What the Non-Woke Are Waking Up to Now

Nibbles of sound

We all hear sound bites and talking points. We recognize them because they become memes in society. Take the words “sound bite,” or the phrase “talking points.”

What would either of these phrases mean to someone fifty or sixty years ago? I do not know the date of when they came to be recognizably ubiquitous, but you will hear people, left and right, saying “That’s your talking point.” They are indicating people are not thinking for ourselves, but repeating something popular they hear to present an idea.

The word “woke” is one of these memes. We hear how it first gained popularity as a phrase meaning to ‘stay alert to injustice.’ But, on the far right it has come to be a disparaging net to catch anyone caught performing inclusivity.

It is not incorrect, then, to say many wary people have “woke” to the very idea that they have to stay alert to catch anyone suspected of being woke!

A corporation can use woke as a marketing tool without ever having to say the word. They can include pride flags, feature a trans person, sell ‘masculine’ razors to men reformed by feminism. There are tons of examples of this. An individual, or an organized group, can warn against ‘subversive’ books in school, or people that do not conform to their perspective on righteousness. To take on the “woke mob” means to topple these dangerous ideas that threaten the status quo.

Upon hearing the word, or almost any other talking point, we must ask the speaker which, exactly, do they consider to be a threat.

Every day, society changes its norms. This is the (not really) new ‘normal.’

It becomes apparent that we all have to wake up and stay woke daily.

An unexpected outcome

Another phrase we very often hear repeated is that the ‘woke mob’ wants equality of outcome. They fear distribution of wealth, education, resources (or even less tangible things), will be reconfigured to give everyone a share. Social reformers will refer to equality of opportunity — not ‘outcome.’

Listen for the difference.

Wanting everyone to begin at the same starting line, have equal social standing, or access, won’t happen through shaming. These, and other worn out phrases do not serve us very well because equality of outcome and equality of opportunity are worthy goals that are very often impossible for real people in varying times and places.

It does not mean that we should not strive for justice, but that our structured systems are a threat to both. The people who are in those social structures are more often victims than perpetrators of evil.

Should food be accessible to all? How about medical degrees/offices for both less, and crowded, populated regions? Should clean water and owning your own home all be human rights that happen regardless of what year you are born, or what the economy is like? Jobs are another example.

The trouble, of course, is that change happens constantly, and while you may have be born at a time when housing is affordable, there is no way to control it individually. If your family wealth is affected by the fact that grandfather was kept out of ownership by vile boundaries like redlining, it is a social and systemic challenge, not just a personal one. If your grandmother was born in a time before women could own, or have credit, this is a social benefit to work on, not an issue about just one person’s exclusion.

Why your facts don’t care about your feelings

This is one of the most twisted examples of how someone’s feelings motivate them to deny facts.

It is a fact that some people’s feelings about an out-group suggest that we should control that out-group.

Take the fact that most harassment and sexualized grooming happens among the larger population-heterosexual cis people. It also happens more often among women at the hands of men.

But, how anti-woke folk twist it is that their personal dislike for an excluded minority is just, or even scriptural. They feel strongly about it. In the case of women’s reproductive health people are not persuaded by the fact of a heart or brain being non-existent in the fetus. They often are emotionally motivated to prevent the murder of babies, as that is how they view it.

But wait, aren’t feelings important, too? Aren’t facts important?

Yes, our feelings are very important. We make all our laws and social structure according to both a highly evolved sense of right and wrong, but also a human-centered tendency to support whichever story we need to believe to preserve our inherent sense of needing to be a “good person.”

Facts also matter

The Earth is not flat. Gravity and evolution are real. Our planet is warming due to human-caused activity. In the latter case, as with so many others, humans can, and do, affect both the benefits and harm that humans do.

Facts matter, but progress means some facts eventually change over time. It was once true that we could not fly, or go to the moon. Evolution is ongoing and forever. Our morality developed naturally, but our socially approved constructs can interfere with that. Our sense of being alert, aware, and “woke” developed from our animal origins and is very valuable indeed to keep society changing. It is not a trajectory as much as it is circles, loops, and cycles.

Just as we have evolved with phases of sleep, we have to adapt to phases of being woke.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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