Does ‘Woke’ Mean Saying — or Not Saying — Certain Words?

In any case, careful speech—including refraining from speaking — can build trust

When the right wing refers to “woke,” sometimes they want to prevent people from saying certain words. This year, at the University of Central Florida, for example, professors have removed certain words that the government tells them are too “woke.” Human rights, social justice, dictatorship — the far-right governor won’t allow it. No talk of racial identity or LGBTQ identities. If it sounds like liberalism, conservatives say “no.” The Florida governor’s ideology is that racism is “merely the product of prejudice,” and he strives to forbid teachers from using the same word “racism” to imply that unequal treatment is “embedded in American society and its legal systems” — which he, a white man, does not believe — “in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.” But if certain meanings of a word are legally impermissible, the practical result is that the word itself becomes impermissible. If the governor comes after you, he won’t give you an opportunity to explain the nuance of whether you meant Meaning 1, Meaning 2, or Meaning 1.5, and why you believe what you believe.

At the same time, the right wing sometimes says that taking offense at certain words is itself “woke,” and they want to reserve their own right to say those words and to attach their own meanings to them. If a conservative wants to use a certain word, and a liberal says, Well, that’s inaccurate, or Hey, that’s rude, the conservative replies: But you must allow me to say it. My use of this word generates all kinds of nuanced meanings that might not be the offensive meanings you have in mind or might be objectively correct. How will we ever know whether I might have been correct if you don’t let me choose my own words to convey my own meanings?

On that Latter Point…

This occurred to me because, yesterday, the Sydney Morning Herald published a 900-word opinion article by Yannick Thoraval: “I’m a university lecturer and wokeism is stifling free debate in my classroom.”

Thoraval, who teaches creative writing and journalism at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, complains that some students respond negatively to personal “trigger words.” These triggers easily include slurs, but they can also include words like “racism” that signal broad concepts and are indispensable for intellectual discussion.

He concludes that we shouldn’t declare any words off-limits, as this “gives them more power than they deserve and limits access to the educational terrain.” Words, after all, are only “approximations of our thoughts and feelings,” and it’s better “to interrogate and expand their meanings through dialogue, even if doing so is uncomfortable.” I find this mysterious: words shouldn’t have too much power over us, yet we should consider ourselves charged with the mission of expanding their meanings? I also note that it’s generally the opposite of what the Florida governor understands as combatting wokeness, which involves seeking out keywords to shut down.

My interest doesn’t lie in how the Florida governor doesn’t resemble this Australian writing teacher. My interest lies in whether people believe that fighting “wokeness” means to dial down the volume of certain words or dial up the volume of others.

Defining ‘Woke’ and ‘Trigger’

Woke

“Woke,” Thoraval says, “is a concept that symbolises awareness of social issues and movements against injustice, inequality and prejudice.” He refers to “‘woke’ culture” and “woke sensitivity.” A few paragraphs later, he says “woke ideology…is about inclusion.” Then he speaks of “perceived wokeism in a classroom”; this refers to a perception that prompts individuals to filter what they say “for fear of personal or professional reprisal” for broaching some sensitive topic.

So what does he think “woke” is? A concept that symbolizes something? An awareness of issues and movements? A culture? A sensitivity? An ideology of inclusion? A perception of social risk? It isn’t answered here.

Liberals, progressives, and antiracists generally do not use the word “woke” to refer to ourselves — at least, not anymore, now that the right wing has appropriated it as a slur. Since the right wing only uses the term to dismissively hand-wave at human diversity and liberal tolerance thereof, they never clearly define it, and we shouldn’t expect them to.

Triggers

Students may have emotional triggers, he acknowledges, because of their experiences of “trauma,” “discrimination,” or “marginalisation.” There are “real and present concerns of mental wellbeing.” And, of course, no one wants a “hostile learning environment.”

So, what’s the problem with trying to be understanding and respectful of students’ triggers? He gives a few examples, but they do not answer the question.

• “I’ve seen my students cry and tremble with anxiety.” Unsurprising. If students are writing memoir or poetry, they’re thinking deeply about something that matters personally to them, in front of people they don’t know well, realizing they don’t yet have the words to describe their thoughts and feelings.
• “I’ve seen them bolt from the classroom and refuse to join the discussion without citing a reason.” When we flee, it’s not always because we don’t agree with our classmates. Sometimes it’s because the egg we ate for breakfast doesn’t agree with us. We don’t cite the reason.
• “They log off.” This too can happen.

None of this implies to me that we shouldn’t make an effort to avoid stepping on someone else’s trauma.

Discomfort

Some topics are inherently uncomfortable, Thoraval points out — and this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be discussed at all. He’s worried that some students “conflate” the norm of sidestepping unnecessarily upsetting language with a reluctance to have inevitably uncomfortable discussions on important matters.

The questions he’s posing (I think) are: How important is this discussion? What are the consequences of having it or not having it? How can we diminish negative impact — for example, can our word choice change the outcome? What would it mean to be careful? And I think we can all agree those are fine questions. What isn’t obvious to me is where he draws the line between avoidable and unavoidable discomfort, and why he displaces blame for this confusion onto his students.

He also notes that students have “the question of whether it’s ‘appropriate’ (an Orwellian term) for us to follow this path of inquiry,” even though he says they raise this question “implicitly” through their body language, so it isn’t even clear where he’s encountered this use of the term “appropriate” (a word he finds inappropriate).

