Monday, December 16, 2024

2014 - The Year the World Went Woke and the coming of the Great Awokening

Food for thought! DEI must die! Wokeism is a very regressive ideology!

In my opinion, this latest trend in leftist propaganda and demagoguery goes further back than 2014. It has evolved since the 1960s or so. Wokesim is just a new flavor of an old ideology based on simple minded dichotomy! 

"In a provocative essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education, literature scholar Michael Clune calls attention to an alarming trend in academia: “Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission” away from traditional scholarship and “began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.” Clune is not alone in observing this shift, which some have dubbed the “Great Awokening” as a reflection of its connection to a peculiar brand of hard-left politics that came to dominate scholarly discussions in this period. Sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke associates this event with a shift in language among intellectual elites who pay symbolic homage to “social justice” causes as a way of elevating their own status as elites.

After a decade of woke discourse, the activist turn has taken a reputational toll on elite institutions. Over this same period, public confidence in higher education plummeted across almost all groups. Trust in the traditional news media hit record lows, with much perceptions of political bias driving the decline. At the same time, a growing body of evidence suggests that training in the activist framework of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) actually increases social animosity and resentment. ..."

"Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged. ..."

Caveat: I did not read all of the content linke below.

The Year the World Went Woke

We Asked for It (no public access) "The politicization of research, hiring, and teaching made professors sitting ducks."





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