Last Sunday at Everybody talks about itMarie-Louise Arsenault, host of The more the merrier the more we read, was asked about the “woke” nature of her show. She countered the accusation by saying that this word was today “overused”, “emptied of its meaning” and that it was used “to insult”.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
Arsenault went on to say that being “woke” simply meant being “awakened” to social injustices. She even asked this rhetorical question to the guests on the set: “Is anyone here tonight not concerned with social injustice?” The viewer thus understood that everyone should adopt this posture, his posture. In short, there would be nothing ideological in this word.
However, it is ideologies that define both the types of social injustice that are to be fought and the way to correct them.
In the case of the woke ideology, it is partly its defense of radical equality thought through the prism of race that characterizes it. Concretely, it proposes the establishment of positive discrimination policies based on skin color or publicly condemns a white man because of his staging of black slave songs.
A hackneyed word?
That said, we must recognize that Marie-Louise Arsenault is right when she says that this term is overused today. What she forgets, however, is that this is the case for all political labels. How often are the words “communist”, “neoliberal” or “conservative” thrown around on social media?
In other words, it is not because some use the word as a pretext to use it as an insult that it does not adequately point to a political ideology.
Admittedly, some might think that the word “woke” lacks precision and it is in this sense that the debate on the words used in the public sphere is important and must remain open.
Which definition is Orwellian?
Marie-Louise Arsenault concludes her reflection by paraphrasing George Orwell who worried about a time when words limit thought. However, we can clearly see that the word “woke”, far from limiting thought, makes it possible to identify a real political movement which is taking up more and more space in the public space.
Conversely, refusing to see that there is a woke ideology by claiming that it boils down to worrying about social injustices is to claim a form of objectivity and it is also not to assume that our proposals in matters of social justice are partial and one-sided.
In this sense, Marie-Louise Arsenault does a little what she denounces: by reducing the definition of a word to that of an “awake” posture, she limits our thinking and public debate.
Needless to say, we haven’t finished with the word “woke” and that’s good.