This Tuesday Topics installment, with which I intend to commence some kind of diminuendo in the series, will provide examples of the capturing/co-opting of
- education
- being “woke” (a century later)
- grammar
- and even a funeral
Indoctrination of high school students
“An activist group in California has paid nearly 100 public high schoolers $1,400 each to learn how to fight for racial and social justice, The Free Press has learned.
. . .
“It’s unclear which students are eligible for the stipends, but the organization’s website states its “leadership development” programs operate “with a focus on low income youth, youth of color, LGBTQ youth, foster youth, and immigrant youth.”
. . .
“’The way that they are handing scripts to students, even the words coming out of the students’ mouths, the teacher added, ‘it just feels like indoctrination and not information.’
https://www.thefp.com/p/californians-for-justice-paid-1400-highschoolers
This is just one more way that actual education is being supplanted by other things, including SEL (Social and Emotional Learning), ideologically rooted organizations, and more. The very idea of “woke” ought to be seriously engaged and challenged, not assumed—and certainly not co-opted by outside organizations who stoop to paying teenagers good money to infiltrate and become their activists. Can anyone say “Hitler Youth” or Lenin’s “Young Pioneers“?
Being awakened to “woke”
It was probably only 3 years ago that I was introduced to the term “woke.” Someone I’ve known at arm’s length for most of my life referred me to a “Wokish” dictionary, and I initially thought it was a misspelling of “Wookish,” as in the Wookies of Star Wars. Maybe someone had created a dictionary like the Klingon dictionary of Star Trek? I quickly learned otherwise.
Some have strongly implied on Facebook that being “woke” is what Jesus would have been. I’m not sure about that. If it means being awakened to bona fide racial injustice, Jesus would have been for it, and so am I, but I don’t really think much of that is needed anymore. Not in the U.S. Furthermore, to cast a contemporary epithet back 2000 years onto Jesus is as unhelpful as it is anachronistic. If being woke means thinking all of western society is captured by white supremacy and white privilege, I reject it.
“Woke antisemitism” is also a thing now, as we are hearing about on college campuses. This essay is worth reading:
https://www.buttonslives.news/p/a-quick-explainer-on-woke-antisemitism
As my readers will know, I am not a Zionist of any kind, and I do think being antisemitic is quite distinct from being Anti-Israeli (which I also am not), despite the connections. A decent person, let alone a Christian, should not be anti- any person or people group as such. It is difficult to achieve a logical harmony between “woke antisemitism” and “woke antiracism.” The former is very real and incorporates being against the Jews as people, all the while nominally claiming to stand for injustice. Woke antiracism would appear to rule out antisemitism categorically, if it weren’t for so-called “white privilege.” The whole thing becomes extra-thorny when one realizes that Jews are being included as “whites” now, despite the holocaust history. Calling for the extermination of Jews (or any other people group) is always wrong, whether it’s because of one’s interest in Naziism, or one’s support for Hamas or other Muslim forces, or one’s distaste for oil interests, or one’s aversion to anything that smacks of of “Judeo-Christian” anything. The existence of “woke antisemitism” certainly casts aspersions on any wokeness by mere association.
A black acquaintance I’ve known of for several decades asserted that being woke had saved his life at times. I didn’t know what that meant, but I tried to respect it. I’ve just today read a jaded but pretty on-target definition of “wokish” (if not “woke”), though:
“Wokish people” are practitioners of intellectual dishonesty who use real or perceived social injustices—i.e., unfair differences in access to opportunity based on ethnic, gender, or other inherent traits—as substrate to push knowingly false and intentionally damaging ideas while aggressively punishing dissenters. Wokish people are to social justice what people like Jerry Falwell and Ted Haggard are to the message of Jesus Christ: Insincere, self-dealing, and ugly to the core. Kevin Beck substack
What was being woke? And what is being “woke” today? Wikipedia captures the difference:
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) originally meaning alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights. – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke#
Here is a fair discussion of the terminology viz. culture: https://www.tidalequality.com/blog/what-is-wokeism
Inasmuch as anything “woke” is attached to the BLM movement, it must be seriously questioned. Not that BL don’t M. Of course they do. But BLM is, like pretty much every other movement, ideologically captured.
Inasmuch as “stay woke” (grammatically awkward as that is) means to stay alert for injustice, such as being falsely accused of a crime, per Lead Belly in his song “Scottsboro Boys,” such a posture should be upheld. However, being alert to racially charged situations in the 1930s is not the same as BLM activism 90 years later. A lynching in the deep South in 1930 is one thing. Rodney King was another, as far as I know. And all the world deserves to know that the George Floyd incident was quite another. Even most non-wokes consider that nothing but a murder, because they don’t know anything else. It was not what was widely known. So much was concealed during 2020 and beyond. (More was later published by a Minneapolis news journalist whose husband was on the police force; partial truths and misleading assertions have become part and parcel of aligning oneself with “woke” ideology.) The idea of being, or staying, woke has been captured and re-appropriated. Therefore, the connections with the original uses of the word are no longer valid.
Certain poor treatment of women in some churches doesn’t mean women’s rights or women preachers will be a cause for me. Certain poor treatment of blacks, homosexuals, and trans-identifying people doesn’t mean “staying woke” will be a cause for me, either.
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I am trying to bring this Tuesday Topics series to a more-or-less natural close. That doesn’t mean it will happen. It means I’m tired. And it also means I’m starting a new series next week. Looking toward that, and trying to thin my collection of material, I will share one more thing today.
Gender: four kinds of messed-up
A report on the child of Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck caught my eye. It is yet another gender story, and it’s messed up in four respects.
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You don’t co-opt a funeral for your own purposes, no matter who you are or what they are.
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You don’t give yourself a nickname.
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You can say you’re “non-binary” all you want, but that doesn’t change your sex (which until recently was also your “gender”).
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You don’t force bad grammar and word use on people in order to force your point of view. One thing takes a singular pronoun. So, a clause with the subject “the teen” (singular) is not properly continued with the pronoun “their.” The teen began her speech, not “their speech.” (Even “The teen began its speech” would have been better. If you want to be stupid about sex/gender/identity, at least be grammatically correct.) Duh. I can’t believe we’re in a time that one even needs to say stuff like this. . . . Teenaged, peer-influenced nonsense is one thing, but a supposedly journalistically driven enterprise such as MSN.com should rise above.
Earnestly Speaking 