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Episode 261 - What's "Woke"? (w/ Freddie deBoer & Osita Nwanevu) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-03-20 10:28:22
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2026-06
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Subscribe to Bad Faith on Patreon to instantly unlock our full premium episode library: http://patreon.com/badfaithpodcast

Following Briahna's super viral interview with Bethany Mandel on Rising, America once again debated the meaning of "woke" and why it matters. This week on Bad Faith, Brie welcomes back Freddie deBoer, author of the recent Substack essay "Of Course You Know What 'Woke' Means," along with New Republic contributor Osita Nwanevu to dig in to the #discourse.

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube for video of this episode. Find Bad Faith on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod).

Produced by Armand Aviram.

Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands).

Comments

Demented Avenger

Things were great until that outro song, an absolute exhibit in things that don't work as song lyrics.

Mathieu Dube

It’s a lie to say that wokeness is helping subalterns material conditions. That’s just bs. Policing language among the well-educated ppl doesn’t do anything for poor ppl for instance.

Mathieu Dube
>>104492178

My experience in lefty political groups is that ID politics is always more important than anything else. Denying this is baffling to me.

Anonymous

Great deep dive into 'woke'. I particularly liked Freddie's opening statement. What I think is always missing from the 'woke' discussion is the recognition of the very real social engineering agenda using language as a cudgel. It's the social engineering zealotry that causes such a negative backlash, IMO.

Anonymous

It seems pretty obvious that the term "Woke" has one use right now... to DIVIDE & CONQUER. Conservatives use it as a catch-all slur against Liberals, or anyone they don't like. Liberals use it to keep their club exclusive - they won't work with or talk to anyone who isn't officially "Woke." It doesn't matter to these 2 groups, where the term originated. They only know that it is an Attack word in 2023. Every conversation about this word just feels like either a Liberal or Conservative circle jerk.

Anonymous

Miss Briahna Joy Gray could you pretty, pretty, PU-LEEZ, with confetti sprinkles & caramel sauce on top ~ Do an episode on Workers Strike Back? I'm very respectfully requesting that you consider it.

David Hughes

I just tell anti-woke idiots that “WOKE” is an acronym that stands for “What’s OK Ethically”

Fahim Everyone's Dream

Bethany’s bigotry against Palestinians is all one needs to know about her. Maybe, next time she’s on Brie can ask her, “Bethany, can you define what bigotry looks like?” If she stumbles, Brie can just hand her a mirror.

Anonymous
>>104503716

I suspect that Mandel will probably restrict herself to the right wing talk curcuit so that she can be fed leading and softball questions.

Anonymous
>>104503716

Which is PRECISELY what those who hold themselves out to be “better than” do (and those who are their friends/supporters parrot) while chastising those who say “no go; we know where THIS leads and what it means regarding truly fighting for Anti-elite/cool kids/their peers supporting/sustaining policies.... A policy position which reveals CHARACTER PROPENSITIES is dismissed as a “purity test” and unwillingness to “compromise”. Note: this only ever goes one way.

Adam Brosnan

Excusing the historically black usage of ‘woke’, I think contemporary usage can be defined as: ‘don’t be a dick’

Anonymous

This whole discussion on Wokeness brought the 90s screaming back to me. This strategy of appropriating Left concepts was explicitly adopted and used by Conservatives in what they called “high ground articulation” or “idea marketing” to attack political correctness in academia - specifically the Humanities. If I’m not mistaken, I think this is what Bri was trying to focus in on - rather than the definition. I think we make a grave mistake in not understanding how well organized and how ingrained in Conservative culture these very explicit strategies are. In the anthology “After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s,” Per Sara Diamond (Managing the Anti-PC Industry), "By late 1984 the campus organizing plan [by Conservatives] was spelled out in a confidential memo, 'The Report on the Universities,' written by Roderic R. Richardson for the Smith Richardson Foundation. (It is worth noting that this foundation has had a history of sponsoring CIA-linked media projects and leadership training programs for CIA and Defense Department personnel.) The document proposed to distinguish two possible anti-Left strategies: ‘deterrence activism’ and ‘high-ground articulation” also termed ‘idea marketing.’ Deterrence activism, wrote Richardson, ‘exists purely in response to the left-wing agenda. It is not very interesting, frankly boring, and it is the kind of activism sponsored heretofore. At best it is a form of cheerleading that can focus som attention on stirring media events.’ Instead, Richardson advocated ‘high ground activism’ or ‘articulation,’ ’the attempt to steal one or another high ground away from the left by both action and articulation. As noted, it involves doing things like insisting on rigorous discussion and debates, setting up political unions, battling divestiture and other causes, not by calling their goals wrong, necessarily, but by proposing better ways of solving the problem. Student journalism is a high ground approach.’ Richardson recommended that the Right ‘mimic left-wing organization’ by forming what he called regional resource centers, starting with a faculty network ‘on one area of th country, say, New England or around New York. The aim of such a group is to set up a permanent network to defuse the left, to grab the high ground, to change the atmosphere on campuses, and perhaps, to help command a corner of the national agenda.’” As this particular strategy has morphed more generally into the culture I've watched these appropriations played out on at least a couple levels. As we are seeing in this example from the Right but also from the mainstream as it is manipulated by oligarchs and corporations. I believe this two step process actually gives Conservatives more fuel for their efforts. For example, we saw the bastardization of the term diversity as it ran through corporations to end up meaning anything at all - it was divorced from any economic or structural analysis. IMO, the same is true for Wokeness. It got diluted in all the ways that, I think, Freddie talked about so it then became a perfect term to be re-imagined and weaponized by the Right. I do think Bri is exactly right, that rather than ignore this strategy - and discard the word, as Freddie suggested, a better strategy is to understand what this tactic is and to deconstruct it in conversation the best one can in a situation.

Anonymous
>>104492178

I spent 2-3 years organizing with a few different left groups, and my experience was similar. A not insignificant percentage of the people I was organizing with seemed less interested in organizing, and more interested in language policing, alleging microaggressions, and trying to discover who among us was secretly racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., which is what we often spent most of our time focusing on. It ended up getting pretty miserable, so I quit. And I'm far from the only one that quit for the same reason.

Anonymous

BJG really misses the guest's point on "model minority". For instance, she draws a comparison between the Asian American critique of the term as an undue burden, to the African American push back to the criminal stereotype despite, as she seems to put it, criminal statistics. But the comparison falls flat given the reason for African American's revulsion of the brute stereotype is that the statistics that ostensibly undergird the myth are a consequence of targeted government policy and targeted government impolicy; whether it troubles the psyche similarly to Asian Americans on "model minority" isn't, for African Americans, similarly the most especial concern. The exchange is as if the function of the term "model minority", to obfuscate the continuing consequence of slavery and Jim Crow on the American Negro, is afterthought—then proceeded to invent nuance on black poverty. most ADOS ppl are poor. The bottom 50% of the group is worth negative wealth...combined. the top 20%, with respect to wealth, are mostly aggregated from pension age homeowners, media celebrities/athletes, and immigrants. Get ADOSAF on the show plz cause how are we still dampening black politics with the imaginary black middle class, Christ!

Demented Avenger
>>104498313

The liberal use of the term and attitude in general towards this is what makes "woke" different from "politically correct" 30 years ago. Back in the 1990s, nobody would describe him/herself as "politically correct." Now, people will call themselves "woke" and use it to show how much better they are. (Last week a friend of mine shared a Facebook meme doing exactly this.)