of the lot is the supremely annoying "right side of history."
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