One of the political words that has become a weapon and joke, depending on your political persuasion, is the word ‘woke.’ It came into vogue in recent years to describe a person who is consciously awake to concerns in relation to social and racial justice. The Urban Dictionary, mocking, notes that being “woke” is opinions that a white, upper-class person pretends to hold that he thinks a black lower-class person might hold. But it goes far beyond race — it essentially refocuses everything in society around a prism that all of life is biased in one way or another because of inequity. Thus, it is up to the social justice warriors to get it all straightened out.
This ‘narrative’ (another overworked and misinterpreted word) has become the political language of our day. If you are not progressively woke, which means that you embrace climate change, the green movement, racial reconciliation through systemic changes in law enforcement, rights through grievance, etc., then you are behind the times at best and a Neanderthal at worst. To the Woke Folks, to defy this reality is putting the brakes on the progress of human society.
It is not so much that society has shifted as much as those who impact our society has shifted. The movers and shakers in our world today are the information and entertainment media, educational institutions at all levels, foundations and think tanks, and governmental entities both elected and appointed. Whole books have been written on how these institutions have sought to reshape our world, but here are a just a couple of examples to illustrate the illogical logic of the Woke.
Take the Hollywood film industry, for example. Has anyone noticed how important it is to have female superheroes these days? “Wonder Woman,” “Black Widow,” female “Ghostbusters,” etc. Championing women is fine, of course, but in the past, heroic women were highlighted because they were able to outsmart men, not beat them up. Just look at Princess Leia in the original “Star Wars” movies. She was clever and determined and able to defend herself when necessary, contrasted to her fellow rebels Luke and Han Solo, who were brave and tough but knuckleheads. Now compare her to the later “Star Wars” heroine, the lone desert scavenger Rey. She is a totally self-reliant, kick-butt tough gal that is carrying the water for her stormtrooper deserter and wimpy sidekick, Finn.
The latest and possibly worst entry to this genre is the action movie, “The 355.” This film has been almost universally panned because it requires discarding all rationality to believe that these 100-pound runway models are able to seemingly kick the crap out of men three times their size. Not just that, but every man is either evil, stupid, or both. Today’s Hollywood hero women must be tougher, stronger, smarter, morally sounder than men. Welcome to today’s Woke Entertainment.
The Woke World leaves no stones unturned. They look for inequity everywhere, even in maps. Yes, even maps must be ‘woke.’ Why? Well, here is the problem. As we all know, our planet is a three-dimensional sphere; thus, when it is spread out in two dimensions on paper, it will not be proportionally what it is in actuality. The standard map was the Mercator, named after the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator who designed a world map over 400 years ago. He was trying to enable sailors to plot a smooth, straight course across the ocean. Still, to accomplish this, he had to sacrifice accuracy in other areas, namely, the relative sizes of the continents. Greenland is a good example. Look on a Mercator world map, and Greenland looks almost as big as the continent of Africa. In actuality, Greenland is about the size of the Democratic Republic of Congo. You could fit fourteen Greenlands in the size of Africa.
For centuries, this has been vexing for map makers, and many options have popped up. The one that most cartographic historians favor today is the Eckert projection, now in its IV version, which preserves proportionality without distorting the shape of continents. This would seem to make logical sense.
However, the new and improved map is known as the Peters projection, which has been used in schools in Great Britain and now in the Boston School District, which comes from the concerns of the American Cartographic Association, the National Geographic Society, the Association of American Geographers, and the National Council for Geographic Education (all the woke folks) who believe that maps should be “the beginning of a conversation about the social implications of maps.”
In other words, maps should reflect how people ‘perceive’ (or should we say, how they are supposed to perceive) the world in which we live. In establishing these new maps into the Boston School District, Hayden Frederick-Clark, Director of Cultural Proficiency, remarked, “we were primarily concerned with the notion of decolonizing our curriculum.”
Lesson is over today, children; just remember to think properly about social justice when you look at a world map.
