​“Woke” vs. What Actually Helps People

[February 2026]

I am not woke.

I am also not anti-woke.

And I am tired of the word “woke” being used as a catch-all for everything anyone dislikes about modern politics.

The term originated in Black communities as a warning — stay awake to racism, stay alert to injustice, stay conscious of the systems that shape your life. It meant vigilance. It meant clarity. It meant survival.

That is not what most people mean when they use it now.

Some people use “woke” as shorthand for any acknowledgment that racism, sexism, or queerphobia exist. Others use it to describe what I would call vibes-based politics: virtue-signalling, identitarian performance, moral grandstanding untethered from material reality. What used to be called “SJW” culture on Tumblr in the 2010s — a culture that shifted from structural critique to competitive correctness.

I watched that shift happen.

In the early 2010s, movements like Occupy Wall Street were dangerously close to articulating something coherent about class power. There was a brief moment when economic injustice was the central conversation. And then the energy fractured. The discourse turned inward. Language policing replaced strategy. Sounding correct replaced building power. Politics became tribal signaling, and the movement began to eat itself.

Critiquing that shift does not make me anti-Black, anti-queer, anti-woman, or anti-justice.

​It means I am not interested in politics as performance art.

If we are going to talk honestly about how things went sideways, we have to start with class.

Occupy Wall Street was messy, imperfect, chaotic — and it was right about the central problem. “We are the 99%” was not just a slogan. It was a diagnosis. A tiny fraction of people control a disgustingly huge amount of wealth and political influence, and the rest of us are left scrambling for scraps, fighting over cultural crumbs while the structural machinery hums along untouched.

The core insight was simple: the primary engine of inequality in this country is economic power.

If you strengthen the social safety net, if you guarantee healthcare, if you ensure housing stability, if you raise wages to an actual living standard — not survival wages, living wages — you immediately reduce enormous amounts of racial, gender, and queer inequality without having to moralize anyone into enlightenment. Poverty is not evenly distributed across identity groups. When you lift the floor, you disproportionately help those who have been historically shoved beneath it.

And yes, that includes people on disability. A society that forces disabled people to live below the poverty line while policing their income and relationships is not progressive; it is cruel. A universal basic income is a policy I support — but it cannot exist in a vacuum. If landlords are free to absorb it through rent hikes, if food prices are unregulated, if healthcare remains commodified, then it becomes another subsidy flowing upward. UBI only works if paired with rent controls, food assistance, healthcare guarantees, and protections that prevent corporate capture.

Material stability changes lives. It gives people room to breathe. It reduces desperation. It reduces violence. It reduces the conditions under which bigotry festers.

This is not a new observation. Lyndon B. Johnson put it bluntly decades ago:

If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. 

​Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

That quote is crude. It is also brutally clear.

Division along racial lines has always been useful to people at the top. Not because racism isn’t real — it is — but because racism can be weaponized to redirect anger away from concentrated wealth and toward lateral enemies. If poor and working-class people are busy policing each other’s status, they are not organizing against the people extracting from all of them.

Class does not erase race. It does not erase sexism. It does not erase homophobia. But class determines who has insulation and who does not. It determines who can weather a crisis and who collapses under it. It determines who can walk away from a bad job, a bad landlord, a bad relationship, a bad medical bill — and who cannot.

When you change material conditions, you change the terrain on which all other struggles take place.

A Black family with stable housing, healthcare, and generational wealth is less vulnerable than a white family with none of those things. A queer person with financial independence and a safety net has more leverage than one who is one missed paycheck away from homelessness. Economic power does not solve everything, but its absence makes everything worse.

Occupy was trying to force that conversation into the center. It was trying to say: the system is rigged upward. The fight is not between neighbors. It is between concentrated capital and everyone else.

And for a moment, that clarity was dangerous.

That clarity brings people together instead of pitting them against each other.

When you say, plainly, that most of us are being squeezed by the same machinery, it becomes harder to sell the story that your neighbor is your enemy. It becomes harder to convince a white warehouse worker that his problem is a Black cashier. Harder to convince a straight mechanic that a trans barista is the reason his rent doubled. Harder to convince anyone that symbolic wins on social media are a substitute for material security.

Class analysis does not flatten differences. It contextualizes them. It explains why exploitation replicates across identity lines while still landing harder on some groups because of history. It offers a coalition instead of a hierarchy of grievance.

It also forces accountability upward.

When the focus is structural — wages, healthcare, housing, labor power — the spotlight shifts to corporations, to finance, to policy, to lawmakers. It becomes about who sets the rules and who benefits from them. That is a unifying frame. It says: you may have different experiences, but you are trapped inside the same economic architecture.

And once people start recognizing that architecture, they start asking different questions. Not “who said the wrong thing?” but “who owns this?”

Not “who is insufficiently educated?” but “who profits?”

​That kind of clarity is harder to fracture. Which is precisely why it is so often redirected.

On Tumblr in the 2010s, people went feral over trivia. If someone typed “GLBT” instead of “LGBT” they got treated like they’d committed violence. If a trans guy wrote “transman” as one word to describe himself instead of "trans man", he got scolded, dogpiled, chased across platforms, harassed in DMs, screenshot and mocked. Hunted. Followed. Mobbed.

