Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This message comes from the podcast Vibe Check. Join Saeed Jones and Zach Stafford as they make sense of what's going on in news and culture. Your favorite group chat come to life. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. So what happened to Woke 1.0?
I tend to think that Woke 1.0 was murdered by the pandemic.
I am not convinced we've exited Woke 1.0. I mean, there are still a variety of issues that you basically cannot touch with a 10-foot pole.
Target sales have plummeted after rolling back DEI policies. The Red Scare podcast faced backlash after interviewing Hitler-loving conservative pundit Nick Fuentes. Democratic socialist Soran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City. What do all of these have in common? Well, some people online are saying Woke 2.0 is the culprit. But is that really the case?
I mean, to me, I'm not so sold on the idea that there's been some death knell of wokeness, at least within these liberal circles.
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Chapter 2: What happened to Woke 1.0 during the pandemic?
Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. We're getting into it with Constance Grady, senior correspondent on the culture team at Vox. Thanks so much for having me. And Tyler Harper, staff writer at The Atlantic and co-host of the podcast, Time to Say Goodbye.
Thank you so much for having me. Okay, so just some background. As a term, woke has a long history in Black culture, dating back to the early 20th century. It meant being politically conscious and aware, but to be frank, it was also used a bit tongue-in-cheek. But in this conversation, we're digging into the way woke is used today as political shorthand for the left.
So first off, before we get to woke 2.0, how would you describe woke 1.0?
I think we see the idea of wokeness start to mainstream circa roughly 2014 and the Ferguson protests.
Right. It became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement and digital activism circles.
This is when... The idea becomes increasingly mainstream in white liberal circles that systemic racism is an animating force in American culture. And this language starts to become used increasingly often on social media and in... center left to left digital outlets, which are at the time gathering a lot of online clout.
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Chapter 3: How did Target's sales impact the perception of wokeness?
That's really, I think, when we see this idea take off. And also when it becomes trendy enough for a corporation to want to post a black square to Instagram after the death of George Floyd, or for Disney to want to include a token queer character in the live action Beauty and the Beast remake, right?
These are not gestures that necessarily mean or do anything, but they get coded as woke because there's a sense that there is cultural capital to be had from aligning yourself with this ethos.
Interesting. Interesting. I've noticed wokeness start to wane in the public in the last few years with right wing media pundits on the rise and, and the government and corporations have been rolling back their DEI programs and the repeal of Roe versus Wade. And of course, you know, the win of Donald Trump, the second time he won the presidency in the past decade, just to put a point on that.
So what happened to woke 1.0?
That's a really good question. Um,
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of Mamdani's election for Woke 2.0?
After lockdown, there's a pretty clear reactionary turn happening throughout US culture, particularly among young men. I think that for a lot of people, the idea of lockdowns get conflated with the sort of sense of censoriousness that has come to be associated with the left.
And they all kind of become one thing in people's heads that has to be repudiated and pushed back so that we can all get back to the mythical normal time that came before.
I wonder how both of you feel about like the perception of wokeness and how it affects consumer habits. We have some data that says that Target's brand perception has taken a hit since it rolled back its DEI policies. And Starbucks has long been riddled with accusations of union busting and more recently its perceived position on Israel and Gaza.
But at the same time, if I think about like the controversy surrounding Sidney Sweeney and the good genes ad for the American Eagle jeans where it kind of seemed like they were doing a little bit of eugenics. I don't know that American Eagle was thinking about it that high level. I can't say that. I wasn't around for that. To me, it came off as completely sort of like thoughtless.
But regardless, conservatives really picked up on the backlash to that ad. And Sidney Sweeney has become something of a conservative idol, a conservative darling. American Eagle stock went up after that ad ran and after the backlash. So I don't know. What do you both make of that?
You know, I think one of the frustrations regular people have with what gets called wokeness, I'm going to use a piece of academic jargon, so I apologize. But what is, you know, what academics would call like the hermeneutics of suspicion, right?
So this like approach to textual objects or cultural objects or whatever, where you're like skeptical of them, you think they have deep, secret, maybe nefarious meaning. Right.
And I think one of the things that people find really annoying is largely innocuous and maybe, yes, tone deaf or poorly judged statements, but are basically close read by pundits and activists, et cetera, to be like, oh, no, this was actually, you know, secret Nazi eugenic stuff. Right.
And I think one of the reasons, you know, the Sidney Sweeney thing seemed to actually help the company in question is just because I think people are tired of that kind of approach to politics where we are close reading everyone's statements, every single message that comes before us and trying to figure out like or, you know, insist that there's some dog whistle hidden there. Right.
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Chapter 5: How has social media shaped the narrative around wokeness?
wokeism so-called or about our political beliefs we end up having in the language of consumption of being buyers of products of course voting with your dollar and boycotting is a very time-honored political action but it's as though we seem to have our voices limited in the ways that we can talk about these things as everyday people and so we are limited to
Creating our identities as primarily consumers, we are what we purchase and what we express our values and and how we think of ourselves in those ways.
Hmm.
In a way, it speaks to one of the big issues that people had with Wokeness 1.0, which was that it was an opportunity for corporations to kind of gesture meaninglessly towards these fashionable social actions without actually having to make systemic change. It's individual solutions to a much bigger problem.
Coming up... I think until folks on the left side of the aisle come up with a sort of successor to wokeness, we're going to be kind of in a cultural vacuum.
More from Constance and Tyler after the break.
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