Taxacom: policing the scientific lexicon and misuse of the term woke

[Stephen Thorpe]

 The Wikipedia entry for Woke gives a useful summary. Wokeness has some good points and some not so good points. My main problem with it is that it goes too far, in ways that make only superficial changes without improving the underlying injustice and bigotry. The present example of wanting to rename taxa is an example. Also, the case of Roger Waters serves to highlight another problem. Who is woke, Waters or his opponents who accuse him of being an antisemite/nazi? I'd say that Waters is being true the original noble idea behind wokeness, i.e. understanding and compassion, for the Palestinians in this case, as people with equal human rights to Jews. Waters also has equal understanding and compassion for both the Ukrainian and Russian sides of a war that he claims was provoked by the Western (U.S. mainly) war machine. What this shows is that political issues are very complex. The general Woke movement backs Ukraine 100% and condemns Russia 100%, in line with economic benefits to the Military-industrial Complex of the U.S. (Eisenhower's old speech warning of the Military-industrial Complex is worth listening to). So, wokeness, although originally a noble idea, has become tainted by vested interests. The thought of these sorts of endless political debates influencing the availability/validity of taxonomic names is surely the road to chaos?
On a fairly pedantic technical point, a patronym is more than a name. It is the combination of a name and a dedication. People's names are not unique. 13 thorpei names are patronyms for me, not just because of the thorpei epithet, but because of the dedication to me in particular. So, given any patronym which someone finds offensive, the problem is not with the name per se, but with the dedication, which has, of course, been published, often long ago. But, of course, the dedication cannot be unpublished/cancelled/written out of published history. Changing the epithet seems to me to be a purely superficial move which really misses the point. The problem, from the wokies perspective, is not with the name per se, but with the politics of the taxonomist who created that name. It would make more sense from the wokies point of view to cancel the entire body of work by that taxonomist! The whole thing just becomes ridiculous!
Stephen    On Saturday, 17 June 2023 at 03:36:40 am NZST, Leslie Watling via Taxacom <taxacom at lists.ku.edu> wrote:  
 
 From all the messages and replies in this thread, it seems to me the term
woke has been adopted as a pejorative, which is not the true meaning of the
term. The word "woke" arose in the Black community in the US as a way to
talk about seeing others with understanding and compassion. The right
wingers have usurped the word  and made it sound bad, evil, something to be
stamped out, which could be nothing further from the truth.

So, unless you agree with the right-wingers, please stop using the term
"woke" to label ideas and statements you don't agree with. But also, if you
can, be "woke" to the ills of others less fortunate than you.

Best,
Les

Les Watling
Professor Emeritus
School of Life Sciences
University of Hawaii

Professor Emeritus
School of Marine Sciences
University of Maine
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