Being “woke” is being informed.
The term, in recent years, has been given multiple additional meanings (not all of them complimentary) but its original definition is straight-forward – you should take pride in not being hoodwinked by government spin and corporate propaganda.
Which is why anyone who believes they meet this criterion should be moderately disturbed by Nike’s recent pseudo-political advert, which is aimed at just that sort of person.
To mark the US women’s basketball team claiming a gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics, sportswear giant Nike dropped the ad, comparing the international stars to the dynasties of old.
The short clip depicts a young black woman going through her studies.
She turns to the camera and reveals she has a presentation on ancient history but doesn’t like to talk about it because “that’s just the patriarchy”.
Sorry, what?
OK, where to start. This practice – where an exploitative multinational corporation hitches itself to the struggle for social justice – is known as “woke-washing”.
It is when protected groups and minorities – whether women, people of colour, LGBTQ folk, or people with disabilities – are simultaneously made visible and also erased.
In recent years, woke-washing has become common place, granting aggressive, vampiric institutions a new moral high ground from which to pitch their tedious corporate mantras.
Not to drive social change but to turn profits.
Costa rainbow flag cups. Stay-at-home dad shaving products.
It’s OK to not be OK jalapeno dippers.
And zero-carbon CIA drones piloted remotely by neurodivergent, non-binary people with mental health problems.
Buying into this stuff is not “woke” – it’s dumb. This is corporate ambulance chasing at its absolute worst
This advert, like so many others, is cynical and reductive.
History is partly about patriarchy, yes, but it’s also about other stuff, too.
And that’s the issue with this woke-washing business.
What it seeks to present is a simulation that change is occurring – without actually changing much.
Lest we forget, the same companies engaged in this charm offensive are also behind the climate meltdown, the Western obesity and mental health epidemics, the opioid crisis and hundreds of billions in annual tax evasion.
Women should be more sceptical than anyone.
These are the same brands that objectified and demeaned them as male property for decades.
Not that many moons ago, one footwear manufacturer even published an advert of a woman lying on the floor staring at a shoe, with the caption, “Keep her where she belongs”.
Male-driven advertising presented women as one-note homemakers and sexual vending machines.
And when time for the economic empowerment of women came – thanks to the tireless political campaigning of Shredded Wheat–advertisers then burrowed their tentacles into the female psyche, bombarding women with unrealistic body images and endless useless products to help them attain a look that was never possible in the first place.
“Maybe if you stop eating like a pig”, quipped one woman to another, concerned about her weight, in a Nike ad in the 80s.
Are we supposed to swallow wholesale the offensive notion that firms like Nike care about social justice?
In Nike’s Twitter bio, #stopasianhate is displayed prominently.
This from the same company which, in 1991, was found to have been engaging in the exploitation of Indonesian children – paid pennies for working in
sweatshop conditions – to manufacture trainers, hoodies, and T-shirts.
These PR hacks would literally steal your purse and then help you look for it.
They don’t care about women and they don’t care about race – they care about quarterly profits and market share.
Identity, inclusion and diversity are important. It means a lot when you see yourself represented culturally.
But real wokeness is about seeing through the mutating mirage of corporate lies and opportunism, not buying into it.
