A staff writer for Slate says people who use “woke” as a term to describe the progressive takeover of American culture are guilty of using a racial slur.
“If you’re not black and started using ‘woke’ pejoratively sometime post-2018 or so (or worse, don’t know anything about the earlier iteration of the term), I think it’s fair to consider it a racial slur,” he tweeted on Sunday. “And it doesn’t mean I’m gonna do anything to you, or that anyone else will. But it doesn’t mean I won’t either.”
And it doesn't mean I’m gonna do anything to you, or that anyone else will. But it doesn’t mean I won’t either.
— Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) November 8, 2021
In the same thread, Anderson posted a picture of white men carrying tiki torches and captioned it “all these hit dogs.” He then tried to justify his agitation with “woke” by claiming that “certain group of folks feel entitled to say whatever they want to you whenever they want” but that he’s entitled to his opinion.
I know this is hard because a certain group of folks feel entitled to say whatever they want to you whenever they want. And who am I to stop them from using a term they shoplifted from the black community? All I’m saying is, like with the other words, I get to decide my response
— Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) November 8, 2021
Multiple “journalists” from other corporate media outlets liked or retweeted Anderson’s original post. The Washington Post’s Michael Lee, NBC’s Kimmy Yam, ESPN’s Morgan Jenkins, MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson, and Vox and Draft King’s David Fucillo were among those who seemed to agree with and support Anderson’s claims.
Anderson has long maintained that “woke” is a term “stolen from black folks … and repurposed” to be a word that Americans of any race frequently use. Anderson has complained about the word for at least two years.
“No offense if you use the term, but when i see ‘woke’ now i immediately suspect it’s being invoked in service of racism. blame twitter, if you must. actually, nah. take offense,” he wrote in 2019.
no offense if you use the term, but when i see “woke” now i immediately suspect it’s being invoked in service of racism. blame twitter, if you must. actually, nah. take offense.
— Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) February 26, 2019
those last couple of RTs are, in their way, what being “woke” was supposed to mean before people who don’t know any black people (or those who just resent them) co-opted the term: a series of revelations of all the ways in which racism shapes your life behind the scenes.
— Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) May 30, 2021
she’s merely the latest to use all the terms stolen from black folks — “woke” and “cancel” — and repurposed them with the help of their growing Stormfront brigade. https://t.co/tkrnluYxIp
— Joel D. Anderson (@byjoelanderson) July 22, 2020
He even went so far as to claim that “woke mob” and “young wokes” are vocabulary used by people who are “too worried about the skill of your hands to say” the n-word.
