About 25 years.
What's the difference between Woke and Political Correctness?
Submitted 2 hours ago by SwissArmyKazoo@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
wjrii@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
They are the same thing. The name just has to update every now and then to stay trendy.
The technical name: “Treating all people like they are people” isn’t real popular with bigots, so they come up with their own term, which they use mockingly to convince others that it’s bad to “Treat all people like they are people.”
The topics change as the world progresses around them, but nonetheless they cling to any shred of difference they can find in people and vilify the “others”.
isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 hour ago
To conservatives they’re the same thing. Every decade or so conservatives pick a new loose catch-all term to describe everything they hate. It’s necessary to organize an otherwise empty philosophy. There have been a whole series of these. After awhile, the general public recognizes them as the bad faith labels they are. The following terms have all been used in the exact same way by conservatives over they years:
- Woke
- Politically correct
- Gay
- Cosmopolitan
- Intellectual
- Elite/Ivory Tower
- Subversive
- Degenerate
- Bolshevik/Red
- Untermensch
Note, most of these terms have actual definitions outside of the one used by conservatives. Bolshevism for instance is an actual political philosophy and movement. You can go read books written by real historical and present Bolsheviks if you want. But when conservatives in the McCarthy era used the term Bolshevik, they weren’t referring to the actual political philosophy. Anyone trying to push for absolutely any modicum of social change or improvement was slandered as a Bolshevik. You could be the CEO of a major company, completely onboard with the capitalist enterprise. But if you advocated for desegregation, conservatives would call you “Red” or “a Bolshevik.” As used by conservatives, these terms have no real meaning beyond “bad.” Hell, sometimes people count as “woke” simply because of who they are. Transgender people are “woke” regardless of their actual beliefs. You could be a conservative Catholic trans woman who wants nothing more than to marry a cisgender husband, adopt six kids, and go to church every Sunday. You would still be “woke” to conservatives.
Now, if you want to talk about the actual definition of “woke” and “political correctness” before they became conservative dog whistles? AFAIK, political correctness never had any widely used definition outside of conservative fever swamps. Woke, however, was originally a term from the left, referring to anyone that was actively mindful of social injustice.
You can practice this yourself. Listen to a conservative rant about the people they hate. Whenever they use the word “woke,” try substituting one of the historical terms in your mind. You’ll find they work just as well. This is possible because ultimately they mean nothing other than “bad.”
HubertManne@piefed.social 1 hour ago
both have been cooped an kinda ironically. Woke means to realize the bs going around you or the real power brokers vs the story line. ie how corpos and the rich do things and try to frame it like a problem with poor people or immigrants. PC talk is about language being more important than reality. like insisting non christians say merry xmass instead of happy holidays or the like.
frisbird@lemmy.ml 1 hour ago
Political correctness was about language and word choice, primarily aesthetics.
Woke comes from the black community about being aware of root causes of various problems and particularly how those root causes relate to class, race, patriarchy, and other forms of systemic and systematized forms of manipulation by the elite against everyone else.
dhork@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
I would argue there is a difference. PC language (at least the stuff that started being pushed in the late 80s) was primarily aimed at avoiding anything that might be considered offensive or exclusionary to certain groups.
I always connected the term “woke” to “awake” or “aware”. It goes beyond language, and into an understanding of social systems and why they have historically been biased toward certain groups, in ways that people ,right not have even b3en aware of at the time.
It is “PC” to edit a job description to use gender-neutral pronouns. It is “woke” to rewrite the entire job description to be attractive to a broader range of candidates from diverse backgrounds.
Astronut@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
The difference is that republicans are allergic to either of those and democrats embrace them!
MummifiedClient5000@feddit.dk 2 hours ago
My personal take:
Political correctness may have started out as a means to treat minorities better by weeding out obvious slurs from language, but ended up weaponized and used as a way to shut down any mentions of minorities. It is what the anti-woke crowd mimic when they claim that they don’t see skin colour and don’t care about gender.
Compared to PC, woke acknowledges that it is abusive towards minorities to ignore them.
untorquer@quokk.au 1 hour ago
PC: We’ll used nicer language to express our bigotry.
Woke: I realize some of my inherited ideology is bigoted, doesn’t represent my values, and I’m fixing it.
SwissArmyKazoo@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
I ain’t no chud or right wing Cuntbag Fucktard. I’m just curious to see if people are in the wrong for calling those two the very same deal if they’re just two distinct ideologies
DougPiranha42@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
But these are not ideologies, they’re derogatory terms.
alexc@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
They are both derogatory terms employed by the right to denigrate what is more broadly known as “all humans have equal rights”. PC is a more 90’s term, while Woke is the 2020’s equivalent