How ‘woke’ became a dirty word | Owen Jones Beyond the Culture Wars

i might be woke yeah i mean obviously to work he's is that can we just like finish the interview now that's a lot easier back to snowflake land it's getting hot you guys are going to melt you can't turn on the tv without being told the woke mob has taken over local culture is garbage wokes gold culture is just the worst don't make yourself and your attempt to virtue signal more of a victim than the actual people who are being victimized as people with opposing views clash online we hear that people are outraged silenced or cancelled there's a culture and an atmosphere on the left which seeks to shut down debate on topics which throws the word bigger and racist and xenophobe around like it's going out of fashion but how did we get to this point and what the origins of woke and the backlash against it in the uk freedom dies when moral anarchy takes over their fear is that the dam's gonna break and then what was once seen not acceptable becomes acceptable and then it gets further and further and further and before you know it it's the last days of the roman empire [Applause] hello come in sorry mind the cat absolute nightmare come on get down let's have a cup of tea shall we some people would say you're the wokest person online the wokest person online it's not a word that i would ever embrace because it was a word popularized by black people in america to talk about heightened consciousness and awareness of issues around them but also it's then just been used as a pejorative negative term by people who who often i suppose in my mind just have a problem with the onward march of the rights of minorities which is just a long-running saga this video is about the backlash on whoa what do you want to look at i want to see why is it any different from basically what we've always had i want to understand what is aggravating about where i stand on this i'm going to learn you know learn myself what am i missing what's driving people who who see woke is dangerous there's menace i'm going to learn what is it about it what i want to see what makes it tick when looking at the backlash against woke in the uk we have to start with mary whitehouse freedom dies when moral anarchy takes over that is our message let us get it out the self-appointed moral referee railing against a rapidly changing society she mobilized an army of housewives who believed the bbc was the cultural indicator for everything that was going wrong hiya hi you are sarah i am i'm marin nice to meet you nice to whatever we do this is the mary white house collection it is yes mary was a diligent archivist and offered her a collection of letters petitions and newspaper clippings which spanned decades to the university of essex in colchester oh wow oh there's a lot of letters so read this out 22nd of march bbc1 programme are you being served homosexual character and it was transmitted at 7 30. gays on television at 7 30 jesus so basically there's a mix of objections ranging from innuendo sex education fellatio a gay character and communism she would have loved you i think i really am mary whitehouse's sort of dream character in 1977 mary infamously brought a case of blasphemous libel against gay news for a controversial poem that they published oh i can see already while she's not happy so you've got basically love between a roman centurion and jesus christ there's a lot going on here um as they took him from the cross eye the centurion took him in my arms the tough lean body of a man no longer young beardless breathless but well hung the shaft still thought just imagining mary white asked me dig this i'm surprised she survived her classes just sprung off her face i would imagine today that would cause a bit of a storm actually absolutely the editor dennis lemon was fined 500 pounds and given a nine month suspended jail sentence he says um mrs whitehouse is not an evil woman but a misguided evangelist and i don't think she represents anywhere near as many people as she claims she does and small groups in the powerful censorship lobby just don't represent anyone but themselves the conviction was later quashed on appeal later on in sort of subsequent issues they actually had pins that you could buy sort of as a fundraiser that said gay news fights on and it was a photograph of mary whitehouse oh wow because she was fighting her political battle with her loyal supporters but of course the people she was up against at the time of a marginalized and frankly widely despised minority in the 60s 70s but they had their supporters as well absolutely and she was their hate figure over the time and i sort of i think she ended up to be a caricature of outbreak four decades on the struggle for minority rights continues and one of mary whitehouse's original targets the bbc is still at the heart of the culture wars the most recent charge is that it's a den pact full of left-wing comedians so i am now looking up some videos from the comedian jeff norcott who is a right of center comedian let's have a look i'd like to focus also is i haven't just built my own echo chamber here i do get a lot of my lefty friends give me a chair thank you for coming to my show and showing the open-mindedness that your wing of politics used to be famed for yeah i mean obviously to work and the truth is right is i'm not like anti woke or such i'm anti unworkable ideas or ideas you know and unfortunately a lot of those to me do seem to come from that area of discourse and it it's another name for something that's been around a while which is like right on progressive you know social justice warriors snowflakes it keeps morphing it's still the same sentiment how has woke gone too far what kind of examples well i suppose over the last few years a good example would be winston churchill right for a very very long time a lot of people's favorite britain and then it seemed to for most people particularly who are outside the social media domain that overnight he's a toxic figure you know he's he's racist and what happens then is a lot of people think well you know i really like winston churchill does that mean i'm a racist you know it's too quick to form a very binary view of something quite complicated it's driving me that a lot of people from minorities with a platform when they speak out about racism you know they often then get a day luge of really quite vile stuff they'll get death threats rape threats if we're gonna have this discussion about people who think woke's gone too far to do it in a way without them getting piled