The Roots of 'Woke' Culture
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2020
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Barack Obama condemned it. Black American activists championed it. Meghan Markle brought it to the Royal Family. “Wokeness” has become a shorthand for one side of the culture wars, popularising concepts like “white privilege” and “trigger warnings” - and the idea that “language is violence”.
Journalist Helen Lewis is on a mission to uncover the roots of this social phenomenon. On her way she meets three authors who in 2017 hoaxed a series of academic journals with fake papers on dog rape, fat bodybuilding and feminist astrology. They claimed to have exposed the jargon-loving, post-modern absurdity of politically correct university departments - whose theories drive “woke” online political movements.
But is there really a link between the contemporary language of social justice warriors and the continental philosophy of the 1960s and 70s? And are critics of wokeness just reactionaries, left uneasy by a changing world?
Producer Craig Templeton Smith Editor Jasper Corbett
Transcript
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| 0:42.0 | When you turn on your radio or TV or podcasts. What is all the shouting about? You are a white privileged male who has a |
| 0:53.9 | speed in real life. |
| 0:55.8 | I was born like this. |
| 0:56.8 | It's an immutable characteristics. |
| 0:58.2 | So to call me a white privileged male is to be racist. |
| 1:01.0 | The word exotic. |
| 1:02.1 | Because it others her and associates her with a history. |
| 1:05.0 | She's an African American joining a white royal family. |
| 1:09.0 | Perhaps you're also perplexed by some of the words and phrases which accompany the |
| 1:14.0 | shouting phrases such as micro-aggressions. Micro-aggressions are real. |
| 1:21.0 | Micro-aggressions are real. Rape culture is not a mess. |
| 1:25.0 | White privilege, intersectionality, hegeronormativity. |
| 1:31.0 | So there are some binaries. |
... |
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