Woke 101

A Little Herstory Lesson

For the last few years we have all been dealing with a new version of political correctness. It’s a continuation of the old political correctness that’s been around since about the early 90’s.

There was really funny series of books in the mid 90’s called Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by a guy named James Finn Garner. I read them when they first came out and if you can find a copy, I recall them being uproariously funny. (Although I haven’t read them in almost 30 years… geez I’m getting old)

Basically they were just retellings of familiar fairy tales using the “university style” Marxist PC language of the day. They spelled “women” as “womyn” and made the story of Cinderella into some kind of hellish politically correct gibberish that lost the whole point of the story.

About this time the movie PCU came out starring Jeremy Piven and David Spade. It was a hilarious Animal House knock off that basically pitted a group of beer drinking, skirt chasing college guys against the no-fun PC powers that be. They made fun of the feminists and the gays and the blacks and the rest. It was very funny… and as it turned out, prophetic.

The reason that these books and movies were being made was as a comment on a phenomenon that was happening in the culture in the early 90’s. Political correctness had arrived, and it was starting to change the way Americans interacted with each other and the language we used.

For example, “black” became “African American”. “Retarded” became “mentally challenged”. “Cripple” or “handicapped” became “physically challenged”. Women were wearing outfits with giant shoulder pads and blouses and jackets that hid their breasts in an effort to look more masculine (Think Julia Sugarbaker). TV shows and movies were showing up with PC themes.

Conservative Americans noticed and there was some consternation over it all (Rush Limbaugh became nationally syndicated in 1988 and by 1992 was a full time comment on political correctness)… However, people generally accepted the changes in an effort to just be nice and not hurt anyone’s feelings.

Woke!

After the 1990’s passed and 9/11 came along there was a bit of a reprieve from the political correctness movement. It never really went away, but for about a decade, maybe a little longer, nobody really talked too much about it. Everyone just kind of accepted that you don’t call people “black” anymore… at least not in a public context… you call them “African Americans”. You really shouldn’t call people “fags” anymore, they were “gay”. But that was pretty much it… we got some newer nicer words for people who, at times, weren’t treated well by society. Between us… I didn’t really like being called a “fag” anyway, so why not give it a try?

It’s hard to say exactly when society pivoted from polite political correctness that most people simply rolled with to “woke”. The woke stuff has been rolling around in academia for decades where it never really went away, but it seemed to break out into mainstream society around the time of the Occupy Wall Street movement. That’s the first time I remember seeing segregated activist groups shouting down white speakers who agreed with them in favor of black or other minority voices. It’s probably about the time the hierarchy of oppression showed up in regular society.

The Theatre Of The Absurd

What is the hierarchy of oppression, you might ask? Well, in the woke world, your value is proportional to how much your identity group has suffered. So for example, a gay white guy is over a straight white guy, but under a straight black woman, who is under a gay black woman, who is over a Mexican person, unless that person is trans. The rules aren’t exactly written in stone, but you get the idea.

At the bottom of the pack is the dreaded “straight white male” who is looked at as the oppressor. The best he can hope for is to be adopted as an “ally” and even then, he is only allowed to speak out against other straight white males.

As thoroughly asinine as the above paragraph is, it was only step one in the woke march forward. All of a sudden, you started seeing people only identify with their victim group. People started connecting their identity group with completely random things. They might say something like “as a Pacific Islander woman, I’d like to eat at Chili’s instead of Applebees”. It got nonsensical. A normal person would ask, “What the hell does that have to do with being Pacific Islander woman?” The response is… “Everything has to do with being a Pacific Islander woman… that’s my identity.”

There’s another word for this… it’s called narcissism. If you believe everything begins and ends with your described identity… you are a narcissist. Sorry, not sorry.

Of Color… Completely Different From Colored (somehow)

Somewhere along the line another little language change came along, but this one was insidious and intentional. This change was not simply an attempt to be polite or inoffensive… this was about power.

One day, African Americans were no longer African American. Latinos were no longer Latino or Hispanic. Asians were no longer Asian and American Indians were no longer whatever their current preferred euphemism is. All of a sudden, there were only two races… People of Color (POC) and white people. With one simple change, the woke powers that be erased the racial identity of everyone in the country and placed them in two distinct groups. POCs and the enemy.

