It is about womens rights!
Woke up!...disrupting a millenium of patriarchy
March is Women’s History month. Women the world over are still fighting for equal rights and self-determination! Experiencing discrimination and violence and oppression is a daily occurrence for many women. Caring about women’s rights is a justice issue for all of us (and I will get that to that later in my next article).
What the heck does woke mean anyway? Woke is an adjective that stems from the African-American Vernacular English pertaining to issues of racial prejudice and discrimination.
In addition, why is “woke” a right wing hyper-focus word twisted to disparage those examining the abuses of power, our history of enslavement and racism, sexism, xenophobia etc? What are they afraid of? Stopping violence against women? Stopping racial discrimination? Hmmn…wonder of wonders. What is going on here?
According to the U.S. Holocaust Museum article on Nazi Language and Terminology:
“Every detail of daily life was strictly controlled and regulated under National Socialism. This control by the state extended to the German language, both in the colloquial and the official context. Certain words such as Volk (“the people”) and Fanatismus (“fanaticism”) became synonymous with the official party line of the Third Reich. Other terms were created as euphemisms to hide acts of terror. For example, in the language of the Nazis, Sonderbehandlung (“special treatment”) meant execution, and the term Endlösung (“final solution”) referred to the systematic extermination and mass murder of the Jewish peoples.” https://www.ushmm.org/collections/bibliography/nazi-language-and-terminology
Maybe it is time “to woke up” to the twisting of the meaning of words to purposely turn us away from the truth of the undeniable evil of laws and actions that stomp on basic human rights and liberties and that hide the history of slavery, racism, misogyny and exploitation. Rights to housing, rights to work and education, rights to freedom to reach one’s highest potential are not dangerous woke ideas. These rights matter to all in a society that claims to cares about justice and freedom.
If we say nothing when woke is used to exclude, defame and employed as a political weapon against others to prevent enjoying freedoms, then we as a society have lost our sense of justice and empathy. Empathy is the ability to understand and share feelings for another, to care for another human being.
Again time to join the woke revolution! It matters now more than ever!