It is not, in fact, Orwellian (disinformationist, dystopian, authoritarian, etc.) to ask if a certain line of inquiry is appropriate or inappropriate. Some discussions are inappropriate because:

• They are intentionally insincere and trolling.
• A professional troll is manipulating unwitting people into having a discussion within a framework that isn’t intellectually necessary and only helps the troll.
• One person casually raises a sensitive topic (e.g., adoption) as a mere thought exercise, possibly with factual inaccuracies, without considering whether one of their 20 peers in the room might have deep personal experience with it and shouldn’t be compelled to “out” themselves in this context.
• The information uncovered (as happens often in journalism) is legally sensitive. The students are not yet equipped to have a conversation about what is “good” and “bad” to publish, even if only in terms of whether they or their publisher might be sued.

All of this is part of what it means to ask: Is it appropriate for me to initiate or participate in this conversation right here, right now?

It would be Orwellian if the state came in to decree: Due to your “inappropriate” teachings, we’ll strip you of your teaching license, fine you, and throw you in jail. But it is not Orwellian to acknowledge: In this classroom, we just started a pointless argument about adoption, and our 18-year-old classmate, who recently learned that they were adopted, is crying. We could pick a different topic now, which would be kind, and come back to this later, if it seems appropriate.

The real Orwellianism is what’s currently happening in Florida. The authoritarians have captured the state, and they use the word “woke” to shut down discourse. It’s not the people they call “woke”; those are the victims of state power.

Problem and Solution

The problem, according to Thoraval? As per the first sentence of his column: “In the classroom, I must be careful.” Careful, about what? About students’ feelings. Their feelings cause him to have feelings. Of one sensitive discussion, he reports: “I felt ill-equipped to manage” the “blushed faces and furtive looks” and the “palpable and general sense of discomfort and uncertainty in the classroom.” That sense of discomfort might belong to the students or to himself; he doesn’t disambiguate it for us.

And his solution? “Teachers and students need to trust in each other’s beneficent intentions.” In other words, if his students would just believe that he means well, he wouldn’t have to spend time and attention “be[ing] careful” about what he actually says. They wouldn’t feel uncomfortable, and he wouldn’t have to feel guilty for making them uncomfortable. Students would just automatically have good feelings about whatever words come out of their teacher’s mouth.

He allows that we can “harness sensitivity and personal experience as a useful dimension of learning and teaching.” But he also wants everyone to trust each other out of the starting gate.

Some classes can work with automatic provisional trust. It may be most likely to work out when it’s a small group of people from similar demographic backgrounds with similar intellectual goals in taking the class. They may just smile at each other and not get their feelings hurt — and they don’t have to be lectured about why they shouldn’t have conflicts they’re not having. But if it’s a large, diverse group with vastly different assumptions about why they’re in the room together and what they’d like to individually achieve in their education, telling them that they’re all on the same side might be a non-starter, because it’s likely not true.

He wants his students to trust him, and each other, always — regardless of whether that trust is overly optimistic, or ultimately deserved and earned, and what everyone is doing to maintain their relationships. Was he showing trust when he complained that a student fled the room without citing a reason? In that sentence, I don’t see his trust that this student did indeed have a reason, nor do I see his curiosity in finding out what it was.

Regarding his solution, Thoraval says: “I asked the students if they were prepared to trust each other this semester, to believe that another person’s doubts and questions came not from spite but from noble impulses, such as curiosity, a desire to understand, to connect.” Short-term result: “The students seemed enthusiastic about this pact, a few told me later they felt emboldened by it, others said they felt relieved.” When did this happen? “Last week.” But: “I’m hopeful.”

Stop Signs

Certainly, a functioning community has ways to “accommodate nuance, difference and dissent,” and “managed conflict can have a constructive outcome,” as Thoraval puts it. But that — in my view — doesn’t mean we should entirely discard the idea that “strong feelings” should sometimes be “stop signs to conversation.”

“Without conflict, we stagnate,” he says. But what does this mean? It is true that we stagnate if we never have any conflict in our lives at all. But it is not true that we begin to stagnate the moment we withdraw from any given conflict. We do not need to engage in any and all conflict. We do not have to poke every bear we see. When catching wind of a bear, is often good to creep away quietly and find a refuge in which to happily stagnate for a moment, lest the bear permanently stagnate us. It is also good to notice when the bear’s face is in fact our own reflection in the lake, that we may stop ourselves from becoming the bear toward someone else.

What Thoraval has figured out is that other people’s sensitivities may sometimes imply that he should curtail his speech. He doesn’t want his speech curtailed, as that takes away his freedom and his range of intellectual movement.

What he seemingly has not figured out is how his speech may sometimes take away space from other people. When we use words that are uninformed, imprecise, dismissive, or mischaracterizing— whatever our level of intention — we diminish other people. We repurpose a word that was important to them, and by doing so we place the burden on them to find a new term. We imply that they aren’t smart or accomplished enough or otherwise worthy of speaking, and they have to reestablish their space in the room. We say we’re “objective” and “fact-based” while they are “subjective” and “biased,” so they have to spend time (from their subjective standpoint!) figuring out what’s going wrong in that assessment and what’s unfair about that dynamic, and meanwhile they don’t get to say whatever it was they originally wanted to say because we ruled it out of court. We do this with a flick of the wrist, a “Some people say — ” or a “Just asking questions — ”, knocking them down. We get to infinitely expand the meanings of our words; they are put on defense, always.

When we allow for the possibility that other people’s feelings should at least sometimes be stop signs for our own trains, we are building real trust. We are finding ways together to say the things we mean to say to each other.