Actor Laurence Fox has rifled many features recently after claiming on Question Time that being called a ‘white privileged man’ is racist.
His controversial comments continued when he revealed to The Delingpod podcast that he broke up with his ‘too woke’ girlfriend over her opposing views on the Gillette advert last year.
He explained: ‘I don’t know how we ended up together.
‘It was a very short relationship. We were walking down the road and she was talking about how good the Gillette advert was. I just looked at her and went, “Bye. Sorry, I can’t do this with you”.’
The Gillette advert – which addressed issues of toxic masculinity, bullying, sexual harassment and the objectification of women – was celebrated widely.
But Fox felt it was too much and claims to have broken up with his partner because of their opposing opinions.
In November last year, Fox also admitted he’s becoming ‘increasingly intolerant’ due to his views.
He said: ‘I say, “Can we just get on and not be mean to each other?” But I feel compelled to be mean to the wokies.’
But what exactly does wokies mean?
The word wokie has been floating around in the past decade – and prior to that – describing anyone aware of social injustices.
But in the last few years, terms such as social justice warrior and wokies have been used derogatorily to poke fun at those sensitive to these issues.
According to Urban Dictionary, a wokie is someone who wants kudos for performing wokeness – enlightenment.
It explains: ‘A wokie is an individual who is woke, someone that emits higher grace and does not shy away from sharing his or her insights on the topic, regardless of the actual possession of said knowledge.’
While wokie is more of an insult, woke originated with a racially political end by Black Americans which makes it difficult to unpick from race.
It became a watchword around 2009 for the Black Lives Matter Movement – a call to arms against the various racial injustices still occurring in the US and beyond.
Musician Erykah Badu is said to have brought the term alive in popular culture by singing ‘I stay woke’ in the 2008 track, Master Teacher.
Fox feels ‘wokies’ play the ‘race card’ too much.
Ironically, he claimed to be the victim of racism when he was called out for white privilege.
And yet he has lambasted minority groups which has been inferred by social media users as a thinly-veiled attempt at racism from his part.
He has since become a poster boy for ‘anti-wokeness’ claiming that those enlightened on subjects of race and social injustice are now ‘boring’.
Despite his unpopular take, Fox received support from fellow controversial speaker Piers Morgan.
Similarly, Morgan has also claimed to be a victim of racism following comments from people calling him ‘gammon’.
Since all the outrage, Fox has claimed he would be taking a break from Twitter yesterday.
He tweeted: ‘Right, super fun as all this has been, I’m going to take a day off from winding up the wonderful wokies. Have a lovely day everyone.’
He then resurfaced with various other tweets, one referring to himself as ‘Wokey McWokeface’.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/20/what-does-woke-mean-and-what-is-a-wokie-12089546/
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