Diversity, Equity, Inclusion. Basically the right wing’s latest boogeymen to scare up their base. Think how “woke” has been co-opted and used by pundits to make people angry.
You’ve got the causality reversed. What “makes people angry” is what certain progressives believe and say and do. Co-opting the label “woke” just gives people a way to communicate about those ideas; it doesn’t create the anger.
People propose lots of changes, most get shot down and rejected by society because they’re bad ideas. Go look at all the dead-end ideas from the 1960s. Most of what falls within the umbrella of “woke” today will meet the same fate.
For example, I’m pretty sure that 10 years from now the racial affinity groups in my 5th grader’s school are going to be an embarrassing idea liberals will pretend never happened, rather than being the future of race relations in America.
My litmus test for what’s real versus manufactured outrage is running things by my CNN-watching, Biden-voting immigrant parents. Most woke ideas get a derisive snort from my dad, though he’s quite worked up over racial preferences, affinity groups, and the idea that you can’t be racist towards whites. My mom, meanwhile, got very worked up over the 2020 riots and mass immigration from Latin America. She approvingly texted me Trump’s ban on DEI trainings in the federal government.
These are people who consume zero right wing content, so it’s not like they’re being socialized to be mad about stuff that they wouldn’t otherwise be mad about. In fact it’s the opposite—they would be madder if CNN wasn’t careful to hide the full scope of what woke people think and believe.
For example the collection of beliefs that led Google to engineer an AI that draws pictures of black Nazis. That did percolate up to CNN, because it was so silly. But all the stuff that these engineers learned about race in college that led them to make the AI this way doesn’t make it to CNN.
Nor does it refer to a “boogeyman”—those ideas definitely exist and aren’t made up, regardless of what you choose to label them: https://web.archive.org/web/20211108155321/https://freddiede...