- A better candidate is the “woke” ethos. The modern concept of woke began, as far as anybody can tell, with a 2008 song by Erykah Badu. The woke mentality became prominent in 2012 and 2013 with the Trayvon Martin case and the rise of Black Lives Matter. Embrace it or not, B.L.M. is the most complete social movement in America today, as a communal, intellectual, moral and political force.
The woke mentality has since been embraced on the populist right, by the conservative “normals” who are disgusted with what they see as the thorough corruption of the Republican and Democratic establishments. See Kurt Schlichter’s Townhall essay “We Must Elect Senator Kid Rock” as an example of right-wing wokedness.
Another excellently hurried attempt to conjure an abstract perspective on things you'll never experience inside of a Long Island mansion. He's right about the growing distrust of institutions, though. And authority. Like establishment journalists, sometimes. I mean, he read a book. He read one book, an essay, and listened to an Erykah Badu song. Thanks David, it's been weird. At least I agreed with this: But I don't think everyone's on board with that.That’s because the cool person has found his or her own unique and authentic way of living with nonchalant intensity.
It isn't "wrongness" that makes David Brooks so entertaining. It's that he's the Thurston Howell III of pundits. You can tell he has no spite for the rest of humanity and is fundamentally empathetic to the struggles of his common man. He's just doesn't grasp that his conception of "common man" is wholly removed from most of America, which makes his empathy feel like well-intentioned condescension from another planet.
"Why don't you just take some Juicero packets for the road?"
When I clicked through the link and saw the actual title of the article, it was a solid 20 seconds of guttoral guffaws.
I'm not sure that it's actually growing. The 60's happened, and then the punks in the 70's. NWA came a long time before BLM. I feel like folk trust institutions a regular amount these days. Not so say that they like them, but I don't think there is an unusual interest in changing them. I don't see 'woke' as organic.He's right about the growing distrust of institutions, though. And authority.
Black Lives Matter is a reaction to police violence against African Americans. Whether that reaction is due to increased awareness or increased violence is an open question. That graph is from here, which argues that police killings have gone way down since the '60s (nonetheless, note the uptick). On the other hand, here's Politifact: They determine that while the available statistics indicate a steady climb, the sources of those statistics suck. "more study needed" is a shitty place to be when the subject under scrutiny is "your race" and "being shot by police."
Re: Institutionalized Distrust: For the zillionth time this lifetime, I'm ashamedly guilty of letting my microcosm boil over into my worldview. When "woke" became a synonym for "lit", its etymology ceased to significantly matter, I guess. Maybe it was organic, originally, but I'm not going to attempt to dissect that timeline. And 'bl00 is right, Brooks definitely means well with his efforts, but there was already a lot of whiff'ing going on in the generation gap. Sprinkling in race wasn't going to bridge anything. Almost-good hustle, though. I also apologize for the generally negative vibe I've been rolling with around here. Apparently, I'm trying to go from a B.S. to a PhD in three years. Wasn't my idea.
"Cool" and "Woke"? Couldn't these be cultural byproducts of the influence of Buddhism in American Culture?It was during the late 1950s and the early 1960s that the number of Westerners other than the descendants of Asian immigrants who were pursuing a serious interest in Zen began to reach a significant level. Japanese Zen has gained the greatest popularity in the West. The various books on Zen by Reginald Horace Blyth, Alan Watts, Philip Kapleau and D. T. Suzuki[citation needed] published between 1950 and 1975, contributed to this growing interest in Zen in the West, as did the interest on the part of beat poets such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. In 1958, the literary magazine Chicago Review played a significant role in introducing Zen to the American literary community when it published a special issue on Zen featuring the aforementioned beat poets and works in translation.