James Haywood Rolling Jr
1 min readJun 10, 2023

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Jim, yes, the struggle is real. As a linguist, you're probably familiar with Stuart Hall's seminal lecture, "Race, the Floating Signifier." It can be found online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PodKki9g2Pw. Claude Lévi-Strauss originated the term. For those reading this thread of replies, a floating signifier is also known as an empty signifier, referring to any word or term that points to no actual object and has no agreed upon meaning. One way to create a floating signifier, a term that is a struggle to define, is by emptying a term of its actual meaning. That's the goal of "wokewashing," to wash out or whitewash the actual vernacular meaning of the word "woke." So, folks who struggle to define the word "anti-woke" do so because they've emptied the word "woke" of its intended meaning and its new meaning (to them) floats around to refer to anything and everything their bigotries and biases have taught them to fear or hate about their Black or Brown or LGBTQ+ or differently-abled neighbors.

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James Haywood Rolling Jr
James Haywood Rolling Jr

Written by James Haywood Rolling Jr

Creativity Educator | Artist | Antiracist | Counter-narrative Crusader | Rebel with a Cause | Author, “Growing Up Ugly” available @ https://tinyurl.com/4zs6de28

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