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https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/jun/10/how-does-woke-start-winning-again>
"Inside a coffin-like glass box lies the figure of a man, his face streaked
with scarlet paint. Above it a video plays on loop, showing the afternoon in
June 2020 when an exuberant crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters yanked this
statue of the 17th-century slave trader Edward Colston from its plinth near
Bristol harbour and rolled it triumphantly into the water. Five years on from
that cathartic execution, the graffiti-smeared statue occupies the far end of
the exhibition on protest at the city’s M Shed museum, in a thicket of placards
left behind by the departing crowd. Their slogans – “Silence is violence”;
“Racism is a dangerous pandemic too” – evoke the radicalism of a summer that
already feels oddly consigned to history, when frustration erupted on to the
streets but never quite seemed to be channelled into lasting change.
The museum leads visitors to Colston via older stories of resistance figures,
once considered shockingly radical but now celebrated without question: Theresa
Garnett, the suffragette who brandished a horsewhip at Winston Churchill at
Bristol Temple Meads station, or the heroes of the 1963 Bristol bus boycott,
who walked to work in protest against the bus company’s refusal to hire black
drivers (and helped pave the way for the 1965
Race Relations Act). But the
legacy of protests at the modern end of the gallery, where the statue lies
sandwiched between exhibits on Extinction Rebellion and Occupy, remains, for
now, more contested.
Trying to clarify what the UK public understands by the perennially slippery
term “woke”, in 2022 the pollsters YouGov asked respondents how well it fitted
various contemporary causes. The highest match – above trans rights,
no-platforming people whose opinions you dislike, stronger action on climate
change and the Black Lives Matter movement itself – was with removing
historical statues associated with slavery, like that of Colston. Something
about this combination of direct action against a highly symbolic target, and
revisiting history through a modern social justice lens, meant that 61%
considered it woke.
For some, that was perhaps a compliment. But by 2022, a word briefly synonymous
with enlightened liberal consciousness – borrowed from a phrase used as far
back as the 1930s by black Americans, urging each other to “stay woke’” to the
threat of racial violence – was already becoming what the then Scottish first
minister Nicola Sturgeon called “a pejorative term of abuse”."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics