Reflection and Analysis

The Problem with "Going Woke" Censorship - 3/15/23

I've honestly grown tired of the censorship from the "Going Woke" crowd, with the latest victim being the work of Roald Dahl.

And yes, it's the writers who are the victims here, not the special snowflakes who think someone's words should be censored to spare their feelings, that the language should be edited into being politically correct by their standards.

Let me emphasize that the politically correct standard is a standard of someone else being forced on everyone else and really has nothing to do with political correctness but instead an attempt to push "correct-think," to force everyone else to think the exact same way they do, to not allow for differences of opinion, to silence others who don't agree with these special snowflakes that there is anything objectively wrong with what the writer wrote let alone that we should be deeming something as offensive simply because of one's subjective feelings.

And boy, are feelings subjective. Look no farther than a certain royal couple I'm choosing not to name because I don't feel they deserve to be after falsely accusing the rest of the royal family of racism based on a perceived slight purposefully framed by them as being racist only for them to now, currently, be turning around and claiming they never inferred such a thing, that it is all on the media. But then, as an American, I also find myself frustrated at this idea that the material of the BBC should be diverse like the United States despite us, here in the US, being around 50% non-white and over in Great Britain being only 10%.

Yes, I do think this "correct-think" is a form of Americentrism as so much of it is based on things like the country's population as a whole, let alone what Hollywood, which doesn't even represent the entire United States, looks like.

Yet, in saying this, I also want to define what those of us who object to going woke actually mean by going woke, because having researched into what being woke actually means, I can say actually being woke isn't a bad thing, as it's being aware of social injustices and looking for ways to change it. The thing is, those who are being woke aren't the ones going woke, but instead, the ones pointing out that those who've gone woke are a problem.

See, being woke is a term coined in the African American community, which is about being awake to the things going on around you, the actual social injustices such as your local Black neighborhood being in a dead zone or a place where none of the residents can get affordable fresh vegetables which in turn has a negative impact on healthy eating. And by affordable, I do mean to include the cost of gas to get to veg that is affordable in this.

Going woke, on the other hand, is about pretending at and or faking at being woke. It's about someone pretending that they're awake to the social injustices going on only to themselves not see the social injustices they are creating. It's, to be honest, a con, with some banking on their victimhood and this idea we should just believe someone who claims victimhood, thus allowing them to grift vacations and other things which amount to a want rather than a need.

And yes, we do want to talk about it, but it is pretty bad... well, let's quote the Wikipedia article on the Dahl controversy, the part about Criticism of sensitivity readers.

"Puffin Books' use of to determine potentially offensive words or phrases renewed criticism of sensitivity readers as a whole; the use of sensitivity readers in the industry has increased following the in 2020. British poet , whose memoir 'Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me' was edited by sensitivity readers, wrote an essay in in response to Puffin Books' revisions criticising sensitivity readers."

Which, the problem can be summed up as--well, as I said, special snowflakes. In the case of the Dahl edits, we had sensitivity readers who obviously did not understand the character being described wasn't meant to be likable, such as the evil witches in The Witches who got a STEM buff rather than being allowed to remain a stereotype.