| HN Mirror

Sure, glad to help. I can give more detail including etymology.

"Woke" originally meant that a person has "awoken" to the true nature of society. They see the thing that others do not see! Unfortunately, it seems that that's also the only thing they see, or the only thing they care about. And that thing is racial / identity-group conflict. As I say, they cheerfully sacrifice principles like freedom of speech, meritocracy, proportionality, hard-fought civil rights ideals, etc., when it's inconvenient for the fight they want to pick in the moment. I think that, to a first approximation, when anyone says "Is this going too far?", they get accused of sympathizing with the oppressors and shamed or cast out, so the group goes farther, and we are seeing the results of iterating this process for decades. A peak moment was tearing down a statue of Abraham Lincoln, apparently in the name of anticolonialism.

That's the woke people themselves, a small, aggressive, highly vocal group with outsized influence. (There's also a larger group of relatively normal people with a surface-level understanding of it who go along with most of it; I think if they understood and believed all the details, most of them would recoil.) (Incidentally, most people instinctively understand that aggressively attacking others is bad, but via concepts like "microaggressions" and "privilege", the woke frequently find reasons to think that someone else attacked first.)

Then there's the legal and corporate environment. Civil rights legislation brought laws against discrimination and creating a hostile environment for identity groups in companies. In the absence of mind-reading, a claim of discrimination is difficult to prove or disprove, and a "hostile environment" could be interpreted in many ways. I think that the "game of telephone" chain from the text of the law, to the interpretation of the law (and evidentiary standards) in courts, to lawyers' understanding, to what company lawyers tell management, to what sticks in management's brain and gets implemented, has yielded essentially "If you offend the woke identity groups, then that puts you at significant legal risk, so best appease them. Also it's good to pay them lip service, host Pride events, etc., because that reduces legal risk." Additionally, some portion of management themselves are woke, and some additional portion earnestly believe in civil rights as a cause and tend to take the woke at their word when they claim their policies are the right and proper next steps. And finally, on a personal level, expressing dissent against a woke-aligned policy is, in many cases, perceived to put one's own career at risk (in some cases the lawyers may say it's a liability to keep a person like that; and, having seen cases of this, many people err on the side of caution, creating a "chilling effect").

So you get a lot of corporate policies meant to appease the woke. Some may be the exact policies the woke asked for. Others may be cynical appeasement, and by design they will be difficult to distinguish from the first type. Some policies are invented by well-intentioned people believing in civil rights principles. Some are the outcome of some kind of compromise.

It's not necessarily clear which of these should be called "woke policies", both in theory and in practice. It doesn't help that, whereas you could identify Democrat or Republican policies by looking at official websites, and probably get reasonable consensus on what are "conservative policies" or "progressive policies" based on prominent self-identified conservative figures and institutions, the woke do not call themselves "woke" (with occasional exceptions like "Woke Kindergarten") and object to anyone else calling them that; it's understood to be a pejorative. The woke will tend to call themselves advocates of civil rights or of specific groups' rights, and try to blur any distinctions between the classic civil rights movement which enjoys majority support (things like non-discrimination and gay marriage) and what they're trying to do (things like discriminating in favor of their identity groups and policing pronouns). This serves to make the case that anyone who disagrees with them is a 1950s Jim Crow racist, and anyone who isn't a 1950s Jim Crow racist must agree with them, which is useful for coercing acquiescence and support. It also makes it harder for the rest of us to notice the patterns and call out the damage that the woke have done and are likely to do. But I think we're getting there.