When Performative Wokeness Misses the Point

John Ohno
5 min readJun 29, 2020

There’s one thing SJWs and anti-SJWs broadly agree upon: highly visible corporate attempts to gain social justice points are stupid and counterproductive.

As social justice ideas gain currency in powerful circles, these attempts are getting more frequent — and, in some cases, more stupid. Where once we merely had pinkwashing, greenwashing, tokenism, and queerbaiting, now we have the removal of Elmer Fudd’s gun, the removal of episodes of sitcoms explicitly criticizing blackface, and flooding useful tags with black squares.

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John Ohno

Resident hypertext crank. Author of Big and Small Computing: Trajectories for the Future of Software. http://www.lord-enki.net