1/21/2024 0 Comments Lama rod owens you yube black joy![]() ![]() My understanding of wokeness began in my early teen years when I was developing an intense interest in justice. What I mean to say is that being woke doesn’t mean we somehow permanently transcend being harmful. I am not a woke person in the same way that I do not consider myself a good person, because any positive place we claim to occupy as a static identity location makes it hard to notice the times when we are not so good. Considering how we define wokeness these days, I fear that I am not cool enough or pretty enough, or that I don’t wear the right clothes or have enough pseudo-spiritual catchphrases or social media followers. Contemporary wokeness is basically a New Age feel-good cult mentality steeped in neoliberalism and expressing the traits of performativity (or the pursuit of the cool and hip), reductionism (oversimplification), and a lack of accountability (folks do and say whatever they want)-all stuffed into a machine of over commodification. When I think about contemporary wokeness, I reflect on what I call social media gurus and self-help experts who craft glitzy personas and offer simple wisdom with little depth. Wokeness these days seems more like a performance meant to hide the performer’s deep terror of anyone realizing that they are as full of pain as everyone else. We move around in our circles gauging the wokeness of the people around us, and I can’t help but feel that this inquiry is a kind of elitist performance attempting to establish yet another hierarchy within an experience that is supposed to be inherently anti-hierarchical and inclusive. There is a desperation to get woke or else. Not only does being woke feel like trying to be the coolest kid on the block, getting woke also feels like some kind of competition we are desperate to win, because the losers get blamed for all the bad shit in the world. ![]() The work of wokeness is not what you think ![]()
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