Yasmin Benoit: Woke Culture HAS NOT Gone Too Far - 4/8 | Oxford Union

[Applause] foreign [Applause] [Music] oh my God look at me following Toby okay um I guess that kind of means your own paw with an Instagram model Toby if we're looking at the lineup but I was really honored to be invited to do a debate at the Oxford Union but also incredibly nervous when I saw what the subject was and who was in opposition and I was nervous because it feels like a strangely personal topic but I realize that that's not a reason to shy away from it and all the more reason to get involved and the thing is you can't really debate whether woke culture has gone too far without first establishing what woke means and there might never be a consensus there but what it means to me as a black person is quite different to how it's often depicted now I remember I first heard the term workers back in 2014 it was around the same time as Michael Brown was killed by the police and we were seeing the first black lives matter protests in the U.S and it had been used in various forms in the black community particularly in the African-American Community long before that I could actually find record of it back in the 1930s when Lead Belly performed a song called the Scottsboro boys which was about a particularly horrendous case and it was about racism in the criminal justice system and at the end of his performance he encouraged the audience to best stay woke and keep their eyes open to be woke meant to be aware to be informed to be vigilant to know your history as a black person and the Legacy it has on your community now being worked with something to Aspire to and naturally being workhorses started to Encompass having an awareness of other forms of Injustice because you can't really discuss racial inequality without including gender social class sexuality and other factors and then it was hijacked by a white conservative audience and turned into an insult a way to ridicule people for doing thinking or saying anything that was centered around trying to make life easier for those who are traditionally being disadvantaged and as a way to dismiss the existence of various inequalities it's crazy to witness how being woke has gone from being something aspirational for black people to a pejorative that is used to beat communities down for trying to be informed and helpful in a short space of time we've gone from having hashtags like hashtag stay woke Which derived from Black American protesters pleading for people to be more conscious of inequalities to phrases like go woke go broke encouraging multi-million pound corporations to stop caring about inequality which sounds kind of counterproductive to me because isn't that what Rogue really is when you break it down caring can caring go too far as a black woman as an asexual activist I've been told that I am the epitome of workingness going too far everything that I am everything that I do is symptomatic of our society going down the drain and the fact that I use new words that aren't actually new and speak about Concepts that are actually hundreds of years old but seem new and wave unfamiliar flags and fall within the plus section of the alphabet Mafia is all a step too far but I'm happy to join the leagues of others who have gone too far in the name of equality or locery because our society would be a lot worse without woke people of the past I mean take a rather popular example Martin Luther King who's held a very high esteem now but had a nearly 75 percent public disapproval rating according to a Harris poll in 1968 which was the year of his death despite being famously non-violent he was relentlessly prosecuted and attacked supporting issues like desegregation and worker strikes women's right to vote combating poverty was seen as being a step too far and he was assassinated for it and when Simone wrote The Second Sex she ignited the second wave of feminism she advocated for women to have the same entitlement to work as men the same bodily autonomy as men the same entitlement to pleasure as men the same ability to love without domination as men and so naturally her work was censored and banned by the Vatican it was a step too far a bit too woke for the time he could go further back to the 1800s there was a German teacher and clinician called Emma Tross who was the first known woman to publish scientific works on homosexuality specifically lesbianism and fun fact she was also asexual and she argued that same-sex attraction and asexuality were not abnormal or exceptions to the Natural order and as such we should not be discriminated against and the state should take measures to protect people's right to sexual freedom and as you can imagine that didn't get a great reception in the 1890s it was seen as going a step too far and the Articles were censored and banned I was a bit too woke for the time um sorry you're gonna kill my flow could we just like wait sorry I'm six Wines in at this point there's been delays um I'll get two afterwards um and history doesn't really remember her as much unfortunately but it does remember Magnus hirschfeld who came not long after and here's a guy in the late 1800s who was campaigning for the decriminalization of homosexuality and even talking about asexuality transgender rights suggesting that queerness exists in every culture and he wanted to decriminalize abortion and he joined feminist organizations and even criticized the hypersexualization of black women under white supremacy and of course he was deemed as being way too leftist for the time he was violently attacked his Works were burned by Nazis and he was exiled and it was too woke apparently and if he said that now it would probably still be considered as being too woke over 100 years later I'm so glad that those people went too far back then because in hindsight it really wasn't that far and they made undeniable contributions to how we understand the world now but so many issues that they were tackling then are still hardly addressed issues in modern times how can wokeness go too far when it's still just a conversation a conversation isn't as new as this course makes it out to be a conversation trying to change issues that still haven't been solved we could debate for hours about what too far means but I'm sure we could all agree that for something to go too far it has to actually go somewhere and I mean we live in a society where the wealth divide is widening even more so for ethnic minorities and women conversion therapy for lgbtqia plus people is still legal trans people are waiting up to three years for a first appointment at a gender Clinic black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than white women and rape classifications in England and Wales have fallen by 70 despite the metoo movement even though more sexual assaults are being recorded things have improved but not that much not enough for us to start demonizing progress in new ideas and I'm not saying that every new idea and outcome is going to be a keeper there's going to be some outliers some extremes and I'm sure that there's that the opposition is going to zoom in on those examples because outliers is all they really have because nothing that substantial has happened and I'm not saying that your average work kid on Tick Tock is going to be the next Simone de Bourgeois and I'm not saying that the next woke Heart Take on Twitter if Twitter's still around will be revered like the works of Aristotle but even Aristotle have some bad ideas and so did Simone de bevoir for being honest and it's okay to not be into everything but trying to stifle progress out of the fear that it's going to go too far means that we're not going to go anywhere at all and as a believer in evolution I believe that we shouldn't stop evolving as a culture and as a society so I hope that the house applies that empathy to the everyday realities of marginalized groups and less to the Panic stroking headlines of the mainstream media and click bait headlines on YouTube channels thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

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Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 12 2023