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My pet theory is that most 'woke' people are people that feel ashamed at not being at the bottom of the hierarchy, and so try to compensate their 'privileges' by being overly sensitive to any kind of injustice, to the point of seeing moral or symbolic violence where there is none.

And since the negative discourse (e.g. saying "Women face so many issue in the workplace" as a man) is way more socially palatable than a positive one (saying "Women have it OK now in the workplace" as a man), people who try to be sensible about thing not directly concerning them tend to overdo it by amplifying the "everything is bad" angle.

Which is why at the height of the BLM movements, lots of well-meaning (but IMO severely misguided) people felt that 'master' or 'blacklist' were carriers of oppression, while not thinking twice about words such as 'white noise' or 'white-label' (Implying that a lack of creativity or panache is associated with whiteness, the horror!), The former was among white 'wokes' sensibility-by-proxy, while for the latter the same crowd had the experience and tool to know this argument is bonker, and that anyone having issue with the expression 'white noise' has mental issue.

I came to this conclusion after a gay/muslim friend of mine, who likes to do humoristic quizzes on Instagram did one for the Ramadan. He asked "Apart from Ramadan, what are the other 4 pillars of Islam", and accepted the Ru Paul reference "Creativity, Uniqueness, Nerves and Talent" as the answer. The only people taking issue with that were non-muslim white french dudes who felt it was islamophobic, which greatly annoyed my friend, who felt it feed into the stereotypes of "angry muslim".



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