The Woke Wave and Left Liberalism

The prevailing issue with this is that a lot of young people see these leftist woke initiatives and think they have to act and behave like everybody else in the group if they want to fight for what they think is right.

The Narrative World    03-Sep-2024   
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INTRODUCTION
 
Imagine this! You just bought a brand new car with your first salary. You go on a long drive with your friends and get yourself a few burgers and coke from McDonald’s. You are blasting off the greatest 2000s Eminem hits on your B&O stereo speakers. Just chilling out and having a blast. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?
 
If you said yes, then I am sorry, but you are getting cancelled.
 
“How dare you buy products from a company like McDonald’s that has openly supported Israel for its genocide in Gaza?”
 
“How dare you drink Coca-Cola, which actively profits millions from the factories they have established on the stolen Palestinian land?”
 
“How dare you support an artist like Eminem who has had problematic lyrics in his songs from ages?”
 
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It is not me who is saying all these. This is what you would hear normally nowadays because it is 2024, and according to the left liberal wokes, you are not woke enough. I am pretty sure if you just go back in time and narrate this to a high schooler in the 1940s, he would think this is some sort of futuristic authoritarian dystopia.
 
Over the past few years, a radical left ideology has been slowly gaining traction, conquering the major pillars of our society. It is an ideology that hides itself under the veil of social justice and equality, but in reality, it is nothing more than mere performative activism.
 
With the rise of cancel culture and white knights of political correctness, it would be foolish of me to assume you have never seen or actually been a victim of the woke culture.
 
You may wonder what is wokeism and how the left liberal opportunists have hijacked this as a medium to spread their political propaganda. Well, that’s a story in itself.
 
Let’s rewind a bit and get to know how wokeism really started.
 
ORIGIN AND PRESENT ITERATION
 
The difficulty with defining a term such as woke is that it is quite vague and its meanings differ with people. However, to establish a base, let’s look at the definition by Merriam-Webster, which states woke as “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice.”
 
The term "woke" has its roots in African American vernacular English, originally meaning alertness to social prejudice and discrimination and being at the forefront for social justice.
 
To quote Barbara Lee,
 
“But we will only succeed if we reject the growing pressure to retreat into cynicism and hopelessness.… We have a moral obligation to "stay woke," take a stand, and be active, challenging injustices and racism in our communities and fighting hatred and discrimination wherever it rises.”
 
However, as the years passed, the term gained quite the popularity, especially because of the BLACK LIVES MATTER movement, and as the term gained the mainstream identity, its domain has expanded well beyond racial and social justice to gender, LGBTQ+ rights, environmentalism, feminism, body positivity, and much more.
 
THE INVISIBLE KNOT BETWEEN LEFT LIBERALISM AND WOKEISM
 
The thing that makes this much more interesting is that all of the aforementioned issues are championed by the liberal left and, in one form or another, have been turned into sort of a reform.
 
This brings a new perspective to the entire thing. It is not just that we are labelling everything that the liberals do as woke, but the agendas and ideologies of both parties somehow intersect, which has made the left liberals jump into the bandwagon and push their agenda through the woke movements.
 
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The Oxford English Dictionary in 1997 had written about political correctness as “conformity to a body of liberal or radical opinion on social matters, characterised by advocacy of approved views and the rejection of language and behaviour considered discriminatory or offensive,” which I believe is at the heart of left liberal wokeism.
 
AGENDAS
 
We are not unfamiliar with the agenda of the leftists and liberals, and as the woke culture has gained traction over these past few years, they have used it as their messenger to push forward their propaganda. 
 
Take the LGBTQIA+ movement, for example. What was once started as a fight for equal rights and legalisation of same-sex marriage has quickly delved into “gender pronouns," "transition,” and “representation on the basis of sexuality.”
 
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One of the Youtubers I follow is Amir Odom. In one of his videos titled 5 reasons why I left the left and woke ideology, he says, “Why should what I do in private automatically define my worldview, politics, habits, and culture? Straight people do not make being straight their entire identity, but for some reason, for gays that is their entire identity, and for some reason, me saying all these automatically makes me a homophobic person for some reason even if I am gay. It does not make sense.”
 
Another such liberal agenda is unnecessary gender and racial diversification. As someone who has been into pop culture for quite a while, this makes me furious. You see your favourite characters being slaughtered in front of you in the name of diversification.
 
The Ghostbusters reboot, Scooby-Doo, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman adaptations, etc. all have undergone changes in the name of diversification that were not necessary in the first place.
 
This diversification thingy is nothing new, as it has been an active topic of protest for the left liberals for years, but with the woke culture and movement on the rise, it has gained more traction than ever. Not just in pop culture, it has solidified its roots in academia, sports, administration, and more.
 
They say it is to curb the racism and sexism to strive for equality, which is very ironic because you are discriminating against one side to favour another.
 
People, whatever race, gender, and sexual orientation, should be chosen based on their ability and skill set, definitely not to fit into some bizarre diversity model.
 
They all went from “we don’t want to be judged on the basis of our colour, gender, and orientation” to being exactly judged by these parameters. Swinging the pendulum disproportionately does not increase equality, does it?
 
HAS THE LEFT LIBERAL WOKEISM GONE TOO FAR?
 
To spare you some time, yes, it has. Just look around yourself. It is an absolute freak show that is going on. You see activists splashing soup over the Mona Lisa, climate change protesters taping themselves to the road to disrupt the traffic, and even LGBTQIA+ activists influencing kids via cartoons and movies.
 
The prevailing issue with this is that a lot of young people see these leftist woke initiatives and think they have to act and behave like everybody else in the group if they want to fight for what they think is right, and it's self-destructive because it sets them up in a narrow lane that becomes more and more difficult to escape from as they progressively get conditioned to it.
 
In today’s society that is plagued by this very notion of left liberal wokeism, it just takes for you to have an opinion, and suddenly you are labelled as a transphobe, homophobe, misogynist, and bigot.
 
Funnily enough, the woke movement in its original sense called for freedom of speech, but now if you speak your mind and exercise your freedom, you would be cancelled and called out names just because your opinions do not coincide with theirs.
 
You just simply cannot claim woke is about caring when you viciously go after people who do not unconditionally agree to everything you personally believe.
 
CONCLUSION
 
Woke is a conversation in which only one side is allowed to speak. With their intolerance and over-the-top bizarre methods to support their cause, left liberal wokeism in the modern world could not be a boon, but that does not mean it is entirely evil.
 
After all, it has helped the African-Americans to get the much-needed recognition in postmodern society. It magnified the voices of actual victims of oppression and discrimination.
 
It is just that the essence of what is woke is lost and it has transitioned into performative. The right, as I believe, never thinks there is something wrong with the moral values of woke with their agenda supporting BLM, pride, or body positivity.
 
These things are in their own way admirable, but it becomes problematic when radical methods are used to force-feed these agendas into our mouths.
 
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Shubham Pati
Younginker
Puri, Odisha