How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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The presenter is so fond of using the word ‘woke’, he even argued with radio host James O’Brian about its true meaning. Joanna has written numerous academic journal articles and book chapters as well as being a frequent contributor to national and international debates on education, feminism and gender politics. It is often followed by the similarly negative term ‘snowflake’ – a word that has divisive connotations in the UK – and is frequently used in arguments online and debates in the media to belittle people with left leaning viewpoints. Frequently people of colour. We feel as if we’ve run into a mental wall, and the whole woke business is running out of road. ‘Intersectionality’ – the academic word for the game of victimhood top-trumps which has dominated our discourse for so long – seems to have metastasised so much it makes no sense to anyone. New neurodiversities, new genders, new sexual orientations, new disadvantages are spawned every day. How Woke Won looks at what lies behind the woke world view. It asks how one way of thinking about gender and race has won out over all others. It considers the influence of identity politics and the lure of victimhood in shaping how we relate to others. It argues that elite condescension towards the working class translates into an illiberal and censorious culture.

How Woke Won - History Reclaimed

Jonathan adds that what has happened with the meaning of ‘woke’ comes down to the original intention of the word itself. The twisted consequence of the unwoke perspective was highlighted last week in an opinion piece in the Yorkshire Post by GP Taylor headed “Don’t let ‘wokes’ rewrite history, let’s learn from the past” told those with “anti-British thoughts”: “If you do not like the history of the country that gives you shelter, protects, feeds you and allows you free speech, then get out. Go!” He claimed, too, that the Frankfurt School – a group of German and German-American Marxists that emerged in the interwar years – wanted “ to end Western Civilization and is almost wholly comprised of Jews. This allows antisemites to recruit new antisemites”. Critics who rightly condemned this as blaming Jews for antisemitism were accused of spreading “smears”. An obsession with wokeness, as much as with whiteness, can make you blind. There has been much criticism of taking down statues as the “rewriting of history”, but little recognition that many statues themselves were erected to substantiate an often distorted historical narrative. Monuments, whether to Winston Churchill or to the Bristol slaver Edward Colston, or indeed to Mary Wollstonecraft, are not just dumb pieces of stone. Each is designed to tell a particular story. Joanna’s writing has been published widely in the UK and the US including The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The Guardian, The New York Post and American Conservative.

Of course, words and phrases change their meaning all the time. Jonathan points to ‘right on’ as an example that followed a similar trajectory to ‘woke’. And it’s no coincidence that so many of the negative references to ‘wokeness’ are directed towards Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.

Woke warriors on the march? Don’t forget the bigotry of the Woke warriors on the march? Don’t forget the bigotry of the

All too often, the sense of virtue that comes from claiming to act on behalf of the disadvantaged and oppressed legitimises a refusal to countenance dissent – and a ruthlessness at dealing with those seemingly in opposition to the woke mission.Dr Joanna Williams is a columnist for spiked as well as a regular contributor to The Spectator, The Telegraph and The Times. An academic she is the founder and director of Cieo, which provides a platform for research and debates that universities today dare not touch. Has woke “won”, as Williams claims? Her extensive survey of the spread of woke, taking in developments in the UK, the USA, and Australia — remember Yassmin Abdel-Magied stomping out of the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in 2016? — certainly indicates that woke is ascendant and that its influence is pernicious. But Williams concedes rather too much in declaring that woke has already clinched victory. “Ultimately,” she argues, “woke is a defensive stance from an elite that has lost its authority.” Far from being progressive, woke twists older ideas of racial and sexual equality beyond all recognition. It leaves us unable to defend women’s rights and pushes us to judge people according to the colour of their skin. Woke thinking benefits only a small minority at the very top of society. On every other measure, O’Sullivan had the better of the Scotsman. Thirty-eight ranking titles to Hendry’s 36. Seven Masters titles to his six. Seven UK Championships to his five. When they played head-to-head, O’Sullivan had 30 victories to Hendry’s 21. Hendry was the King of the Crucible. After O’Sullivan’s 18-13 victory over Judd Trump last night, that is an honour he must now share. As for the question of who is the GOAT, there can be no more argument. Germany/Turkey 2007, 122 mins. Director Fatih Akin. Starring Nurgul Yesilcay, Baki Davrak Tuncel Kurtiz and Hanna Schygulla.

How Woke Won: book review - The Centre for Independent Studies

Welcome to the world of ‘woke’ anti-racism; just one manifestation of the phenomenon of wokeness that has swept across the West, transforming school curricula, workplace relations, competitive sports, policing, politics, history, free speech, and the administration of justice. British author Joanna Williams thinks this transformation is so complete that she is provoked to declare woke has triumphed in her important new book, How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason.She writes that holding the wrong opinions – or even being unaware of the latest correct language – can lead to the loss of livelihood, being ostracised and even the threat of violence. Teachers in Brighton are told that even the youngest children are ‘not racially innocent’. A Labour MP receives death threats for defending women’s access to single sex spaces. Sensitivity readers remove ‘problematic’ views from books.

the word ‘woke’ was weaponised by the right How the word ‘woke’ was weaponised by the right

Woke has adopted this ambiguity about truth which allows words — such as ‘racism’ and ‘hate speech’ — to take on whatever meaning the user intends without regard to the possibility of countervailing evidence. As Williams remarks: It’s hardly surprising so few of us encounter racism on a daily basis. According to the latest report from one of the most reliable barometers of Australian society, the Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion survey, that segment of the population with racist or xenophobic views is shrinking rapidly. Even during the long months of the pandemic — when Mr Tan insists that instances of race hate spiked — the Scanlon survey reported high levels of harmony in the community. But there was a puzzling spike of 20 per cent in the number of those who did think racism was a problem; a finding that baffled report author, Andrew Markus, seeing as how it conflicted with Scanlon’s findings in all previous years. Jonathan explains that these kinds of shifts can happen from over-use. That once a word slips into the mainstream it can fall out of favour with the marginalised groups who originally created it, as it is co-opted and misused by other groups.

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I like reading about this topic to better diagnose what the problem is, because it’s a tough one to understand. The problem that authors face right now is that this topic is extremely saturated, so it’s difficult to write something new. But when I saw Joanna Williams’ subtitle to this book, it definitely caught my interest with it’s focus on this being an elitist movement. This is something Rob K. Henderson discusses with his theory of “luxury beliefs”. While this is a great book, there’s a lot in it that’s already been said. Oxford theologian Nigel Biggar, a defender of the British empire as a moral good, claimed that Rhodes “was an imperialist, but British colonialism was not essentially racist, and wasn’t essentially exploitative, and wasn’t essentially atrocious”. Rhodes was merely “a supporter of the British empire as a modernising force for good”. Defenders of woke will always cloak their efforts to denounce and cancel their critics with claims of protecting freedoms of the vulnerable; opponents of woke see through this ruse, and must gird themselves for another long march if they are to reverse woke’s advance. As Williams reminds us forcefully, there is a great deal at stake.