The scale of punishment was grotesque compared to the “crime.” It wasn’t about harm. It was about blood in the water. It was about showing everyone else you were the most vigilant, the most correct, the most ideologically pure. And the people doing the dogpiling often behaved worse — more cruelly, more aggressively, more obsessively — than the person they were accusing. It was moral theater with a body count.

Then George Floyd was murdered and the country exploded.

And what did we get?

Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben got new labels. Some Confederate statues came down. Corporations updated their branding. HR departments hosted workshops. Social media feeds filled with black squares.

Meanwhile, Black people are still racially profiled. Still brutalized by police. Still incarcerated at wildly disproportionate rates. Still given harsher sentences than white people for the same crimes. And now we have federal agents and ICE officers shooting people in the street.

The packaging changed. The system didn’t.

“Defund the police” became a chant. “The police are a function of the slave state” became a slogan. And most of the people yelling it the loudest were upwardly mobile white liberals who do not live in neighborhoods where violence is an abstract theory. There was never a serious, workable replacement offered that wouldn’t collapse into chaos. No one produced a functioning plan that didn’t quietly rely on either wishful thinking or vigilantism.

You cannot abolish a flawed institution and replace it with vibes.

If there is no trained, accountable public safety structure, power does not disappear — it devolves to whoever is loudest, angriest, or most armed. Karen calls the HOA on Jamal for being “suspicious,” and in a power vacuum that can end in a shooting or a lynching. That is not liberation. That is chaos.

“Defund” was terrible optics and terrible messaging. The demand should have been concrete: retrain the police. Raise hiring standards. Enforce accountability, including the use of bodycams. Fire and prosecute bad actors. Change union protections. Build oversight that actually has teeth. That is policy. That is reform.

That is something you can measure.

Instead, we got a slogan that made half the country shut down and tune out.

And then there’s the ritualized virtue. Land acknowledgments delivered like opening prayers before returning to business as usual. Saying the tribe’s name without otherwise materially supporting Native communities. It feels like clout. Like checking a box so you can be seen as morally aware. If you’re not backing it with action, it’s performance.

Same with the identity inflation.

I identify as trans because of dysphoria. Because of a real, destabilizing brain-body mismatch. That isn’t vibes. That isn’t aesthetic. That isn’t social positioning.

So when I see people treating gender identity like a moral accessory — going "she/they" or using cutesy neopronouns without distress, without any shift in lived embodiment, and framing it as a way to escape “cis oppressor” status — it feels like a dilution of my blood, sweat and tears.

Not because non-binary people aren’t real.

Not because gender variance isn’t real.

But because dysphoria is real.

And when “trans” gets turned into a vibe, it erases the fact that for many of us it is not a vibe. It is medical. It is psychological. It is embodied. It is expensive. It is risky. It reshapes families and bodies and legal documents and careers.

I’m critiquing the social incentive structure — the way identity can become moral currency in certain online cultures. The way some spaces subtly reward distancing yourself from “cis” while offering social capital for claiming proximity to “trans,” regardless of material stakes.

That’s not invalidation.

That’s frustration at reduction.

When politics becomes about signaling rather than substance, even identity can become performative.

And the trans rights movement has an optics problem.

Most cis people — including moderates, including people who are not raging bigots — have concerns about two things: minors transitioning and trans women competing in women’s sports. Whether those concerns are rooted in misinformation, fear, or legitimate policy complexity, they are real concerns in the electorate.

And instead of strategically separating those debates from the core issue — which is the right of consenting adults to transition safely and access medical care — we collapse everything into one emotional front.

We lead with the most controversial edge cases.

We treat any question as hatred.

We respond to public anxiety with “they hate us anyway.”

And then we act shocked when broad swaths of the country tune out.

I am an older trans man. I have dysphoria. I believe adults should have the absolute right to access transition care without government interference. That is non-negotiable to me.

But when I express nuance — when I say maybe minors require careful guardrails, maybe sports policy is complicated, maybe messaging matters — I get dogpiled. I get told I’m enabling transphobia. I get treated like I’ve defected.​

The same culture of moral policing that devoured Tumblr devours dissent inside the trans community.

Nuance becomes betrayal.

And when politics becomes performance, the loudest, most uncompromising posture wins social points — even if it loses elections.

Who benefits from that?

MAGA does.

People did not just vote for Trump because they are cartoon villains. Yes, many of them are racist. Many are misogynistic. Many are anti-queer. That is true.

But some are moderates who feel alienated.

In 2024 and 2025, “wokeness” was cited over and over again as a primary voter concern, right alongside the economy. People felt talked down to. Policed. Shamed. Told they were evil for asking questions. Meanwhile, they were struggling financially.

Donald Trump lied about fixing the economy. He made it worse. But he spoke to material anxiety. He talked about jobs, inflation, gas prices. He talked about money.

We talked about pronouns.

That is not a winning trade.

This is why I have been drawn to people like Bernie Sanders and cheer for Zohran Mamdani. Why I found Andrew Yang intriguing. They centered economic inequality — wages, healthcare, UBI, structural reform — while still supporting LGBT rights and opposing racism. They did not build their campaigns on scolding. They did not lead with aesthetic purity. They talked about material conditions.

You can fight racism. You can support LGBT rights.

But if your public-facing politics is dominated by symbolic battles and moral performance, you will lose the broad coalition required to win power.

And when you lose power, you lose policy.

And when you lose policy, you lose protections.

And then we all pay for it.