Shut Up About How Much You Hate 'Woke'. I Don't Care.

Or, Words: What Are They Good For?

Thanks for being here, folks. I appreciate the fact that this newsletter gives me the chance to research and write a piece every week, and I also appreciate the fact that I’m starting to worry less and less about my fear of other people reading what I write. Translating what’s inside my head to the world outside my head in any number of written formats has always been fun to me, but the anxiety absolutely comes into play when I consider letting someone else read those words.

Me writing all these words for What We Can has meant that at least a few people are going to read something I’ve written once a week, and that’s been a really good thing for me. Not to mention the discipline of maintaining a weekly newsletter in spite of all the obligations and time commitments I’ve got at the moment (and let’s be honest, that I’ll probably always have). Life is busy, but writing is good for me, and you reading that writing is even better for me. So thank you.

This week, we’re going to talk about words. The concept that “Words Matter” has been commonly used in the mental health and addiction worlds for many years, and there’s a reason for that: it’s true. They do. The way we talk about things flavors the way that we think about those things, and it also flavors the way that we act toward those things. That probably makes sense to you on an instinctive level (at least, it does to me, and to many of those I’ve discussed this with over the past decade or two).

If you want to hear a few of the things I’ve said professionally about words in the past, here you go:

That clip comes from a project I worked on with the Ashtabula County Mental Health & Recovery Services Board (where I chaired a Stigma Workgroup to try and impact the ways words were affecting my community).

There are lots of other great examples of videos from that campaign here.

Our use of language determines a great deal about the outcomes of those we’re trying to help, if you’re talking about the helping professions like social work, counseling, nursing, or medicine. There’s a lot of data out there that shows when we call someone with an addiction an “addict” in a professional setting, we care less about them as human beings.

The same is true of all kinds of derogatory words that people sometimes use to describe mental health conditions. Look at the evidence—stigmatizing language leads us to worry less about that person’s experience of pain. It leads us to give them fewer choices regarding their care. It causes us to listen less closely to their description of their symptoms, and ultimately to give them a worse standard of care. And that isn’t exclusive to helping professionals, who you’d imagine tend to self-select as pretty compassionate people in the first place. So with the everyday person, the lay-person who isn’t specializing in providing care, the same effect applies at least as strongly (if not more).

When we use language that demeans other people, we start to view them as mattering less. We start to identify those people in dehumanizing terms. We start to find ourselves hating them, or at least disliking them, more than we would otherwise. And that’s not a good thing, by anyone’s definition of “good”.

When we call someone an “addict”, it does a few different things. On an individual level, we start to believe they’re less-than. That process makes us care less about them. It also makes them care less about themselves. It saps their motivation to make different decisions regarding their health and their life choices. On the level of groups of people, we start seeing things like policies that harm people struggling with addiction, or policies that demean and further dehumanize them. On the community level, we start arresting and stop funding programs that actually make a difference. And on the level of states and, ultimately, the whole country, we see words and the hate that comes from them translated into all kinds of negative actions against these folks.

In regards to addiction, many of us can very easily make the case that the use of stigmatizing language pretty directly leads to fewer people seeking treatment, fewer people staying consistent with treatment, fewer people funding treatment, and fewer people providing a good standard of care in that treatment. It’s an individual thing and also a systemic thing, as so many issues end up being. We can make different choices on our individual level and also make changes on the system level in the areas where we have influence, and enough of those changes equals a bigger and bigger degree of change. That’s the truth as I see it (and as I’ve learned it, experience it, and taught it over the years).

I mention stigma related to words and addiction because that effect has been so well-documented in the literature. But I could just as easily point to any number of uses of words that I feel are equally impactful/harmful. This isn’t just my opinion—it’s as close to fact as you can possibly get in an area related to human beings (who are very, very difficult to pin down, as you may have noticed).

Why am I pondering words so deeply this week? You might know where this is going if you read as much political news as I do, but bear with me here. Since the 2024 election, there have been countless words written about the perceived shortcomings of the Democratic party in this country. Sometimes it feels as though there are as many opinions among political consultants as grains of sand in the universe. And one of those opinions, which I’ve heard expressed a number of different ways from a number of different places, is this: “Woke is dead, so act accordingly”.

