“OK, my daughter loves Harriet Tubman. Tell me what you got!” she says. I explain our product, how we use historical women to teach girls about their worth and potential. The mother says: “But is it woke? I mean, I don’t want to teach my daughter about woke.”
And these people feel qualified to teach history.
The follow-up paragraph is even more amazing, because (like all conservatives) she can’t even say what “woke” is.
And that’s the really insidious part. The teacher is too ignorant of what she is ignorant of. If Harriet Tubman “might be too woke” then how would this women teach the nuance of protests? Of sit ins? Letters from a Birmingham jail? Much less modern protests. Her daughter is going to grow confidently saying things like
“I know all about black history, just not the woke stuff.”
And not even understand the tragic irony.
Or she’ll learn on her own later. It’s sad, but many do it. The line of thinking of “we used to treat black people in utterly horrific ways” -> “we freed them but took a long time to give them the same rights” -> “they’re still mad and saying that racism still is a systemic problem” -> “why” is a path that many white Americans with intellectual curiosity have tread. Some don’t like the answers because they come with expectations, responsibility, guilt, and shame. Others decide that it doesn’t matter and accept what is learned.
It’s a shame she has to start there, but we have to believe that these indoctrinated children aren’t doomed
Yes it does. It means you don’t trust politicians or the system, you reexamine your beliefs and look at it critically.
If you don’t think there’s a fascist threat in our country right now, there’s people who are literally burning “woke” books and firing elected “woke” prosecutors. They’re using the word “woke” fairly correctly without understanding what it means, ironically enough, because “non-woke” is whatever lies the party spreads and “woke” is anything that contradicts that
if defining words is that easy for you, can you tell me: “what is a woman?”
some words are more subjective then others and for many feelings and emotions are more important then objective facts to define anything.
Right, so give a vague definition then. Give a conditional definiton. Say “woke is when black people are treated like humans and stuff, you know, like when they say marital rape is bad”. They won’t though, because while that is exactly what it means, they also know they can’t say it out loud.
“Woke” is the thing that opposes their horrible and reprehensible ideas, and they know it. Hell, when DeSantis’ lawyer had to define it in court he went with “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” It’s weird though, why haven’t conservatives just grasped on to this definition? Because “woke” is a dogwhistle for “someone who isn’t a trash human like me”.
If you want to define “woman”, I can do way better than a vague definition though. Of course, the question itself is in bad faith, but I don’t give a shit. In terms of gender: “A woman is anyone who wants to call themselves a woman and wants to be called a woman by others.”
Just as an aside, I’m of the opinion gender is a stupid concept anyway and we should get rid of it entirely.
There are words that are notoriously difficult to define in such a way that every edge case is covered. For those words we use criteria. Listing off essential attributes and marking the entire list as provisionally sufficient. The Greeks figured this out 25 centuries ago, just a fyi. I know it is hard for conservatives to keep up with modern ideas but 2 and a half millennium should be enough time.
A women is one of the sexes, usually identified by their genitals. It is biological.
Not to conflate with feminine, which is one of the genders at the end of the gender spectrum. Which is sociological.
It isn’t so hard once you listen to the science and understand the difference between Biology and Sociology.
