General Discussion

Louis1895

(768 posts) Tue Mar 7, 2023, 07:21 PM Mar 2023

Better to be "WOKE" than "DOPE"!

I am tired of all of this “Anti-Woke” propaganda coming from the right. When pushed, I doubt that many MAGA adherents and other fascists like Ron DeSantis can give a coherent definition of what they truly mean by “woke”.

Wikipedia defines “Woke” as an “adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke. Being woke sounds like a good attribute to me!

SO WHY DOES THE RIGHT THINK WE NEED TO DISREGARD RACIAL PREJUDICE AND DISCRIMINATION?

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) under the heading “WHAT IT MEANS TO "STOP WOKE"” - states: “To some, woke is now a derisive stand-in for diversity, inclusion, empathy and, yes, Blackness. So, when legislators pass a law to “stop woke” in light of the word’s true history as well as its commonly understood meaning, what are they really saying?” The article quotes Janai S. Nelson, LDF’s President and Director-Counsel, in a legal challenge to DeSantis’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act. “[This law] seeks to deprive future generations of knowledge, information, and the ability to appreciate the humanity of their fellow citizens. It is also a direct and unlawful assault on the bedrock principle of free speech in a democracy.” https://www.naacpldf.org/woke-black-bad/

Adam Serwer, writing in an article in The Atlantic entitled “The Cruelty Is the Point” makes the argument that “President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

I agree. These people have no shame, no decency, no empathy for the plight of their fellow humans. The so-called anti-woke crowd disregards the humanity of their fellow citizens.

The extreme right, which has taken over the Republican Party, wants to dumb down the American public. They are rewriting history and making it more difficult to get a good education in the public schools. Their accentuation on victimhood (“I am your retribution” pledged Donald Trump recently at the CPAC gathering) encourages their base to blame others for any misfortune they perceive has befallen them. FoxNews, on the other hand, contributes to the ignorance of their viewers by feeding them lie after lie after lie.

How do we deal with an ignorant, extremely vocal, and increasingly dangerous and powerful fringe movement in our population? Dare I say a “stupid” cult?

In a great video online (https://sproutsschools.com/bonhoeffers-theory-of-stupidity/) there is a discussion of the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

In his famous letters from prison during the Nazi Germany period, Bonhoeffer argued that stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice, because while “one may protest against evil; it can be exposed and prevented by the use of force, against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here. Reasons fall on deaf ears.” Facts that contradict a stupid person’s prejudgment simply need not be believed and when they are irrefutable, they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this, the stupid person is self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.

With these points, it is my view that the “Anti-WOKE” crusade is actually the “Pro-DOPE” movement, which has the goal of creating stupid people who do not believe facts and become very dangerous in their inability to reason and to think critically with open minds. Are we really defenseless against this?!

In my view when someone criticizes people who promote racial and sexual equality, gender identity issues, diversity, inclusion, and/or empathy, we cannot be silent but need to fight back and acknowledge that it is better WOKE than DOPE!