I don’t have enough free time in my life to do a deep-dive for you about the origins of the term “woke”, but suffice it to say that the Black community in the United States likely coined the term close to a hundred years ago, during the Jim Crow era. Its colloquial meaning refers to staying aware of the way the world works, rather than allowing yourself to be asleep and thus endangering yourself. There’s a connotation of acknowledging structural racism and other forms of inequality there as well. So after a hundred years of usage within that community which was mostly perfectly acceptable, why is “woke” so widely considered to be “dead” these days? Because words matter.

It’s a very clear example of the exact phenomenon I’m talking about in this exact piece: if a thousand (or ten thousand, or a million) right-wing commentators say that all kinds of diabolical nonsense are attached to the term “woke”, they can then extend and amplify their disdain beyond the dark corners where their voices were traditionally confined to the popular discourse at large. Suddenly we’ve all heard that “woke” stuff is bad. And what’s “woke”? Oh, all kinds of things. Pretty much anything can be considered “woke”, and then pretty much anything can be devalued, sneered at, and hated. How is that a good thing for anyone? Simple answer: it’s not. It’s a very, very bad thing.

Here are a few things I’ve seen labeled as “woke” in just the past 24 hours:

• Superman

• A random female CEO (who was also accused of ‘girlbossing’, for some reason)

• A GAP jeans ad

• Disliking slavery

• Women cooking

• Having a logo without a barrel in it

• Food trucks

• Lesbians who might like men too

• Hand soap dispensers

• Museums

• Men cooking

• T-shirts

• Cars

Yes, seriously. I’m not even making any of those up. You’re going to have to trust me on that, but I bet that you’ve got a similar list to mine in your own head. Your list might even have more ridiculous items on it than this one did. But my point remains: “woke” is now being applied to anything and everything, and it’s also considered by some folks to be the worst possible thing that could be used to describe you, your business, your preferences, etc.

Would you like another example? The White House’s official Twitter account posted this image last Wednesday. Yes, I’m serious.

What was that in reference to, you may ask? It’s hard to say, since it’s kind of all over the place, but…slavery and also the Smithsonian, I think? And, perhaps, museums in general? I can’t even, folks. I just can’t.

Last Friday, an organization called Third Way published a memo directed toward “All Who Wish to Stop Donald Trump and MAGA”. Third Way is, in their words:

A national think tank and advocacy organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas. Our work on the center left acts as a critical bulwark against political extremism.

They say that they’re “passionate moderates” who seek to “motivate ambitious policy reform”. They quote the Washington Post as saying they’re “the best source of new ideas in public policy”. And this new memo from Third Way encapsulates what I consider to be an incredibly harmful set of ideas which would only feed into the toxic and, frankly, incomprehensible “anti-woke” perspectives of the current administration’s most fervent fans. I hate this memo, and I hate these ideas. So that’s why I’m talking about it here today.

In this memo (you can find it here, if you’d like to read it yourself), Third Way argues that “Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying”. They continue,

To please the few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.

Even though they note that the social positions Democrats tend to espouse aren’t actually “wildly out-of-touch”, Third Way claims that many who care about our use of words in this way “are aware that the words and phrases we use can be profoundly alienating”, and yet:

But they use it because plain, authentic language that voters understand often rebounds badly among many activists and advocacy organizations. These activists and advocates may take on noble causes, but in doing so they often demand compliance with their preferred messages;

So the problem, according to Third Way, is that the typical “ordinary person” doesn’t care about the words that liberals tend to use, and neither do we, but that we’re just scared of “activists and advocates” who share ideology with us but insist upon heterodoxy of word choice. That argument, frankly, gives me the ick. I care about people, and I care about the ways people get treated. And that’s why I’m going to continue using words that I feel aren’t intended to harm people. It’s that simple for me. I don’t fear left-wingers. What I fear is people being dehumanized and having to face even more hate and have their lives disrupted even more by our current political state of affairs. They’re not the enemy, and they don’t deserve to be sacrificed on the altar of the fake “woke is dead” movement. They just don’t.

Continuing onward, Third Way makes the claim that,

These are words that people simply do not say, yet they hear them from Democrats. Over the years we’ve conducted, read, and analyzed hours upon hours of focus groups, and we’ve yet to hear a voter volunteer any of the phrases below except as a form of derision or parody of Democrats…Here we are focusing on the eggshell dance of political correctness which leaves the people we aim to reach cold or fearful of admonishment.

