Woke: The word that splits the world

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, History, News, News Commentary

4.7 • 811 Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2022

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Who turned Woke from a badge of African-American pride into a hammer to beat liberals with? How does it relate to PC? And what are Erykah Badu, Piers Morgan, the weaponisation of African-American slang against black people, Julie Burchill and Google’s salad emoji doing in the eye of the Culture War storm? Ian and Dorian investigate another world-changing concept you thought you knew. –––––––– Woke: A Reading List From Dorian: The War of the Words by Sarah Dunant. Fascinating 90s collection of essays about political correctness from writers across the political spectrum. We are still having many of the same arguments. Debating PC by Paul Berman. As above but American. Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture by Geoffrey Hughes. A serious attempt at a history of PC. The Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes. Extremely opinionated and entertaining 1994 polemic against censors and heresy-hunters on both left and right. The Myth of Political Correctness by John Wilson. This forensic examination of the original anti-PC backlash reveals how many of the key case studies were exaggerated or invented, and the role that right wing think tanks played in drumming them up. Sounds familiar. The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. Of historical interest only. The cranky jeremiad that became a colossal bestseller and kickstarted America’s obsession with political correctness. And from Ian: Wake Up by Piers Morgan. Don’t read this. Welcome To The Woke Trials: How Identity Killed Progressive Politics by Julie Burchill. Don’t read this. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Heidt and Greg Lukianoff. Don’t read this, but if you’re really going to insist on reading one of these, I guess make it this one. –––––––– “Even racists seem to want to appropriate MLK. Maybe if you’re woke and dead you’re OK?” – Dorian Lynskey –––––––– Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Jade Bailey and Alex Rees. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Some words have been robbed of all meaning. They've been used, abused, mangled, contorted, weaponised and stripped of context. If we can't agree on what words mean, then we can't agree on much. This is origin story. In each episode, we take a key term
0:21.7	from the political or cultural discourse and tell the story of where it came from, what happened to it
0:26.1	and what it means today. By exploring the history of the ideas, we'll try to get a clearer
0:30.3	understanding of where we are now. My name's Dorian Linsky, author of 33 revolutions per minute,
0:35.8	and the Ministry of Truth. And I'm Ian Dunn. I'm a columnist with the eye and the author of 33 revolutions per minute, and the Ministry of Truth. And I'm Ian Dundt. I'm a
0:37.8	columnist with the eye and the author of How to Be a Liberal. Ian, this time we are talking about
0:41.5	the word woke. Why are we talking about woke? Because we are sadomasochists. We really like to
0:48.8	punish ourselves physically and mentally. You can't escape it. I mean, while we were doing the
0:52.7	research for this program,
0:55.6	I mean, I lost count of how many newspaper headlines, typically in the right wing press,
1:00.0	but not exclusively in the right wing press. We'll be talking about the word woke.
1:02.8	There was a speech by the Tory Party chairman, Oliver Dowden, in Washington, which was sort of framed,
1:08.3	it was sold and delivered as this attack on woke. It has become
1:12.0	this kind of catch-all sort of encapsulation of liberalism, progressive ideas, left-wing
1:18.9	ideas, racial justice, gender justice, typically from a conservative viewpoint. And you sort of end
1:25.6	thinking, well, this word just simply has no
1:27.6	meaning to it whatsoever. It's being used as a catch-all attack. And I think, and actually,
1:31.6	this is, I mean, to me, the next hour is basically about us trying to excavate it, check it out
1:36.5	and see whether there is any meaning to it, let alone whether any of that happens to be true
1:40.4	or false. Yeah, because we've got some words which had very specific meanings at the beginning
1:45.3	that we talk about in the series like neoliberalism, McCarthyism,
1:48.3	and then they become more contested or more vague over time.
	...

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