They've got a point!
They've got a point!
Thanks to the commenter who reminded me that it's not bad to be reminded that the term is only a pejorative because conservative racists made it so.
They've got a point!
Thanks to the commenter who reminded me that it's not bad to be reminded that the term is only a pejorative because conservative racists made it so.
when did woke folk bayt Nazis?
nazi germany doesn't get overthrown without resistance movements working tirelessly to fight for their rights back. french resistance, german resistance, italian anti-fascists, polish resistance, jewish resistance, and ukrainians who chose to liberate the concentration camps rather than make use of an opportunity to seek independence from moscow were all critical to allied victory in europe in 1945. and as is often the case in history, as soon as that was done, other oppressive forces such as stalin and the liberals of western europe sold out these freedom fighters installing a new world order of oppression. but we've continued working to get our liberation. you can discount our historical contributions all you want. it doesn't change the fact that the world only gets better when people who know the world is fucked work to get it unfucked.
french resistance, german resistance, italian anti-fascists, polish resistance, jewish resistance, and ukrainians who....
Right. Groups totally unrelated to the 'woke' thingy people are talking about in this thread e.g. here and here
It's not like we're going to learn anything useful about leftism from the USA. They've done nothing but ratchet their country rightward for decades.
underpants weevil has the context for the word wrong and playing to that doesn't prove your point the way you think it does. woke, as a term, belongs to the Black community, one of the, on the whole, most left leaning demographics out there. the term comes from a group that has been saying for 300 years that oppression anywhere represents oppression everywhere. it's a anti-colonial, non-national term. people fighting oppression are woke. people fighting on behalf of oppressors are not woke. don't use a nation's government as proof there's no leftist thought going on there, that's some ignorant divisive thinking that will prevent you from building the kinds of coalition you need to fight oppression. it seems like all of this comes down to that you've accepted the conservative rebranding of woke rather than taking the time to understand what it really means and help us reconnotate in order to resist this fascist takeover of language. the powers that be have the power to redenotate words and create newspeak, but we have the power of connotation. don't give them what they want like what you're doing
woke, as a term, belongs to the Black community
Which black community?
i'm not explaining Black politics or abolition movements to you. i'm not the one to do it and you're WAY off base about any of it so i won't be able to do it without getting really angry and unkind. but the history of liberation struggles are out there and relatively easy to find if you're willing to read up on political thinkers like Harriett Tubman, Malcom X, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr, bell hooks, Nikki Giovanni, Carter G Woodson, Rosa Parks, Daisey Bates, Fannie Lou Hamer, Audre Lorde, Clara Luper, Toni Morrison, and Bayard Rustin.
i'd point you to more contemporaries, but pan African liberation movements and anarchocommunist resistance groups in this moment are intentionally underground because the thought leaders are largely double or triple marginalized by their race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. so instead i'd point you to just reading up on for us by us mutual aid networks such as SW VA Mutual Aide which is seeking restitution and the restoration of right of prisoners held in one of America's most horrific maximum security state prisons.
also, i beg of you, when you talk about Black politics, capitalize the "B". leaving it lowercase makes you look like a performative shitlib who doesn't know shit about fuck about what pan African and abolitionist movements stand for. you criticize americans for not knowing about leftist politics but you alienate the most progressive and left americans by using the signifiers of white supremacy instead of the ones preferred by the very people you claim you want to coalition with world wide. which is part of why i say i can't explain it to you, because you're making me so fucking angry with this uninformed shit that it's making it impossible to coalition build.
inform yourself. read theory and history somewhere other than the eurocentric (any anglocentric society like america is inherently eurocentric before you say lemmy is amerocentric) dominated cesspit that is lemmy. and yes i saw your comment about how "inform yourself", "take the redpill", and "get woke" are all cringe to you, but you lack perspective and accuse the rest of us of lacking perspective, and it isn't helpful. its hurtful. and when you read theory, keep in mind the theorists most marxist-leninists read were white people investigating Black liberation struggles. and since stalin (the originator of the term marxist-leninist) died, 72 years have passed. there's new theory out there based one this entire lifetime of praxis. most of it generated by Black people seeking the answer to the question "what will it take for us to be free"
tldr: which Black community? the overarching Black community that's been pushed to the side starting 2600 years ago. the one people who look like me and sound like you refuse, as a whole, to listen to. the one that has a sense of community, oneness, and Ubuntu that is completely foreign to the eurocentric world view
the history of liberation struggles are out there and relatively easy to find if you’re willing to read up on political thinkers like Harriett Tubman, Malcom X, Frederick Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr, bell hooks, Nikki Giovanni, Carter G Woodson, Rosa Parks, Daisey Bates, Fannie Lou Hamer, Audre Lorde, Clara Luper, Toni Morrison, and Bayard Rustin.