up without often quite vicious abuse oh yeah but that's my view as somebody that believes in free speech is that people should be able to express all opinions you know without losing their jobs it's worrying to me the idea that somebody that works in a job that's perceived more left wing would be be concerned about even saying that they were coming to see my my torso you know we went to the archives university of essex with mary whitehouse and it was interesting reading the correspondence she she didn't like the fact homosexuality appeared on tv or the radio and a lot of people were they were scared it's that fear of but yeah it's really interesting for me that you've mentioned i don't think that being suspicious of um or certainly having reservations about what culture is for me has anything to do with minority it's not fear of minorities it's simply about a way of understanding people that's trying to move so fast it like gets hot housed on social media and you know things conclusions can be reached in a very short amount of time i mean you mentioned mary whitehouse that's the irony is that to me a lot of uh certainly some of the debate coming out of what discourse sounds brutish in a way you know sound is probably according way too much power to language that actually exists is this debate just split among left and right lines i don't think it's as clear cut as just being left versus right for the right it's it's a it's a useful political approach because it forces the left and more defensive grounds and it often can cause a split between the sorts of people who are attracted to the less economic message but are frightened about social change paul embry like me is someone who backs the labor party but he believes that woke culture has been fundamentally damaging to the left and to its success am i too woke are you too well yeah i'm right he woke well i wouldn't want to make it personal but people who are now described as virtue signalers are generally people who like to gain cured us by expressing expressing a particular fashionable moral or political opinion often i've got no experience or no interest in grassroots political campaigning and organizing and think that you know going on twitter and and sending a tweet condemning someone for an ex for expressing an unfashionable view somehow you know takes the place of proper debate and proper argument the people who are going on about how woke the left are and how they're obsessed with these issues it strikes me spent far more time far more time speaking about it no within the left with respect that's rubbish i think that it's a reaction to much of the much of the comment and much of the drive for some of these fringe issues that's coming from people on the left but it hasn't come out of a clear blue sky you know people didn't wake up and say you just create this thing called woke and rail against it people now say well that's offensive as if that is the moment that debate should shut down the minute someone says i'm offended it means you are inherently wrong and the debate should go no further i mean these claims have always been made it's this idea of you can't say anything anymore which was a cliche in the 1990s political correctness gone mad i mean these things have always been said well they may have always been said but the reality is now they're they're having an effect both jeff and paul talk about people being cancelled for expressing socially conservative opinions but what happens on the other side those deemed to be too woke or too progressive hello how are you professor priyanvada gopal found herself at the center of a firestorm after a white lives matabana was flown over burnley stadium i tweeted white lives don't matter as white lives meaning quite clearly that it wasn't whiteness that ought to give life's values i didn't think much about it i went off and i logged back into twitter a few hours later and it was just volumes of hate mail and what you see in this dossier and it comes with a content warning is explicit rape threats the n-word the p-word other racist slurs yeah i mean here's this one i won't read it all out but you know listen you ugly cow worshipping something that baits in and pisses in the river of the ganges white lives are the only ones that matter [Music] how would you categorize it what is this phenomena so there's a real eagerness ironically to claim the mantle of victimhood to paint the political right or a white man for instance as the real victims of woke cultural left-wing communist socialist warriors what is that what why what is the dynamic there the idea is that any concession of absolute power is equivalent to becoming oppressed and to losing all rights and privileges so it's a kind of offenses defense if you like that the wall should not be breached even a little bit uh because we will make such a song and dance about it and silence you by abuse and threats that far from the social order changing we will not even give an inch mary whitehouse clearly saw there was a culture war as she saw it going on and she felt that she was on the losing side i mean although i don't know what do you think is it culture wars are routinely declared by the right and they are declared when the right feels itself or thinks itself or believes itself to be on the back foot from a series of claims for justice if you think about the world as a series of pushing back against oppression then culture wars have been with us from the dawn of time either that or culture wars are completely made up whenever it is suitable to make it up in order to discredit a legitimate opposition the battle between the socially conservative and the socially progressive those now called woke certainly isn't new but it's louder and more aggressive than it's been fueled by the hot house of social media and escalated by political upheavals but is it really a culture war it's hard not to conclude that the most intense moments are yet to [Music] come you

Channel: The Guardian

Views: 96,958

Keywords: owen jones, mary whitehouse, geoff norcott, paul embery, woke, wokeness, culture wars, cancel culture, the proms, nigel farage, politics, gdnpfpnewspolitics, black lives matter, blm, rule britannia, go woke go broke, snowflakes, guardian, woke culture, freedom of speech, gdnpfpculture, sjw, social justice warriors, race, geoff norcott stand up, all lives matter, priya gopal, virtue signalling, owen jones owned, owen jones woke, too woke, geoff norcott comedy, owen jones meets, jones

Id: H2oxtjT0-dw

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020