"Woke Liberals"? I wish!

Abuse of the AAVE term "woke", and related misunderstanding of "Racism" makes communication impossible.

I’m not partisan, but I’m curious what the parties and local candidates are saying.

I was a member of the Federal Progressive Conservative Party for a time in the 1990’s and I joined the Conservative Coalition Party in 2017 for a leadership “election”.

I am signed up for communications from many parties and candidates.

I received an email from “Team Pierre” with “Subject: IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUESTED”

It was a request to fill in a “Flash survey”, using that term loosely as every question was in the form of a loaded question where the language used or minimal options provided made it not qualify as a survey.

(Invalid “surveys” with loaded questions and other logical fallacies are sent out by several parties, but the ones from the current Reform/Conservatives are the most impossible to answer.)

Racism

I have seen this quote from Ruth Wilson Gilmore referenced by many racialized people as a good place to start to understand what Racism is.

Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

While I understand and agree with this definition now, I remember a time when I would neither understand nor agree with it.

I had been told that Racism is about individuals doing “bad” things to each other, so I would not have understood the “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation”. In general I was told that as long as I kept any potentially “rude” things to myself about someone declared as some other “race”, then I was “not racist”.

Racism isn’t about individuals, but about systems and policies. An individual may be prejudiced based on the social construct of “race”, but that is a superficial impact of racist policies, worldviews and/or paradigms as opposed to itself being Racism.

My privileges, and my systems mental block around race.

I also wouldn’t have correctly understood the “group-differentiated” part, as I had been told the differences related to biology. This is in fact what the pseudoscience of Scientific Racism and Eugenics is about, which was an attempt to justify the existing social construct of race using natural sciences.

Race is a social construct in order to create and/or justify a social hierarchy. Race isn’t something which you are, but something that is done to you. This starts with a subjectively defined concept of “whiteness” that has changed over time. For instance, some of my Irish and Scottish ancestors would not have been considered “white” in the past, but I am considered “White” today even though I have no English ancestors and only a few French ancestors.

Everyone who isn’t declared “white” is then racialized, and forced onto a social hierarchy at various distances below “whiteness”. Both the concept of “white” and the social hierarchy are social constructs.

Anyone who discusses racism will eventually have someone ask “Why don’t you talk about all the good things that White people have done?”

Once you understand what Racism is, you recognize the question doesn’t make sense. Being “White” is the absence of being racialized, and thus you are merely an individual as far as the social construct of “race” is concerned. People who are racialized are not treated as individuals, but as representatives and part of their group that have been declared by the social hierarchy as lesser.

A racialized person or community can talk about their accomplishments despite being racialized, but a non-racialized (IE: White) person can not as they were never racialized. Their “race” simply doesn’t matter.

Since starting my deep-dive on “Racism” I have written several articles discussing Anti-Racism.

Woke

“Woke” is an African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) term that has considerable history.

• Reclaiming the Word “Woke” as Part of African American Culture | NAACP

• What Does 'Woke' Mean? | Merriam-Webster

Stay woke became a watch word in parts of the black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better. But stay woke and woke became part of a wider discussion in 2014, immediately following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement; instead of just being a word that signaled awareness of injustice or racial tension, it became a word of action. Activists were woke and called on others to stay woke.

While there is an alleged “new sense” that this term has taken outside African-American and other racialized communities, I believe that cultural appropriation has been abused so much that this “new sense” manipulated by non-racialized communities has become meaningless.

Woke Racism

What I have observed of Canadian and other examples of Eurocentric (Europe and colonies) culture is non-racialized people using the word “woke” to apply to themselves or other people without having a clue about what racism is or the systems/paradigm that they are supposed to be awake to.

This is essentially two groups of (primarily non-racialized) individuals being rude and pointing fingers at each other, all while upholding racist systems/paradigms.

To get into what passes for a political spectrum in Canada, it is entirely incorrect to associate the term “woke” with the “Liberal Party of Canada”.

While Justin Trudeau is a good example of a privileged non-racialized individual claiming to be better than anyone else, he was not “woke” in any reasonable meaning of the term. He was “performative progressive”, meaning he said words and put on a big show suggesting a specific political ideology, but actual policy and the way he acted when not on stage regularly demonstrated something entirely different.

In this article I had even stronger words to say about Justin Trudeau's father.

I have come to believe that, adjusted for the time period, Pierre Elliot Trudeau was more racist than Sir John Alexander Macdonald. Statues of John A are being removed, and I expect we will want to revisit a more honest version of the historical record of P.E. Trudeau.

There have been individual members of parliament who understand the social construct of racism, Anti-Racism and the AAVE term “woke”. They wear team jerseys from nearly all political parties. That said, I have not seen any political party that has had seats so far in a Canadian parliament in my lifetime (and easily since confederation) that the term “woke” could legitimately apply to.

A party full of rude individuals who think they are better than anyone else and abuse the word “racist” to point away from themselves to attack others? There are several Canadian political parties where that is true!

What about “social liberals”?

There is a video called "Lefty Boot Camp" made by Australian ABC Comedy that sums up the feeling I've all too often had when getting into political discussions with Canadian social liberals. There is so much time being spent trying to demonstrate that they are “one of the good ones”, and being rude to other individuals they have written off as “other”. They remain so focused on individualism that they are incapable of dismantling racist systems/paradigms.

From my personal experience, there isn’t a massive policy difference between self-identifying social liberals and social conservatives in Canada, especially among non-racialized individuals. The primary difference is the honesty of the language, as social conservatives tend to be more open and honest (with themselves, as well as with others).

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Update:

If you are a non-racialized liberal and this article offends you because it doesn’t blame conservatives for everything, you might also want to check out the following article:

If you want to dive more into how language really matters, and how watering down language (including by self-identified progressives) is so harmful, please also consider:

Decolonization is not a metaphor

Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization.