Most Americans are failing to adopt so-called woke terms like “Latinx” and “cultural appropriation” in spite of their use by some prominent lawmakers and activists, a new survey suggests.
The poll by YouGov shows that only one in five Americans regularly uses terms such as “safe space” and “white privilege“.
Words like “antiracism” were understood by the majority of respondents, the poll found, but only a minority used social justice-oriented language regularly.
Republicans are less likely than Democrats to use these phrases, the survey showed.
Of the 30 terms in the survey, “safe space” was the most widely used, with 26 percent of Democrats and 17 percent of Republicans saying it featured in their vocabulary. Safe Spaces are locations not seen as a threat or a challenge to minorities.
Some 17 percent of Republican voters regularly use the term “woke”, which became more widely used during the Black Lives Matter movement and means being alert to injustice. The poll, taken between November 13 – 15 from 1,164 U.S. adult citizens, does not disclose the context in which the words might be spoken, and whether they are used pejoratively or in the advancement of social justice.
A separate YouGov poll earlier this month found that 57 percent of Americans believed that political correctness played a role in November’s election and many of the terms cited in the survey regularly feature in America’s culture wars.
Danica Patrick, the former race car driver and vocal Trump supporter, recently posted a photo of Admiral Rachel Levine, Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), beside RFK Jr., Trump’s pick for the job, captioned: “Woke bullsh*t, to no bullsh*t.”
Marcel Roman, a professor at Harvard University, has argued that the Democrats’ use of “Latinx”, a gender-neutral replacement for Latinos and Latinas, harmed their chances with voters who viewed the term as a “bourgeois, coastal, white imposition”.
“The Democratic Party at the national level recognized it may do more harm than good,” he told Commonwealth Beacon, adding that neither Biden nor Harris has publicly used “Latinx” since 2021.
Americans were least familiar with “BIPOC” (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), with 55 percent of respondents saying they had “never heard” the word.
As reported by Newsweek, some Black campaigners reject the umbrella term on the basis that it erodes the distinctions between anti-Black racism in America and the experiences of other racial groups.
Andrea Plaid, author of Penning with the People, and Christopher MacDonald-Dennis, Chief Diversity Officer at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, said in a recent Newsweek opinion piece: “As America has come to understand finally, the police are disproportionately killing Black people. To use the term “people of color” or even the newly popular BIPOC, which stands for Black and Indigenous people of color, to speak about police brutality obscures Black people’s specific struggle against police brutality.”
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