That doesn't seem to be supported by the essay itself, since it has the following part:
> But by the same token we should not automatically reject everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort of thing a religious zealot would do.
It seems to say there are real issues, there are good things coming from "the woke" (whatever that means), we shouldn't discard all ideas just because one or two are bad.
> Because PG doesn't think its actually a problem.
Is that something pg actually said/wrote/hinted at in any of the essays, or are you just trying to bad-faith your way out of this discussion?
>Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
What he does not explain is how big a problem of scale this is, but based on the way the rest of the essay goes, I'm going to guess that he thinks racism is not a problem that currently demands any policy changes whatsoever, except perhaps to roll back prior policy changes to address the real, measurable damage of historic racism.
Is that really your charitable reading of the part you quoted?
In my mind, a charitable reading would be that he means it is a genuine problem, and deserves to be fixed, but it isn't as big as "the woke" deems it to be. I wouldn't do any assumptions if he wants/doesn't want policy change, and jumping to thinking he advocates for rolling back prior policy certainly doesn't sound like charitable reading to me.
It is a divisive topic already, we would all be better off trying to understand as well as we can before replying.
Who is "the woke"? How big do they think big is? How does PG know what this nebulous group all agrees upon? How big of an issue does he think it is, as far as actions to be taken? Is "the woke" just anyone who disagrees with him here?
Not specifying any meaning makes it literally a meaningless, divisive (us vs. them), dismissive statement on racism at best, and at worst, rhetoric to baselessly paint my opponent as more extreme than myself, because I am of course precisely the correct amount of reasonable.
A rebuttal in similar style would be "racism is actually a problem larger than thought by those who think it isn't", which you may notice is also meaningless and dismissive.
To whit, he repeatedly brushes aside the concept of hostile work environment, in particular professors making their students feel uncomfortable, as if its just a question of one person making their equal feel uncomfortable due to a simple disagreement. This is a dramatic misread of why a professor (who is by definition in a position of power over the student, and such power may well include the career and profession of the student, even ignoring the sexual overtones, which are all-too-common as well) needs to be aware of and avoid hostile environments. Like, a woman who constantly hears from her math professor how s/he thinks women are bad at math will likely not be super-psyched to continue with math coursework. I would certainly leave a company if a manager was constantly insulting whatever group of people I was born into, and they pay me to be there. If I'm paying thousands of dollars a semester, the least the professor can do is stay in their lane.
That's five sentences to retort 2 more-or-less throwaway statements. The entire essay is stacked with stuff like that.
And its all pointless because odds are, instead of changing any minds, or even engaging with what I've said, the anti-woke types will just vote it down.
I think it is a weakness of the article that PG does not address this directly. He dis say that racism is
> Not a problem on the scale that the woke believe it to be
So if someone only uses woke to mean "being aware of and attentive to important social issues" it is easy for the to wake away with the impression that PG painted their concerns as overblown.
If I was PG's editor I would suggest replacing 'woke' with prig here for clarity.
Woke is all rituals, no substance. If anyone profits off it, it is highly educated individuals that belong to the visible minorities = precisely the people that don't need so much support.
Woke is deeply uninterested in actual problems of the poor non-academic population. High cost of living? Food deserts? Meh. That doesn't register on the high-brow radars.
Is that really the only real-world impact? Is there no value in examining the link between how we refer to people and how we treat them? What about the affirmative action aspects of wokism---is there some impact there?
If you define woke as only the people performing meaningless rituals, then of course you're going to dismiss wokeness. But not all of it is meaningless ritual, affirmative action has created real change. And I would argue that efforts to take pejorative terms out of language are worthwhile, even if some people get overly academic about it.
