Oh No, I am the Woke!
There are a lot of people freaking out about “woke” culture. I don’t get it.
“Good lord! People are hoping we will stop being racist and sexist! I am scared! What if they succeed and we all stop being racist? That would be terrible! We must stop the woke mind virus!”
That’s kind of how I pictured the anti-woke argument from the far right. Which isn’t entirely fair. If you talk to a thoughtful anti-woke person (do they exist?) they will tell you this is a matter of free speech. Is it, though? The whole thing feels like the way people complained about “political correctness” in the 1980s, only more paranoid and angry.
People, we’ve done this before. Calm down.
Yesterday, I saw a Ben Shapiro video the way they are intended to be seen: someone had taken a short clip of him talking and they were using it to make fun of him. The video struck me as odd, because Shapiro’s argument seemed to go something like this…
Long ago, there were federal laws put in place meant to make systemic racism illegal. This, Shapiro seemed to argue, may have been a good thing. Let’s brush away all of those outdated racist systems. Get rid of a world where there’s one drinking fountain for black people and one for white. But that fixed it. We fixed that whole mess.
