Umm... just so ya know, practically everything in "wokeness" is about somebody saying "Please don't paint me with the broad brush you're using."
I think most of what you identify as "wokeness" is other people who aren't directly affected trying to help out, since the affected people are usually a minority who won't be heard if it's just them. That can lead to its own forms of tone-deafness and "you're not helping" behavior, but that just leads to more cases of people who are sincerely and effectively helping being dismissed as "SJWs" out of hand. That's a cheap way of avoiding genuine problems with one tiny all-purpose acronym.
I just wanted to point that out because what you wrote can be read like "I didn't care about anything except when it happens to me". It might give you a moment's pause the next time you want to deride something as "woke".
> practically everything in "wokeness" is about saying.... Please don't paint me with the broad brush you're using.
Err.. really? I mean, that's the definition of individualism against which many "woke" people would object. Even you say, "since the affected people are usually a minority". This is just false, if we take minority to refer to the usual "protected subgroups".
The relevant sense of Woke here, seems to me, to be concerned not with people's individual needs -- but their needs qua some alleged group. Esp., as you offer, "minority" groups.
It's a sort of perverse individualism. It's just substituting a different type of broad brush. Rather than starting with a maximally individual analysis (and hence construe treatment in terms of procedural fairness), rather, start by a group analysis and place individuals within those groups (and hence talk about aggregate distributional outcomes).
The derision here is the conflict in having to raise an issue because you are autistic, without inviting the Woke-style "and autistic people are a minority who need protected". The latter substitutes the underlying lack of procedural concern for individual needs with exactly the same problem: again ignoring individual difference expect now substituting alleged "group needs".
Woke analysis of this kind prescribes, a typically condescending, set of redresses for alleged group grievances. Individualism prescribes nothing of this sort, rather, adjusting the rules so as to maximise each person's ability to get what they each, as individuals, need.
"Don't paint me with a broad brush" means let me speak for myself alone. This attitude is antithetical to analysis which begins with "minorities", which by construction, are not people who are each individually empowered to speak for themselves.
> It's a sort of perverse individualism. It's just substituting a different type of broad brush. Rather than starting with a maximally individual analysis (and hence construe treatment in terms of procedural fairness), rather, start by a group analysis and place individuals within those groups (and hence talk about aggregate distributional outcomes).
> Don't paint me with a broad brush" means let me speak for myself alone. This attitude is antithetical to analysis which begins with "minorities",
This is, I think "just be race blind". Wokeness, as you seem to be describing it is an ideology that recognizes that identities impact how a person is perceived. To fairly judge an individual, you have to take into account that, because of their race or gender, their work may have been misvalued or falsely attributed.
For better or worse, society discriminates, and recognition of that is a part of fairly judging people as individuals.
Well I think we have to take "woke" to mean the most plausible worst version of this ideology; or else we'd just name it charitably. Ie., the OP comment is nervous about being associated with the type of thinking i'm talking about.
It's entirely fair to say that whilst accommodating and judging people individually we need to account for that person's particular difficulty in first being judged in this manner -- because we, the judger, may be unable to properly understand their situation; and likewise they may not be able to argue their case, state their need, etc.
The problem enters when we take the goal of our project to actually be removing such "prejudices and obstacles" and, not rather, the empowerment of each individual. The former is an often optional detour to the latter.
Consider, for example, the most effective civil rights president in US history (LBJ) was a racist: did we need to solve his prejudice first? Would that have done anything positive?
Wokeism, if it means anything at all, I think has to be identified with this ends-means confusion. It's raising to the status of an end in itself the elimination of (minority) group hatred, (minority) group prejudice, etc.
This a deeply confused project; and routinely gets in the way of the actual end everyone cares about: each person, in their own particular situation, being able to live the way that best suits them.
If I read the message here correctly, the woke-dissenter is saying this: "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
Wokeism is the political incarnation of New Atheism, or likewise Evangelism: first we fight a total war against The Sins of The Mind themselves; and then, much much later, we help people in their particular situations.
> Consider, for example, the most effective civil rights president in US history (LBJ) was a racist: did we need to solve his prejudice first? Would that have done anything positive?
The current iteration of the civil rights movement is solving a different problem than that of 1968. Due to LBJ's actions, minorities are equal under the law. You can't just pass laws to make them more equal. They already are.
But if you look around, they clearly aren't, so the question becomes, well why not? If you subscribe to woke ideology, the answer is something like "pervasive cultural and systemic biases across various aspects of society". I'll draw a parallel to another evergreen topic, "cancel culture". The idea being that a large group of distributed people can ruin someone's life by changing how they interact with that person and making them a pariah.
Well many of these systemic biases are similar, if less sudden. People and systems trained to see or treat people as lesser. How do you solve that problem? I only see one solution: to get the distributed group of people to be aware of and ultimately counteract those biases, to undue the incidental cancellation of these people. And what is that but raising awareness of and reducing those ingrained prejudices.
All of the other approaches are things that routinely get called "reverse-racist" themselves, things like affirmative action and such which ignore the individual.
> "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
And the response to this is that while your difficulties are particular to you, it's likely that the best tools and practices to empower you when you are mistreated are allies who are willing to stand up for you agains the person mistreating you. As in the limit, if no one believes you are being mistreated except you, you will have no recourse.
There's no law that says that PG isn't allowed to say things that make GGP uncomfortable. In fact, there's laws that say that we can't prevent PG from doing that. All we can hope for is that said mistreatment is recognized by others, and that people pressure him to correct his behavior.
Wokeness is a recognition that this is a political (in the sense of like human-interaction, not election-related), not legal issue.
I think there's a means-ends thing going on here. Everything you say here is very plausible.
The problem with Wokeism (a term I don't like btw) is the means. We all broadly agree on the ends.
The individualist things this type of change can be bottom-up (individual -> group) and the wokeist wants it to be top-down (group -> individual).
In the former case the intuition is that we aren't going to be able to solve the group problem, so starting at the group level is a waste of time and a bit tyrannical. All we can do is empower individuals who, over time, will aggregate and approximately solve the group problem.
I agree however that it has to be both top-down and bottom-up. I think wokeism as ideology of over-reaction, is towards the extreme end of that top-down approach.
Thanks for raising that point. I'm only now realizing that the term "woke" means different things to different people. I'm grateful for your correction.
I agree with a lot of what the 'woke' are trying to achieve; police reform, less bias (call it institutional racism, etc..) in government institutions, address massive generational wealth gaps, etc... but the 'woke' are mostly reductive and reactionary and are the kings and queens of painting with a broad brush.
I think most of what you identify as "wokeness" is other people who aren't directly affected trying to help out, since the affected people are usually a minority who won't be heard if it's just them. That can lead to its own forms of tone-deafness and "you're not helping" behavior, but that just leads to more cases of people who are sincerely and effectively helping being dismissed as "SJWs" out of hand. That's a cheap way of avoiding genuine problems with one tiny all-purpose acronym.
I just wanted to point that out because what you wrote can be read like "I didn't care about anything except when it happens to me". It might give you a moment's pause the next time you want to deride something as "woke".