A definition of woke should

- identify what drove the post-2012 spike in social justice talk and cancel culture

- place the ideology in philosophical and historical context

- be more or less acceptable to wokesters themselves (not a straw man)

There is only one definition that does this:

"Wokism is what follows from taking the equality thesis seriously, given a background of Christian morality. If all races and sexes have the same innate distributions of psychological traits, disparities in socioeconomic status must be due to environmental factors. In practice, that means differences in outcome favoring whites or men will be attributed to past or present white racism or sexism. This triggers an all-consuming crusade against the hidden forces of discrimination." - ncofnas.com/p/a-guide-f…

The Great Awokening occurred when it became clear that another generation of affirmative action and Black History Months wasn't going to bring about the promised equality. Brainwashed zoomers and late millennials—people who truly believed the Noble Lie that black, white, Jewish, and Asian people are all born on average exactly the same—demanded an end to the unfairness. Since environmental interventions to equalize outcomes quickly run up against limits set by nature, the war on inequality must continually be ratcheted up until you're tearing down statues and cancelling people for microaggressions.

The empirical premise of wokism was first articulated by John Locke in 1690. Locke said that the human mind is like a blank sheet of paper, and if you or I had been born in South Africa, we would act like Africans and vice versa. These ideas were picked up by the French revolutionaries, and then became a tenet of leftism itself. Equality of outcome has been a dream of the left for well over a century.

Many conservatives define "woke" as a laundry-list of left-coded stuff they don't like: gender theory, socialism, etc. Trump says it's "woke" to deny that he won the 2020 election. There's nothing logically wrong with stipulating any definition you want. But these other things are philosophically and historically separate from the ideology of taking the equality thesis seriously. Suppose we outlawed transgenderism and neopronouns, made Rand Paul the head of the Federal Reserve, and retroactively declared Trump the winner in 2020, but we still maintained the obsession with white supremacy and racial bean counting. Everyone would recognize that wokism was still with us. On the other hand, if we became race realists, wokism would be over even if some race realists kept their pronouns in their bios.

As far as straw manning—my definition just repeats what is said by wokesters! A wokester might quibble with my phraseology, or object to the term "woke." But, if pressed, they (including, I assume, PennyRed) will admit that they are committed to bringing about equal outcomes among people with equal potential, and they'll know when society is fair when all groups are equal.

Many people define wokism specifically as sensitivity about race (or as anti-whitism). This was eyeslasho's definition:

"Wokeness is a hyper-vigilance toward any real or imagined transgressions against identity-based human dignity, resulting in exaggerated perceptions of harm, rigid systems of thinking, a need for purification, and a desire to disengage from and punish transgressors."

Wokism inevitably leads to these things. But the definition doesn't get at the essence of the ideology, and it's not precisely correct.

The woke are not hypervigilant toward any transgression against identity-based human dignity. They have no problem with saying things like "The white race is the cancer of human history" (Sontag) or "White lives don't matter" (Priyamvada Gopal). They don't care much about transgressions against Jews or Asians unless the perpetrator is a white man. From the woke perspective, this is logical. Jews and Asians have good outcomes, so the environment isn't working against them the way it is against underperforming minorities like blacks. The wokester doesn't care about identity-based human dignity per se, but environment-caused disparities.

"Exaggerated perceptions of harm, rigid systems of thinking," etc. are arguably universal features of human morality. The question is, why are these tendencies being employed in the service of race communism? The answer is that people are committed to taking the equality thesis seriously (given a background of certain moral assumptions).

eyeslasho's definition portrays wokism as something inherently negative and irrational (being based on hypervigilance toward transgressions that may be imaginary), so it would never be accepted by wokesters. But in order to fight wokism effectively, it's important to understand its internal logic, which is perfectly reasonable if you accept the equality thesis.