What it means to be “woke”

There’s a lot of threads lately on “woke” people, and examples of “woke” excess. Thought it might be good to have a thread in which we talk about what it means to be “woke” according to people who consider themselves woke, and then contrast that with what it means to be “woke” according to critics of that mindset.

Here’s a short video in which women describe what being “woke” means to them, from a time before the word was mostly transformed into a pejorative:



They describe it as being very aware of social injustice and being willing to speak up against it rather than passively accept it. OK, that seems like a good thing, fundamentally.

And here’s a description of what it means to be “woke” from Douglas Murray, which captures the current way in which it is typically used (generally by critics on the political right or center):



Murray’s POV is that people of the “woke” mindset mostly ignore the progress we’ve made over the last 50 years or so, that many of the “injustices” they claim to exist now are really imagined offenses and aren’t actually problems.

 

In that case, perhaps there are three types of people, broadly speaking: woke in a positive way, woke in an idiotic and intolerant way, and not woke at all.

It seems to me that it would be good to highlight prominent people in the first category. People who see and fight against injustice on behalf of those with less power, but do so while not being idiotic and intolerant. We should hold them up as an example for others, rather than erase them and portray the situation as either: you don’t care to fight back injustice against the disempowered (not woke), or you are a “woke” idiot.

 

I am not a fan of articles about a person that quote from other articles that in turn quote selectively from a longer conversation. It’s a great way to remove all nuance from the discussion and just caricature your target. Not helpful for actual understanding, though. A blog should always link directly to the original conversation that it refers to, and yet they very often do not.

Anyway, I’m not defending what she said, but I think understanding her position as an educator requires first actually listening to what she is saying, trying as best as one can to see where she’s coming from, and then critiquing it. So, here is the link to that conversation:

https://gsehd.gwu.edu/edfix-episode-23-fighting-racism-mathematics

And here’s the part about mathematics education and racism:

MICHAEL J. FEUER:

I would love to have a little conversation with you about where we are in Mathematics education and teaching and learning, the extent to which race and racism and the effects of our racial history are already imbued in the way we have been teaching Mathematics, and what can we be doing about it now?

DEBORAH BALL:

So you asked me about Math. I think the minute we talk about subjects beyond the humanities, then people start pushing back and saying, "Oh, that doesn't really have anything to do with those subjects because those are culturally neutral and racially neutral," which is a huge problem. And I remember that when I was Dean and I was part of groups on campus that were advancing, what at that time was being called diversity equity and inclusion initiatives, the hardest groups to talk to were often the departments that were the science areas. The Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and really in Mathematics. So I'm interested in your question because there is a kind of narrative that those subjects are culturally neutral and they are... Many people would even argue in the spaces that you can enter without cultural capital. That's all dominated by whiteness, but actually the opposite is true.

DEBORAH BALL:

And I think it's been quite difficult to figure out how to surface and unpack the ways in which Mathematics, for example, is a Harbor for whiteness. I think that the minute we say that, we find ourselves back in a pattern of discourse between the Mathematics disciplinary community and educators that we've seen many times before, and it's always been about race, but it hasn't always been called that. And that discussion is not going all that well again right now, which shouldn't surprise many of us. But there too, have we learned anything about how you talk about conflicts between Mathematics as a discipline and how it sees itself, or they see themselves and what educators who want to push for a different way of thinking about what it is to be good at Math, what education is supposed to be doing around Math, who gets to be smart at it? What is being smart at it?

DEBORAH BALL:

Have we learned anything about how to advance the discussion that could push that forward? Because what we see for example in California right now is just a huge amount of agitation because there's a set of really interesting frameworks and tools that have been developed by groups that are not being attacked by other groups. It's easier in the case of Math, for me to tell you examples that people might not immediately attack me for that had more to do with how mathematics gets taught and represented in classrooms and I can give examples of that, but what's also very difficult is to get people to see how the very nature of the knowledge and who's produced it, and what has counted as Mathematics is itself also dominated by whiteness and by racism. And that is where the conversation would have to pause and actually considerately learn and talk and notice.

DEBORAH BALL:

And I worry that we get more flame around the discourse and not enough digging in. So I'm happy to talk more about that, but I do worry about how this is immediately produced like a battleground instead of pausing to say, "This is really important because we do see patterns about who succeeds in Math in this country and it's overwhelmingly white and Asian. It's overwhelmingly still male once you get on with Mathematics." So how about noticing that and being willing to open ourselves up to the question of how racism has permeated Mathematics and the way it's represented in school and take the time to unfold that and to figure out what that would mean for looking at a better way of a curriculum and the pedagogy of Math in school.

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It’s so easy to create a tweet with a misleading headline about a person (in this case, that she thinks being proficient at math is a form of white supremacy), along with a picture of the person, and have that go viral. Thousands or millions of eyes see it, as it is endlessly retweeted, without ever bothering to click through and find out what she actually said. This is considered “free speech”, when the effect is actually to discourage the target from expressing their views in public and socially punish them for doing so.