Woke Ouroboros: Segregation and Essentialism

Why is it so hard to talk about wokeness? According to Merriam-Webster, "woke" means "aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)," but it rarely seems that's all it means.

If one asks the right, "woke" is a pejorative term for someone pushing identity-only politics. If one asks the left, it's a signifier one isn't a bigot.

If one asks Peter Coffin, author of Less Sucks: Overpopulation, Eugenics, and Degrowth (and producer of the documentary of the same name), "wokeness" is an ideology used to obscure power and funnel people into left/right political fandoms - ensuring culture war arguments that solve nothing.

Woke Ouroboros is a grounded criticism of "wokeness" built on top of a materialist conception of the relations of power through production - a thorough-but-accessible examination of one of the most fraught political conversations Americans are having and the implications it has via the imperialist world order.