How the Woke use Conflation

Woke rhetoric is always conflationary. If a word has more than one meaning, the Woke mean them both, always, all the time, but mostly whatever they need it to mean right now. If the sentence they just uttered requires an alternative meaning in the next moment, it has it. 

The Woke only mean what they say when they say it. Afterward, they might have meant something else entirely, if that's what's required.

"Whiteness" and "Blackness" have obvious racial overtones where the quality or state of being white or black is identified as racial. But the Woke have been smuggling in these "cognitive" definitions for some time. 

A couple recent examples: the infamous Smithsonian NMAAHC poster and the subtle shift from "Black Lives Matter" to "Black and Trans Lives Matter" and then back to simply "Black Lives Matter." 

Click to enlarge

To explain the 2nd example: by adding "Trans" to the mantra-like slogan, an association between Black and Trans is made and reinforced. The subsequent withdrawal supposes those who were meant to have have made the indelible connection. 

And by that example, you may recognize the purpose of adding secondary definitions to both Whiteness and Blackness. In part, it serves to racialize (not just politicize) all possible objects of discourse. No, it's no new trick to say that whoever opposes my tax policy is a racist. But there was doubt about it. One might oppose taxes for taxes' sake. But if taxes are racialized, then one can be certain that opposition is racist.

In the other part, it serves conflation. Now we can start by talking about Black people, then slide into Black policies, and you can't oppose them without being racist. (To what does the pronoun "them" refer? It doesn't matter. That's the idea.) These are post-Obama politics. Obama needed to be Black in order to imbue any policy he touched with Blackness. But now, a policy can stand as Black on its own. 

There is a third, perhaps most important, part. To simply describe "whiteness" as hegemonic won't do. That's because the counter-hegemon (Blackness) aims to (and in many ways, already has) become the hegemon (naturally). But these words already have connotations of upness and downness. Perhaps you see where I'm going. The "punch up, not down" rule must be adhered to, because easy rules are the hardest to unteach. Gladly, both "whiteness" and "blackness" also have connotations of upness (white) and downness (black). And so we have solved the problem of up becomes down and down becomes up. 

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Update: I came across the top graphic shortly after publishing this article and thought that a woke person would absolutely beat you over the head with it while simultaneously insisting that elephants certainly do pack their clothes in the trees that grow from the backs of their noses.