"If only renaming things was all you needed to do to make your community welcoming. If the birding community of the USA is not welcoming to minorities, it’s the birders that are a problem, not the names of the birds."
― Comment at Why Evolution is True
Regular readers know I've expressed a little disdain here and there against master naturalist programs, but now the very moniker could become a target of woke. For my part, perhaps silliest usage is how the naturalist and birding communities refer to one another in title like 'Master John' or 'Master Jane'. It just takes on this sycophantic cliquishness sentiment that a non-conformist like me finds vomitous.
Not only is woke going after eponymous bird names and birding organization names, but also many famous naturalists and scientists like Audubon, Darwin, Mayr, Huxley, E.O. Wilson, and many more. I was somewhat surprised to see that even classic music is being woked. What!? Bach? Brahms? Mozart? Beethoven? Tchaikovsky? Racists, all of them. I've been to Madison Symphony on many occasions and you'd be hard-pressed to see a person of color in the audience, even when the featured guest musician is non-white. Are the tickets too expensive? Is that itself a racist sentiment?
So much is getting woked these days that it occurred to me that if I googled the word 'master' and racial issues I'd likely find an objection to the title. Sure enough, it's a thing. In fact, Harvard University abolished 'master' in academic titles on account of a slavery row launched by their students. In the effort of making birding more welcoming to people of color, we're going to change 153 bird names. But if you think saying 'Audubon's Oriole' is trigger-worthy, how about referring to a subset of naturalists as 'master'? Especially given the fact that the overwhelming majority of them are white. Just take a look how racially inclusive the Wisconsin Master Naturalist website appears to be ― not so much.
To be sure, I don't really have an objection to the word being used as a title as much as the smarmy usage of it, as if birders are part of some kind of Jedi Order or something. It's cringeworthy hearing it used that way in the field. Like, grow up, m'kay? Even 'jedi' has been woked!
The other side of this is far more nefarious, though. The ruthlessly woke will stop at nothing when it comes to the colonial history of the United States ― as if policing history by taking certain words out of our lexicon is legitimate revisionism. Rather than repurposing words, they would rather that we all just quit using them. No, I'm sorry. All the ugliness of our history remains. Woke's efforts are meager and meaningless attempts to make it seem like they're doing something about equality of opportunity, especially in facets of life where nobody other than themselves believe any of this is a problem. It does nothing but make pecksniffs feel better about themselves.