I’m not stupid. I realize that different groups of people are going to be more receptive to specific uses of language and specific vernacular forms of words. That’s obvious. That also speaks to the importance of code-switching (knowing how to communicate with different types of people based upon their context). But this memo does more to demonize words and perspectives which I strongly feel DO need to be emphasized more in our society. If we blame those who are displaying empathy and compassion and say they’re terrorizing us, we have no space and energy to blame the actual bad guys. That seems obvious to me, but what do I know?

Let’s look at some of the categories of words that Third Way says we’re not allowed to use anymore.

First up, “Therapy-Speak”. As a category, it makes me pretty frustrated to use “therapy” as a word with a negative connotation that we want to have represent an entire category of forbidden words, but here we go.

Speaking as a therapist, an educator, and a human being, I’m going to emphatically tell you that these are not scary words. I have used eight of these eleven words or phrases in the past week, but less than half of those uses were actually in a therapy session. Why is “body shaming” forbidden? We aren’t told. Why is “triggering” forbidden? Who knows.

I’ll bet I’ve heard my students use at least half of these words or phrases in the past week, and none of them seemed upset at the terrible error of having done so. I’ll also point out that I’ve never heard the phrase “progressive stack”, and so I really couldn’t tell you why it’s included in a list of “Therapy-Speak” words. I googled it just now, and it actually looks like an interesting way to structure classroom discussions to make sure that multiple perspectives are represented. But I honestly don’t see why people would be afraid of retribution if they don’t use any of these words, and it sounds more like fear of the boogeyman to me. At least at this point, anyway.

Next up, Seminar Room Language. (Which is probably where “progressive stack” should have been placed, if you ask me.)

To me, with undergraduate degrees in Sociology and Psychology and a graduate degree in Social Work, all of these words or phrases are perfectly reasonable. I wouldn’t use many of them at all in casual conversation with non-political wonks, or with folks who don’t understand them. I can’t tell you that I’ve EVER heard someone refer to a heuristic or postmodernism outside of a class that specifically focuses on that topic, and though I did hear someone address the Overton Window on a podcast the other day, the co-host didn’t understand it either. These are words used in specialized settings, and so I don’t get the impulse to scold Dems for using them. I just don’t think it’s a huge issue.

It’s worth noting that Glenn Beck wrote a book named “The Overton Window” like fifteen years ago, so I’d bet that acquainted a whole lot of non-liberal people to that particular term.

Up next is “Organizer Jargon”.

I’m curious what the acceptable alternative to “food insecurity” is. “Starving son-of-a-bitch”? The terms in this list are mostly just descriptors of things, which I don’t see a reason to assume are offensive to people. They’re taking their point too far, clearly. As an example, HUD has referred to “precariously housed” people for many years as an alternative to folks who are truly unhoused and thus are eligible for HUD housing assistance. HUD is about as far as it gets from being a woke bastion—and is “precariously housed” that different than “housing insecurity”?

Next is “Gender/Orientation Correctness”. Oh good.

Do you even hear how ridiculous you sound here, folks? “Patriarchy” is a woke term which must be eliminated? As this article shows, the concept of the patriarchy has been in place since at least the agricultural revolution (maybe 6,000 years ago). Some folks suggest that a gender-based division of labor has been around for as many as 1-2 MILLION years, and arrived with the invention of cooking. The word itself comes from ancient Greek. Are you seriously telling me that we are remaking the history of words to the extent that we are erasing language and concepts we’ve been aware of since the dawn of modern society? Some of the words in this section of the list are very, very seldomly used at all, and once again, are not a huge deal even if they are in some corner of the world.

And then we hear about the need to beware of “The Shifting Language of Racial Constructs”.

I’m a social work educator. I have very little choice but to use several of these words on a pretty regular basis, as they describe very real concepts in my world that don’t have other descriptors which adequately convey their meaning. My students have to learn about intersectionality, since the intersection of personal characteristics speaks to differences in how we each experience the world. As I’ve said in this newsletter in the past, I do believe one can be a conservative and also be a great social worker. But those awesome conservative social workers still need to understand the concept of intersectionality, whether they agree with it or not, and they can’t do that if we can’t use the word!

