Actress Jane Fonda gave a rousing speech while accepting the Screen Actors’ Guild Life Achievement Award on Sunday. She not only took the opportunity to subtly lash out at President Donald Trump, she also pushed a decidedly White progressive definition of the term “woke,” which showed that she has no idea what the word was supposed to mean.
Fonda said she is “a big believer in unions” and that “They have our backs,” “bring us into community,” and “they give us power.”
But SAG AFRA is different than most other unions, because us, the workers, we actors, we don't manufacture anything tangible. What we create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can touch their souls.
The actress further asserted that “empathy is not weak or woke” and that “woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way. And even if they're of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge, but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent, because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what's coming at us.
Fonda further detailed making her first movie in 1958. “It was the tail-end of McCarthyism, when so many careers were destroyed.”
“Today, it’s helpful to remember, though, that Hollywood resisted…overseas, brave American producers like Hannah Weinstein hired black-listed writers. Myrna Lloyd, John Houston, and Billy Wilder founded the Committee for the First Amendment,” the actress continued.
In reality, the term “woke” does not mean what Jane Fonda thinks it means. Indeed, the way it is used today is a far cry from what it was when it first gained national prominence back in the 1930s.
Yes, being “woke” in the initial sense involved having empathy toward people. But it was much more than Fonda’s simplistic explanation. The original term was used primarily by Black Americans to signify an awareness of social injustices being inflicted against them by governmental and societal forces.
Black Americans often encouraged one another to “stay woke” to the systemic oppression that dominated the American landscape back in the days of Jim Crow and even beyond.
However, the hard left stole this concept and molded it into a rhetorical device to be used to promote their overall agenda. White progressives, in particular, expanded the definition of the term to apply to all of the marginalized groups they exploit to amass political influence and power.
Now, to be woke is to be on board with the LGBTQ agenda, feminism, environmental activism, and anti-capitalism. To put it simply, to be woke is to be Marxist.
Today’s bastardized version of wokeness says you must accept that men can become women and vice versa. It mandates that you give land acknowledgments while speaking on land that was taken from Native Americans. You have to make sure to announce your preferred pronouns every five seconds.
Being woke is no longer about recognizing government oppression – it is about pushing people to dive headlong into the world of progressive orthodoxy or face punishment from the Woke Sanhedrin.
Indeed, this changing of the term is aimed at promoting a distinctly authoritarian leftist agenda in which progressives seek to force their warped ideas on the rest of us through governmental and societal pressure.
To put it simply, White progressives coopted the term “woke” and transformed it into an instrument used to advance their agenda. It has little to do with protecting racial minorities, members of the LGBTQ community, or anyone else. It is simply a vehicle through which Marxists seek to gain the power to mold American society into their image.