Josh Marshall
I didn’t have great expectations for tonight’s speech because political events seldom turn on speeches. Nor is speechifying Biden’s forte. He’s workmanlike, solid. But he’s no great orator. That’s Barak Obama.
But I saw an extraordinarily effective speech. Like so much with Biden he managed to find in the historical moment things that play to his strengths. I’ve been watching State of the Union addresses for forty-plus years and I have never seen one like this. Biden delivered it with a tremendous informality. Biden is no Obama when it comes to oratory. But Obama couldn’t have delivered this speech. It would not play to his skills which are heroic and oratorical rather than empathic and conversational.
From TPM Reader TS …
Absolutely right, this latest one. My university sends out an endless stream of apologies for centuries old ethnic crimes, “climate surveys” asking who feels excluded, demands to take one kind of sensitivity training after another, and letters from every administrator after every national controversy showing “compassion” and asking us all about our feelings. Administrators are being hired by the droves to supervise all this, write reports, conduct surveys, and police language.
From TPM Reader DK …
As I see it, there are two complaints about the “wokeness.” One is completely disingenuous and seems to only come from white people: that it goes too far in “restricting” speech or is “overly prescriptive” in dictating how people are supposed to address one another. The biggest legacy of European Colonialism and the white supremacy intrinsic to it is that of the continued insistence on imposing identities around expectations of who people are and what worth people have in its system of values—both societally and—often—financially. Why should I (a white cishet 52 year old) feel the sads—or rage—that I can no longer assume as much as 52 year old white dudes did 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 years ago about the people they meet in their every day lives?
From TPM Reader SD …
I was listening to some old Shelby Foote C-Span interviews recently on YouTube. I was listening to this one on his interactions with William Faulkner. If you listen to this interview between roughly the nine-minute mark and the 16-minute mark, he gives a lengthy perspective on his views of the South and Mississippi of his youth.
From TPM Reader DH …
I was happy to see MK’s comments. They helped me understand a bit what the anti-wokeness energy is about.
From TPM Reader MK …
I’ve never written in about a story before, but I’m right at the heart of this one! I’m in my early 40s, female, and mixed race. People usually think I’m Latina, occasionally they think I’m Black (I’m neither). I’m pretty progressive (voted for Warren).
I work in a very woke environment. Some of the things are great! It’s nice to know people’s pronouns.The company Ramadan message included helpful, actionable suggestions on how to be considerate of our fasting colleagues. This workplace is absolutely more diverse than anywhere else I’ve worked.
I don’t agree with TPM Reader PC on the inevitability of this. But I think he captures certain key dynamics of language and power.
I think it is important to view the “wokeness” field of battle as primarily and initially as a raw display of shifting power relationships.
In this light, the use of constantly changing norms of language is not a bug but an epiphenomenal feature.
In a sense, the whole rightwing fear and pushback against “wokeness” is a tacit acknowledgement that, actually, the culture war is already over and they lost.
From TPM Reader DW …
Great piece today…I had several phone conversations with Shelby in the early 2000s. I grew up in Memphis, but have lived in NYC since 1997. What started as a discussion about The Moviegoer with Wynton Marsalis turned into a discussion on white southerners and race. Wynton has been a mentor to me, and through him I’ve gotten to score several films for Ken Burns. Shelby is difficult to pigeon hole, as you know.
I’ve been making my way through your emails about this morning’s post on language. I’ll likely be publishing some of them later. One was from longtime TPM Reader NG who writes: “I am wondering if TPM could do a piece on the African-American use of the term “woke,” which has been appropriated and turned into a culture war cliche that ridicules black history/struggles and either self-victimizes or self-aggrandizes the person who bandies the term about.”
The Contested Terrain of Language
I started the day thinking about two very disparate topics that intersect at a point that has been on my mind a lot recently. If you can indulge me for a moment I’ll try to explain how they connect and the larger point.
Remember Shelby Foote?
I was reminded of him recently because I was reading a couple things about the novelist Walker Percy. And it turns out the two of them had a lifelong literary friendship going all the way back to middle school. Foote, a Mississippian, wrote a bunch of novels and histories about the Civil War. I only know about him because he was a central figure in Ken Burns pathbreaking documentary The Civil War, which came out about 30 years ago and created the model for all the other documentaries he’s done since. Many of Burns’ core techniques seem obvious now. The visual idioms seem like they’re part of the cinematic argot of our culture. But they were actually quite new. It was remarkable at the time how he managed to bring to life a period which had only a limited photographic record, no video and no audio.
In any case, back to Shelby Foote, who died in 2005 at the age of 88.