How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement That Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason: 1 (None)

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Racial divisions are rehabilitated in the name of anti-racism. Women’s rights are destroyed in the name of trans rights. Ordinary people are demonised as bigots, while virtue-signalling (but exploitative) corporations pose as radical. We aim to look at how, where and why individual and structural racism impacts people of colour from all walks of life. It is often followed by the similarly negative term ‘snowflake’ – a word that has divisive connotations in the UK – and is frequently used in arguments online and debates in the media to belittle people with left leaning viewpoints. Frequently people of colour. How Woke Won looks at what lies behind the woke world view. It asks how one way of thinking about gender and race has won out over all others. It considers the influence of identity politics and the lure of victimhood in shaping how we relate to others. It argues that elite condescension towards the working class translates into an illiberal and censorious culture.

woke’ was hijacked to silence people of colour How the word ‘woke’ was hijacked to silence people of colour

The book is a comprehensive and detailed survey of the ways in which woke thought and practice have corrupted so many of the institutions comprising civil society. It has done this by adopting the intellectual architecture of Critical Theory which holds that imbalances of power in society are hidden from view by dominant cultural structures, such as language and the way knowledge is imparted. Only by exposing these structures is it possible to reveal the extent to which the ‘oppressed’ are held in subjugation by the ‘oppressors’.As it turns out, the politician we’re talking about here is actually London mayor Sadiq Khan. This week, he has jettisoned his boring responsibilities in Britain’s capital to embark on a five-day trip to the US. On the tour so far, he’s schmoozed with everyone from tech entrepreneurs and celebrities to New York’s mayor and Hillary Clinton. There has been much criticism of taking down statues as the “rewriting of history”, but little recognition that many statues themselves were erected to substantiate an often distorted historical narrative. Monuments, whether to Winston Churchill or to the Bristol slaver Edward Colston, or indeed to Mary Wollstonecraft, are not just dumb pieces of stone. Each is designed to tell a particular story. Until Russell Brand is found guilty of a criminal offence, we must assume he is innocent. This means taking the criminal allegations made against him seriously while, at the same time, not automatically believing those who claim to have been sexually assaulted by him, simply because they are women. With more women now coming forward with accusations against Brand, we need to maintain this scepticism.

The genius of Ronnie O’Sullivan - spiked

HOW WOKE WON: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason. Joanna Williams, (London: Spiked, 2022) To discuss her new book How Woke Won, Joanna Williams joins Steven Edginton in the latest Off Script podcast. Williams, a columnist with spiked, a former academic at the UK’s University of Kent, and founder of the think tank CIEO, is a fearless critic of contemporary phenomena, such as ‘cancel culture’, ‘diversity’, and ‘gender neutrality’ — all manifestations of woke. Wokes does not seek to engage in reasoned debate but simply to denounce and tear down those deemed to have transgressed the norms of identity politics. But the problem is more pressing because “woke thinking has come to be accepted as common sense” by a cultural elite that dominates the media, corporate life, and the academy, making dissent increasingly difficult and perilous. Welcome to the world of ‘woke’ anti-racism; just one manifestation of the phenomenon of wokeness that has swept across the West, transforming school curricula, workplace relations, competitive sports, policing, politics, history, free speech, and the administration of justice. British author Joanna Williams thinks this transformation is so complete that she is provoked to declare woke has triumphed in her important new book, How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason.If being ‘woke’ is a bad thing, the subtext is that speaking out about racial inequalities is a bad thing. The use of this word is a convenient veil. Joanna’s writing has been published widely in the UK and the US including The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, The Spectator, The Guardian, The New York Post and American Conservative. Far from being progressive, woke twists older ideas of racial and sexual equality beyond all recognition. It leaves us unable to defend women’s rights and pushes us to judge people according to the colour of their skin. Woke thinking benefits only a small minority at the very top of society. The intention of this word was for it to have a positive outcome for a minority group,’ he explains. ‘But when other groups feel threatened or challenged by it, they might want to subvert it in some way. And by using the enemy’s weapons, that makes it an even more powerful tool for them.’ How does this impact people of colour?

Sadiq Khan should stick to his day job - spiked

How Woke Won: The Elitist Movement that Threatens Democracy, Tolerance and Reason is a timely call to arms. It is also a reminder that what critics of woke need is, firstly, courage to speak out in the certain knowledge that they are not lone voices and that woke is not popular. The second thing critics of woke need is determination to mount a rigorous and persistent defence of free speech. We do not know what this man’s motive was – reports suggest he was staying in a homeless shelter. But given all the flak Chappelle has taken of late, it’s hard for the mind not to turn to the deeply intolerant climate we find ourselves in. The climate in which comedians like Chappelle are routinely accused of inflicting ‘violence’ upon various communities, shamed as bigots with blood on their hands, merely for telling jokes about those communities. This is one of the most dangerous ideas of our time. For if you concede that jokes are violence, then some people will start to see violence as a legitimate response to jokes. Woke activists are obsessed with race and gender identity to the exclusion of almost all other issues. Woke describes a moral sensibility that insists upon putting people into identity boxes and then arranging the boxes into hierarchies of privilege and oppression, with some groups in need of ‘uplifting’ while others must beg atonement.” (p. 2)Very well written and informative analysis of the woke movement ,it’s insidious progress , and capture of ,first the elite, then the mainstream . If we want to discuss the rewriting of history, those words are as good a place to start as any. For this is the same Rhodes who believed that non-white areas of the world were “inhabited by the most despicable specimen of human being” needing to be “brought under Anglo-Saxon influence”. It’s the “not essentially racist” colonialism about which the Liberal politician Charles Wentworth Dilke could boast that “nature seems to intend the English for a race of officers, to direct and guide the cheap labour of Eastern peoples”. It’s the empire so modernising that during the course of British rule, India’s share of the world economy fell from 23% to less than 4%. Biggar is not against the rewriting of history. He just wants to rewrite it with his own myths.