Hahaha, ok, now you're objectively trolling. You say I should read up on liberation and "pan-Africanism" by reading 14 Usans and 0 non-Usans?! In the same comment as you write "read theory and history somewhere other than the eurocentric"?!? lmao
You're trying to colonise leftist internationalism. Why would we look to the USA instead of,e.g., Vietnam?
i'm blocking you because it's patently obvious you're a troll. i just want to outline the problems with how this conversation has gone down so that in the future you can coalition build better (though based on your stance that oppressed people in an oppressive nation are not worth listening to because they live in an oppressive nation, i suspect you don't believe in coalition building, but rather the failed doctrine of vanguard leftism).
this whole conversation began with you coming into this conversation with a white supremacist definition of an oppressed people's word. myself and others asked that you re-evaluate that term and instead doubled down on your notion that your understanding of the word is intrinsically superior on account of that you are further separated from the origins of the term than anyone else. obviously the thinkers, in the context of "you don't understand Black language" i brought up were going to be people who inherited their resistance forms from their enslaved ancestors from North America. so you shifted the goal posts to that i didn't represent pan Africanism properly because all of the thinkers i mentioned were from North America.
obviously i understand that pan Africanism is defined by thinkers all across the Black diaspora and within the African continent. For a full view of pan Africanism, one would need to also ingest the history of the Congolese people, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Africa, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Somalia, all particular hotbeds for the European rape of Africa. You would also need to read up on Marcus Garvey and Black supremacy as well as critiques of this notion written by leaders in Africa about why retributive colonialism should not be the aim of liberation movements because an oppressed person anywhere represents oppressed people everywhere. an honest history of Patrice Lumumba is one of the best starting points i can think of as he worked tirelessly to decolonize the Congo, eventually leading to his assassination (probably at the hands of the CIA).
but you said it yourself. your aim is not to build bridges or to gain understandings or to shift the future narrative. only to cut leftist thinkers in America out because they are American. we ask not to lead, but just to be at the table when it comes to international solidarity. and i'll fully admit i'm an imperfect ally. i work every day to hear my trans sisters, my Black brethren, and my indigenous forebears to understand how people who look like me have hurt them and prevented their ability to thrive. i look to the Taino, Mayan, Mexican, Uiygher, Igbo, Nez Perce, Ukrainian, Cambodian, Irish, Jewish, and Cherokee stories of persistence on the margins to better understand the tactics that will help a queer jewish anarcho-communist like me pass this story on so that descendents who will inherit my story can sit in the shade of trees i will never see. i have blind spots and i know this. but you being proud of your blind spots, and the fact that you refer to Black political thought through the hegemonic lens of white supremacy both in how you understand the word "woke" and how you use the word "Black" does not make you better than me. it makes you ignorant. the only difference is i admit to my ignorance and work to expand my world view. easily my biggest knowlege gap is the precolonial history of what is now the so-called United States and Canada and the African continet. this is on purpose by our opressors and i'm in active work to remedy this.
so anyway. i guess this is all a long winded way of saying i know i don't have the full picture. that doesn't make refusing to know what "woke" means and policing that online discussions of the term should take the white supremacist meaning good
also, i beg of you, when you talk about Black politics, capitalize the “B”. leaving it lowercase makes you look like a performative shitlib who doesn’t know shit about fuck about what pan African and abolitionist movements stand for. you criticize americans for not knowing about leftist politics but you alienate the most progressive and left americans by using the signifiers of white supremacy instead of the ones preferred by the very people you claim you want to coalition with world wide. which is part of why i say i can’t explain it to you, because you’re making me so fucking angry with this uninformed shit that it’s making it impossible to coalition build.
Ironic that you start policing language/punctuation while trying to break woke stereotypes.
you criticize americans for not knowing about leftist politics but you alienate the most progressive and left americans
Yes, that is exactly my intention. Driving wreckers out is important.
You think the woke movement "belongs to" the 0.5% of people who are African-American, and you equate it with the entire struggle against oppression and colonialism.
The anti-colonial struggle certainly does not "belong to" the USA. They want the whole hog: possession of the pro-colonial and anti-colonial movements.
Look at what happened here. The founder of Irish Republicanism, Wolfe Tone, said that the aim was "to break the connection with England". The 20th century Republicans got influenced by the Usan 'civil rights' ideology and lost the war. There were many factors behind the defeat of anti-colonial struggle (military & intel factors), but adopting an alien ideology from the imperial core didn't help. We should have stuck to our homegrown ideology and broken the connection with the imperialists.
Even by your own focus, empowering that 0.5%, the woke movement is a historical failure and has driven them right. Here's some analysis of why: https://web.archive.org/web/20250724121358/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/07/24/opinion/minority-voters-trump-right.html
The anti-colonial movement does not belong to the imperial core: it belongs to the revolutionaries and class-conscious workers&peasants of the world. And most of us are not obsessed with skin-colour (or punctuation!) like the Usan media wants us to be.
i won’t be able to do it without getting really angry and unkind.... i can’t explain it to you, because you’re making me so fucking angry with this uninformed shit that it’s making it impossible to coalition build.
Exactly. The wokes always crumble when someone disagrees with them, and resort to emotions and censorship. Because their point is moral grandstanding, not building a sensible movement. The leftist ThirdWorldist movement dgaf about these things, and are able to take pushback without becoming overwhelmed by emotion. That's necessary to build success.