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Conversing with a Woke Person About Why I’m Not Woke
Or at least attempting to
This is certainly a delicate subject as woke is such a loaded word. I’ve even had people tell me that if I use the word woke, I am showing how biased I am to right-wing thinking. I also don’t want to declare war on my woke readers or attach myself to people who might declare themselves anti-woke in away that is aggressive towards people who like the word. I have my own definition for the word that I clearly spell out in such conversations so I hope people can respect that. This is a discussion I had in the AV Club (a notably woke outlet) message boards with a Palestinian sympathizer who casually asked me why I don’t subscribe to wokeness.
Me: The short answer is that woke thought is the idea that race, gender and sexual orientation explain everything and anything. I believe the world is far more complicated than that. I believe that mostly ethnicities, class, country of origin play larger roles and while believe that racism exists but I think it’s far lower on the list of problems plaguing this country than people make it out to be. So to me wokism is a celebration of oversimplification and it’s grown dogmatic.
Furthermore, my rift with this part of the left grew with the AV Club comment section and its offshoots. All those places treated people who thought…
