Do you speak "woke"? Close panel Open panel Plume Le Figaro App -icon - 512px V1 1 - Style/Logotypes/Le Figaro/Apps/jeux

What is "wokism"? Who are these “wokes”, who talk about “intersectionality”, “cancel culture” and “cultural appropriation”? What do the words "adelphity", or "whitewahsing" mean? This movement, born in the United States, revolves around a set of specific terms, borrowed from English, from sociological concepts or which sometimes go back to Ancient Greece. Le Figaro returns to this jargon, often abstruse, which must be mastered in order to understand the ideological issues it designates.

●Woke

Derived from English, the word "woke" literally means "awake". It is used as a formula in the United States in African American communities throughout the 20th century. “Being woke” then means: “being awake” to the social injustices that weigh on these communities. The “woke” phenomenon became popular in 2008, as Pierre Valentin points out in his study “The woke ideology. Anatomy of wokism”, through music. Georgia Anne Muldrow then sings: “I stay woke” (I stay awake). Asked about the meaning of this word, she replies: “Being woke is definitely a black experience […]. [It's] understanding what your ancestors went through. To be in touch with the struggle that our people have fought here and to understand that we have been fighting since the day we landed here.” The word was then taken up by the "Black Live Matter" movement and its meaning widened: "to be woke" today encompasses everything relating to injustices and oppressions, the fight for which is carried as a banner by its followers. . The "dominated" must "wake up", that is to say, free themselves and fight the "dominant" who use their privileges over them.

●Intersectionality

Here again, it is a question of a relationship between “oppressors” and “oppressed”. Intersectionality, a word still absent from dictionaries, belongs to the field of sociology and social psychology. If we refer to the Office de la langue française in Quebec, this concept would have been described by the African-American jurist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, in 1989, "to speak more specifically of the reality of black women who suffered both the effects of sexism and those of racism.” More broadly, “intersectionality” refers to the different forms of “domination or discrimination experienced by a person”. They may be based “on one's race, sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, social class or physical ability, which leads to increased harm suffered.” In summary, the word encompasses all forms of struggle, based on all forms of "oppression" which denounce all "oppressors". In an attempt to find an etymology for the word, note that "inter" is borrowed from the Latin inter, "between, among" and that "section" comes from the Latin sectio, "action of cutting, cutting, amputation", then, in geometry, “division”, and finally “schism”.

● Cultural appropriation

Recently, the “Christine and the Queens” singer, who renamed herself “Christine”, then a few days ago “Rahim”, was accused of “cultural appropriation” by Internet users on Twitter. He has been criticized for "appropriating" a name of Arabic origin (meaning "compassionate"), thereby demonstrating abusive authority over a culture that is not his own. Cultural appropriation is, as defined by the Office québécois de la langue française, "the use, by a person or a group of persons, of cultural elements belonging to another culture, generally a minority, in a that is deemed offensive, abusive or inappropriate.”

●Deconstructivism

This word comes from an architectural current that emerged at the end of the 20th century, which "aims to rethink the variety of geometric shapes by questioning the architectonic canons", notes the Larousse. Strongly influenced by Derrida, "philosopher of deconstruction", "deconstructivism" is widely used today by "wokes". What do they want to deconstruct? Sandrine Rousseau, former candidate for the ecological primary, affirmed at the end of July in the weekly show "BackSeat" on Twitch that she "did not trust politicians, in this case men who did not have deconstructed (…)” then on LCI, on September 22, “living with a deconstructed man” and being “super happy”. Understand here a man, and more generally the so-called "privileged" people, who seek to get rid of their privileges and a set of habits that society has granted them. “Wokism” thus intends to “deconstruct” discrimination and inequalities by getting rid of “gender stereotypes”.

● Racialized / trans-racialism

Let's take the example of singer Christine and the Queens (who again changed her stage name to: “.”). Not only accused of “cultural appropriation”, she was accused of practicing “trans-racialism”, that is to say, as Benjamin Sire specified in an article in Le Figaro, “of grasping a racial identity other than the one one carries at birth.” We find the word in the columns of Robert: “Person affected by racism, discrimination.”

●Adelphity

This word is the prerogative of a so-called “intersectional” feminism (which encompasses all forms of discrimination against women). He claims to speak of "adelphity", rather than "sorority" about women, for the sake of greater "inclusiveness". “Adelphe” comes from the Greek “adelphos”, which means “of brother or sister”. It literally designates "who is a brother from the same mother, having sucked the same breast", according to the Treasury of the French language. It therefore encompasses brother (“fraternity”) and “sister” (“sorority”), without making any gender distinction. To speak of “adelphity” would therefore make it possible to include men and women without differentiating between them by sex.

●Black-face/white washing

Making up your face in black, whether to play a black character in the theater, in the cinema, or as a disguise, when you are white, is a practice denounced by the "wokes" under the anglicism "black face", or "black face". This practice, very fashionable in French vaudeville at the end of the 18th century, was imagined, as the historian of the performing arts and author of Race and theater: a political unthinking (Actes Sud-Papiers, 2020) specifies. Sylvie Chalaye on France Culture… by the slaves themselves. In the 17th century, "on the American plantations, the masters asked their slaves to play sketches to entertain them". They complied, inserting into their game a satire of the treatment inflicted by their masters, without the latter realizing it. The “black face” was popularized in the United States under the name of “minister shows”, then was exported to Europe. Today, the "black face" is considered "racist" and a marker of "cultural appropriation". Let us underline the existence of another concept, “whitewashing”, also combated by “wokism”, which consists in reproaching white actors for playing the roles of black people.

● Cancel culture

The "cancel culture", in French "culture of erasure", recommends "erasing", or "boycotting" in the public space statues, literary and artistic works or personalities deemed "racist, sexist or homophobic”. Recently, the socialist mayor of Rouen Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol proposed replacing the statue of Napoleon which sits on the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville with an effigy of Gisèle Halimi, "figure of the fight for women's rights" . Wiping a hail of criticism, he defended himself on Twitter that he did not see why "the most visible and symbolic places, such as the place of the HDV, should be reserved for men."