There seems to be two kinds of wokeism (just, as we saw yesterday, there seems to be two Overton Windows), which might be described as wokeism on the right and wokeism on the left. If wokeism might be described as a perhaps exaggerated respect for the sensitivities of others, a sort of extension of what was once branded “political correctness,” the implication by those against it is that valuable things are being thrown away or suppressed to protect those sensitivities, at the expense of traditions of the past, or even the reality of science in deference to traditional worldviews.
Most broadly, being “woke” simply means being aware of how others perceive the world, and how the assumptions made yesterday might not be appropriate today and might be improved. Woke; awake; aware. In practice, especially on the right, it means opposing anything that challenges the tradition in the US of white Christian culture. On the left it means challenging, even trying to correct, injustices of the past, including almost incidentally racist attitudes in old books, from Dr. Seuss to Roald Dahl. Conservatives are outraged that something traditional is being lost when Random House declines to keep in print certain cringe-worthy Dr. Seuss books, but then turns around to ban, as best they can, other books that *they* don’t like, those that concern people and practices that weren’t part of their traditional conservative past. And so on.
Outrages against wokeism are easy to find on the right (see: Florida), less common on the left, where it seems to be confined to the academic community. Today, a couple examples of that.
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