On Wokeness and the such...

We all know that conservatives talking about 'Woke' policies and 'Woke' this and 'Woke' that are really talking about race. And it's not the first time they've weaponized a word in order to try to thinly veil their racism:

On June 14, 1862, the New York Times published an editorial titled “The Mystery of Negrophilism.” The essay questioned the origins of white Americans’ “extraordinary interest in the negro” and called the “passion for the American negro” an “entirely abnormal…phenomenon.” During the Antebellum period, Southerners pathologized Northern whites’ intolerable friendliness—their “liking negroes”—as “negrophilism.” They chided abolitionists as “negro-maniacs” obsessed with “negro interest.” It was untenable for citizens of a slaveholding nation to harbor human affection toward enslaved descendants of Africa—a continent, the author wrote (purportedly quoting then–Secretary of State William Seward), that “nature had fortified against civilization.” White enslavers positioned enslaved Black people as chattel partly by excluding them from the emotional bonds that facilitate civil society.

@motherjones

Oh, it's not the first (or last) time that racist conservatives will try to devalue and destroy any semblance or recognition of the suffering of people that they consider 'other'. It's part of the Repug playbook right now, and it was part of their playbook before.  It's not something that is going to go away. That's going to stay because it's the politics of grievance and the fear of losing privilege.

And this really kind of wrapped it all up nicely:

Conservatives’ fanaticism around “wokeness” also has no anchor in logic, no real definition, and must also be fabricated ad nauseam. Like the southern phobia around negrophilism, the phobia of wokeness is malicious, yet sensible—for the anti-woke, who are paranoid that a society saturated with racial sympathy would turn on a “negro axis.” The possibility of a Black sociopolitical orientation, as Fanon said, causes “fear and revulsion.”

Republicans felt the world tilt along a “woke” axis after the global wave of support for the Black Lives Matter movement in response to George Floyd’s murder in 2020. The collective grief over Floyd’s death triggered racial sympathy across the globe, and the effects were evident in the United States. 

@motherjones

So that's why they cannot really define 'Woke'. That's why they cannot explain why they want to revisit history to white-wash it. That's why Critical Race Theory is their boogieman. That's why they want to disenfranchise Black voters. Because saying what 'Woke' means to them, the Repugs and assorted racists who rail against our 'Wokeness' would be left with nothing but their fear and loathing to shroud them. 

XOXO