Make no mistake, this was done on purpose and with the intention of dividing Americans against themselves along racial lines… and the dividing line was whether or not you were white. Frankly, I can’t come up with a more racist thing to do… but there you go… in woke word up is down, male is female, and racist is anti-racist.

All of this was simply slipped in under the guise of political correctness. American corporations and news media began to play along. Why, you might ask, would any company take part in open and naked racism? Because it was billed as political correctness. It was billed as an innocuous societal tweak that will make marginalized Americans feel better. It was billed as politeness.

The Listening Session

Does everyone remember the #stopAsianhate thing from mid-last year? Apparently some Asian folks here in Atlanta got shot. It made national news as some kind of a hate crime. I don’t know if it was, but that’s not really the point.

I have a friend who I won’t name here. He is in management at a large West Coast company in the tech sector. Unsurprisingly, this company was an early adopter of woke values. It’s a progressive company that considers itself on the cutting edge of their industry. If there is a new trend, it’s a safe bet that this company is a part of it. So it only stands to reason that the woke trend would be something they would grab ahold of with both hands.

About the time of the #stopAsianhate thing, this company, which has many thousands of employees of every walk of life, decided they were going to have a “listening session” for Asian females at the company. For those unfamiliar… a “listening session” is an opportunity for one protected class or another to get on a Zoom call with company management and whine about how hard it is to be them. My friend, being in company management, was volunteered to be on this call.

According to my friend, what followed was simple insanity. From the beginning of the call, a group of young Asian women began to cry and weep… as if they had just escaped being made comfort girls during the building of the railroad (my analogy, not his).

These young ladies have been given every advantage America has to offer. Each one was educated, likely for free, at an elite university. Each one makes six figures in her 20’s working for a hugely successful company. Each one has nothing holding them back in their careers and green lights right up the corporate ladder at this company and it’s competitors.

Yet there they were… talking to the company that pays them crazy money to do who knows what, and acting like they were relegated to the back of the bus when nothing could have been further from reality. They are truly privileged. They are educated and wealthy. They are employed by a powerhouse of a company who bends over backwards to find opportunities for specifically them to advance. Yet somehow, this woke phenomenon has made these young ladies think they are victims of oppression, and that this company should hear about it.

The result of an attitude like that, no matter how advantaged a person is, is that they will hamstring themselves. They will never reach their potential because people who look at themselves as victims simply don’t succeed in the corporate world. The very thing that was supposed to help them, wokeness, will ultimately hold them back. Up is down. Black is white. Male is female. The privileged are oppressed. How sad.

The Results Are In

This stuff has been going on for a few years now. We no longer have to talk hypothetically about what kind of results we will see out of woke policy. The results are in and couldn’t be any clearer.

Cities with woke governments are overrun with crime. The very populations that the woke politicians were supposed to serve are suffering the most. Homelessness is rampant. Violent crime against “People of Color” is through the roof. Businesses are moving out of non-white neighborhoods due to a lack of police. Schools are failing. Basic services like police, fire, and EMT are unstaffed. People are drug addicted and depressed and hopeless. Oh yes… the results are as clear as day.

What was billed as something to help poor people has hurt them. What was billed as something to bring African Americans more into the American dream has only further marginalized them. What was supposed to help women become stronger has made them weaker. What was supposed to improve police interactions has made them more dangerous. What was supposed to distribute wealth has further centralized it in the robber baron class (who are now so rich they actually have their own space programs).

Up is down. Black is white. Safe is dangerous. Peace is violence.

The Solution

This experiment has failed and the good news is that it’s obvious. The American people are rejecting this nonsense in force. But make no mistake… the people who invented it are not gone. We have to reject this stuff every day. We have to say no to listening sessions and be willing to speak the truth.

We have to say, “You are not a victim and I have not transgressed against you. I will not apologize and I will not take part in this pathology. Now do your worst… because I’m not afraid of you.”

If we do that, we can send the woke the way of the dodo… and get back to living the American dream.

Sequitur

Why does everyone keep saying that this woman is black? She seems like some girl who wanted to be a princess and then decided being a princess wasn’t all that she thought, so she made her henpecked husband give up his prince position so she could move to California, drink Starbucks, do talk shows, and spend all day on Twitter.

Seems like a white chick to me.

Happy Sunday all!

—V