Last is “Explaining Away Crime”.

This really, really annoys me. We’re just cherry-picking random words to point fingers at at this point, I’m telling you. Have you heard many of these words used this year, I wonder? Because aside from “justice-involved” and “incarcerated people”, I don’t think I’ve heard the others used in 2025, until I read this silly memo at least. And when I hear “involuntary confinement”, it means involuntary hospitalization to me. Which is not about the justice system, so I’m not sure why it’s even in this section.

Third Way’s conclusion states, in part:

Recognize that much of the language above is a red flag for a sizable segment of the American public. It is not because they are bigots, but because they fear cancellation, doxing, or trouble with HR if they make a mistake. Or they simply don’t understand what these terms mean and become distrustful of those who use them. So instead, they keep quiet. They don’t join the conversation, they leave it.

I think this betrays a fundamental lack of understanding about what the actual problem is here. It is beyond silly to suggest that Sam at the desk next to yours is terrified that someone will call HR on him because he forgot to say “cisgender” or “food insecurity” or “stakeholders”. Your neighbor doesn’t “fear doxing” because she forgot to say “pregnant people”. This is a manufactured crisis, and seems more and more the result of a consultant class that is desperate to justify their own existence.

The issue is not people on the left being afraid of those further to the left than them who are being cowed into using awkward language. The issue is also not people in the center or on the right who are afraid of those further to the left than them forcing them to use awkward language, either. Aside from some online spaces, this is not a real issue facing real people.

Words are important, and the words that we use to describe things matter a whole lot. I’ve already given you some concrete reasons why words reinforce stigma in terms of addiction, and that dynamic isn’t exclusive to addiction.

Folks on the left are not perfect, and the decisions the Democratic Party has made have also been far from perfect. I’m not saying that left-leaning conversations should be considered immune from criticism, because I don’t believe that. I do feel that the thrust of the conversation should be much more geared toward changing behavior by the people who are trafficking in cruelty, chaos, and the disruption of all our societal norms. Why isn’t the pressure being applied to the horrific behavior of those in the Republican Party who have sacrificed all their ideals in favor of their truly morally bankrupt leader? Why doesn’t pushback around language come when “conservatives” call any random product or job or company or movie or ad or social media post “woke” if it pertains to anybody who’s non-white, non-male, or non-filled with hate?

If your feelings get hurt because an actor is Black, or a CEO is female, or a company cares about any progressive cause at all, how is the problem the actor or CEO or company? And, beyond that, how is the problem that Democrats said “patriarchy”?

The problem is the intolerance of the Republican Party and their hangers-on. They will accept no dissenting perspectives, and they will allow no alternative ways of thinking. They have what seems like a hugely disproportionate amount of power in this country right now. And they are using that power to shut up everyone who disagrees with them. If you make the decision to change your language in an attempt to pacify the anti-woke zombie contingent, you are giving them exactly what they’re demanding. Why would you give the monsters what they want? I’m not doing that.

It should go without saying that when we opt to use less compassionate language, we will also opt, over time, to treat other people in less compassionate ways. That’s the way it works with words. So the right’s strategy isn’t only to stop us from using specific words, it’s to stop us from caring about people that they do not feel deserve to be cared for. And I’m not doing that either.

All of the words I’ve written today about words has also left one big point unexplored: it is awfully paternalistic to say that conservatives aren’t smart enough to understand these words. Can we honestly say that conservatives get confused because they don’t understand words and concepts that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years? Not only should we not assume people are too dumb to understand, but we also shouldn’t assume they don’t want to understand (or can’t be taught). Why would we give up on having conversations that are geared toward more understanding between us, regardless of our disparate positions? I have no intention of doing that, either.

So that’s where I’ll leave you, for now. Words make a difference, and while you can absolutely choose which words are appropriate given the context you’re in, I think it’s a huge mistake for anyone to suggest that a magical list of 40-something forbidden words is going to solve anything. I have bigger problems, and so does the left. And the right? Don’t get me started about the stuff THEY need to change. This is not the solution to any of the huge issues that are facing our society. Let’s talk about those instead, perhaps?

Thanks for reading! Keep reading, sharing, and thinking. Appreciate you.