> Consider, for example, the most effective civil rights president in US history (LBJ) was a racist: did we need to solve his prejudice first? Would that have done anything positive?
The current iteration of the civil rights movement is solving a different problem than that of 1968. Due to LBJ's actions, minorities are equal under the law. You can't just pass laws to make them more equal. They already are.
But if you look around, they clearly aren't, so the question becomes, well why not? If you subscribe to woke ideology, the answer is something like "pervasive cultural and systemic biases across various aspects of society". I'll draw a parallel to another evergreen topic, "cancel culture". The idea being that a large group of distributed people can ruin someone's life by changing how they interact with that person and making them a pariah.
Well many of these systemic biases are similar, if less sudden. People and systems trained to see or treat people as lesser. How do you solve that problem? I only see one solution: to get the distributed group of people to be aware of and ultimately counteract those biases, to undue the incidental cancellation of these people. And what is that but raising awareness of and reducing those ingrained prejudices.
All of the other approaches are things that routinely get called "reverse-racist" themselves, things like affirmative action and such which ignore the individual.
> "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
And the response to this is that while your difficulties are particular to you, it's likely that the best tools and practices to empower you when you are mistreated are allies who are willing to stand up for you agains the person mistreating you. As in the limit, if no one believes you are being mistreated except you, you will have no recourse.
There's no law that says that PG isn't allowed to say things that make GGP uncomfortable. In fact, there's laws that say that we can't prevent PG from doing that. All we can hope for is that said mistreatment is recognized by others, and that people pressure him to correct his behavior.
Wokeness is a recognition that this is a political (in the sense of like human-interaction, not election-related), not legal issue.
I think there's a means-ends thing going on here. Everything you say here is very plausible.
The problem with Wokeism (a term I don't like btw) is the means. We all broadly agree on the ends.
The individualist things this type of change can be bottom-up (individual -> group) and the wokeist wants it to be top-down (group -> individual).
In the former case the intuition is that we aren't going to be able to solve the group problem, so starting at the group level is a waste of time and a bit tyrannical. All we can do is empower individuals who, over time, will aggregate and approximately solve the group problem.
I agree however that it has to be both top-down and bottom-up. I think wokeism as ideology of over-reaction, is towards the extreme end of that top-down approach.
The current iteration of the civil rights movement is solving a different problem than that of 1968. Due to LBJ's actions, minorities are equal under the law. You can't just pass laws to make them more equal. They already are.
But if you look around, they clearly aren't, so the question becomes, well why not? If you subscribe to woke ideology, the answer is something like "pervasive cultural and systemic biases across various aspects of society". I'll draw a parallel to another evergreen topic, "cancel culture". The idea being that a large group of distributed people can ruin someone's life by changing how they interact with that person and making them a pariah.
Well many of these systemic biases are similar, if less sudden. People and systems trained to see or treat people as lesser. How do you solve that problem? I only see one solution: to get the distributed group of people to be aware of and ultimately counteract those biases, to undue the incidental cancellation of these people. And what is that but raising awareness of and reducing those ingrained prejudices.
All of the other approaches are things that routinely get called "reverse-racist" themselves, things like affirmative action and such which ignore the individual.
> "My difficulties are particular to me, and all I want is to be able to solve them. I don't want to participate or "ally" with a society-wide war against the possibility I will be misunderstood or mistreated; rather I simply want the rules (,tools, practices) in place to empower me when I am."
And the response to this is that while your difficulties are particular to you, it's likely that the best tools and practices to empower you when you are mistreated are allies who are willing to stand up for you agains the person mistreating you. As in the limit, if no one believes you are being mistreated except you, you will have no recourse.
There's no law that says that PG isn't allowed to say things that make GGP uncomfortable. In fact, there's laws that say that we can't prevent PG from doing that. All we can hope for is that said mistreatment is recognized by others, and that people pressure him to correct his behavior.
Wokeness is a recognition that this is a political (in the sense of like human-interaction, not election-related), not legal issue.