Some Ways In Which We've All Become "Woke"

Race is just one issue where we've all become more 
respectful and enlightened. At least I hope that's the case.

We hear a lot of backlash these days against "leftist elites" creating a perverse kind of hypersensitive "woke" mentality.

But is this all bad? Maybe we've all learned a thing or two about being more sensitive to minorities and those who are the "other."

Here are some examples of changes I've made in my own attitude and speech that most people would now consider a good thing.

1) As a child I remember hearing and reciting the following, with no one in my family raising an eyebrow:

Eenie, meenie, miney moe,

Catch a n_ _ _ _ r by the toe,

If he hollers, let him go.

Eenie, meenie, miney moe.

We were never allowed to use the N-word otherwise, except maybe for the Brazil nuts we enjoyed at Christmas that we called "n_ _ _ _r toes." Thankfully, few of us would find that harmless today.

2) I also recall hearing the expression "Jew-ing someone down," as in "driving a hard bargain," never realizing how offensive that would be to a Jewish person.

3) Likewise, native Americans neighbors in Oklahoma, where I was born, were stereotyped as lazy, unkempt and not to be trusted.

4) During and after World War II Japanese people were routinely referred to as "Japs" at our school and among our neighbors in rural Kansas and elsewhere.

5) While my family didn't believe African-Americans were inferior, the existence of separate water fountains, rest rooms, schools, etc., in the Jim Crow era weren't denounced as evil in the community I grew up in, and no one seemed bothered that the seventh grade Virginia history text used in our public schools was full of misinformation about slavery.

6) While never supportive of Senator Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunts, we nevertheless assumed that citizens of socialist or Marxist countries were under the spell of evil regimes from which they needed to be rescued, as in Vietnam.

7) Women were just beginning to be eligible to serve on the church council and other positions of leadership in the first congregation of which I was a pastor back in the 60's. 

8) The checks for our first bank account after Alma Jean and I were married we had labelled "Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Yoder."

9) Many of us have become more comfortable mostly using terms like human, humankind, or sisters and brothers, rather than just "man," "mankind" or "brothers" when referring to groups of men and women.

10) What have been some of your major, or minor, woke experiences?