Why We Must Unite Against Wokeness

Ella Valentine
5 min readMar 7, 2021

Meaning of wokeness:

a state of being aware, especially of social problems such as racism and inequality. Wokeness encompasses the need to search for more knowledge, understanding and truth in order to challenge injustice.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? While challenging injustice and raising awareness towards issues of inequality and racism is certainly needed and applaudable, it has the exact opposite effect when it leads to another popular term nowadays, the “cancel culture”.

Cancel culture is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles — whether it be online, on social media, or in person. Those who are subject to this ostracism are said to be “cancelled”.

Social media is more powerful than ever — a single tweet can destroy someone’s career, and life. While my argument is that this would be incredibly unfair, I get how easily people are led to follow a trend — a simple retweet just seems so easy and suddenly hundreds of thousands of people have ganged up and are determined to “cancel” someone. What happened to “the need to search for more knowledge, understanding and truth” with which wokeness…

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