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What would you say is the distinction here? To me they were interchangeable, SJW was just the older term that didn’t achieve offline usage
Yeah they're interchangeable at this point, especially from the perspective of everyone understanding basically what you mean. And the 1-syllable version is certainly easier to be workable offline rather than the 5-syllable one.
I just think there was meaningfully something different being gestured at with the "warrior" part of it that we were seeing in the mid 2010s, while 'woke' was more like new elite manners or religion that especially spread among coastal urban white people who were susceptible to guilt tripping or were looking for meaning. I don't know why it works, but being told that you have the original sin of being born white and thus being intrinsically racist (even if you don't consciously think you're racist), but that the good news is you can repent and strive to actively be anti-racist and elevate PoC in your life while spreading this awakening to others...somehow this did actually work on a lot of people. So at least the way I saw it, there's usually a well-meaning core to wokeness. A lot of these people actually did think the non-woke were simply lacking education about historical injustice or something, while other older boomers maybe just shrugged their shoulders and went along with it to avoid status loss, like "I guess this is where society is going now, I can adapt".
So in my opinion, wokeness is enough to ruin movies/shows/fiction, or to make events or press conferences annoying with land acknowledgements or massive split-screen sign-language translations. But it took some real coordinated meanness/nastiness of self-styled social justice warriors to actively cancel people and salt their earth. This had a different level of commitment where these people knew they were down in the trenches of the culture war and had enemies.
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