Scared to be 'woke'? It’s time for progressives to take a stand in the culture wars | Nesrine Malik

explaining the nonsensical lyrics to a song: “Nobody knows what it means but it’s provocative. It gets the peopleDifferent permutations of “wokeness” have always been useful, leveraged by the right to portray

any social change as a matter of exuberant and unhinged vandalism to the status quo. This is not a new tactic : wokeness is the new “loony left” or “PC gone mad”, a swapping of terms to portray the left as an absurdity and threat which has been around since at least the 1950s. What is frustrating is that for a tactic that has been used for so long, progressive politicians still do not seem to have understood that the only way to beat the charge is to own it. To say when confronted with an issue presented as a matter of wokeness: “What do you mean by woke?” To expose and mock the term for its threadbareness, or to question its very pejorative use. I’ll take anything really at this point, as long as it is delivered with authenticity and swagger.

The signal the left sends by letting the term be claimed by the right is so powerful that Labour politicians are now in the bizarre position of denying the existence of the culture wars but being simultaneously afraid of being called woke. In an interview withearlier this year, Labour’s shadow culture secretary, Lucy Powell, showed how cornered and defeated progressives can be by letting the term “woke” go uncontested, while being entirely pinned down by its assaults.

Don’t laugh – “woke and anti-woke” is actually a good summary of Labour’s response when it comes to the culture wars. It’s risk avoidance. What it really means is that the party is taking the moral high ground on the basis that it cares only about tangible issues that impact people’s lives in a strict economic sense, but is otherwise, to put it bluntly, frit.

Seems a bit odd to lecture progressives after giving Hadley Freeman and Sonia Sodha column inches over the weekend to p*ss their pants in public for right wing causes, but go off, I guess.

Yea I am woke as fuck and if anyone has a problem with that they can fuck off.

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Scared to be 'woke'? It’s time for progressives to take a stand in the culture wars | Nesrine MalikTopics such as empire and racism cannot be reduced to a threadbare concept like ‘wokery’. Labour must campaign for social justice on its own terms, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik It is only by the second paragraph the author accuses someone they disagree with of publicly delivering a word salad before they then proceed to spend the next nine paragraphs delivering a word salad of their own. 0/5 stars.
Source: GuardianAus - 🏆 1. / 98 Read more »

Scared to be 'woke'? It’s time for progressives to take a stand in the culture wars | Nesrine MalikTopics such as empire and racism cannot be reduced to a threadbare concept like ‘wokery’. Labour must campaign for social justice on its own terms, says Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik It is only by the second paragraph the author accuses someone they disagree with of publicly delivering a word salad before they then proceed to spend the next nine paragraphs delivering a word salad of their own. 0/5 stars.
Source: GuardianAus - 🏆 1. / 98 Read more »