SOCIETY AND INJUSTICE
Is Woke Culture Really The Biggest Problem in Our Societies?
On Medium or in conversation with other people, I keep hearing how woke culture is ruining everything in our society.
Really? I mean, really?
I don’t consider myself woke, but rather an unapologetic feminist.
That being said, I still do not empathize with or understand people who complain about the woke culture.
It’s true that the whole movement has been very commercialized. It is true that sometimes it’s been taken advantage of, and the most misogynistic people can exploit it to look like saints. Check out woke-washing or woke-capitalism to see what I mean.
This doesn’t change the fact that woke movement is, in its essence, promoting equality, and social awareness.
People who feel threatened by the woke culture, not so shockingly, doesn’t seem to be bothered with the actual problems this movement is addressing:
Violence against women, racism, abuse, homophobia, transphobia, plunder of nature’s resources by profit-greedy oligarchs.
You may not agree with the methods or the nuances within the woke movement, but is this really the movement that deserves to be the target of your fury in the 21st century?
If so, you should ask yourself why.
Why does the woke culture bother you more than patriarchy, racism, neocolonialism, exploitation of labour and resources worldwide?
Of all the things you could direct your anger to, why do you choose the movement that targets discrimination and injustice in our world?
Recently, I’ve read a brilliant article here on Medium talking about tabooing of female breasts and how that fits in the general suppression of female bodies in our patriarchal societies.
Many, again, not so shockingly, men have commented criticizing the author for picking this topic of all the issues women in the world are dealing with.
Don’t you love it when men tell women what they should be fighting against/for instead?
Women in the 70s were being criticized for being a feminist in the first place, in even left-wing groups, because:
“Was that really the most important thing to talk about when all the working-class was suffering under the same system?”
“Shouldn’t you all be good comrades and ignore sexism, since it’s in the end a by-product of capitalism and will disappear the moment it’s toppled down?”
We have observed how women were, once again, controlled or deprived of choice in the communist states that were built.
You even observe sexism within left-wing organizations themselves, with women being told their struggles are not real, or that they don’t deserve the urgency they are addressed with by feminists.
In that sense, when people target “identity politics” today, I don’t have empathy.
It was the same then, it is the same now.
Critique of “identity politics”* comes from people who don’t care about women, or LGBTQI, or people of colour, or people in the non-West.
*I like to put identity politics in quotation marks because I don’t believe identity-based movements are the source of identity politics. If anything, they exist because there is identity politics in the world; patriarchy, racism, structural discrimination, Eurocentrism, you name it.
