I take your point, but I've also been an outsider growing up. What's lame is to force others to respect you when respect should be earned. And if others fail to respect you because they're racist or sexist or just plain evil, the heroic response is to stop caring so much what others think of you. Forced acceptance is worth nothing, and those whose self-esteem is based on shoving their culture down everyone's throats are mentally weak (decadent, infantilized, oversensitive, etc). Of course, those who resort to overtly sexist or racist language are even weaker.

I'm not condemning wokeness here so much as I'm lamenting the ironic downside of real social progress. My real problem is with censorship because art (in the broadest sense, encompassing the freedom of thought and speech) strikes me as sacred in the existential context.

If someone uses the N-word to belittle an African-American person, that's not art so much as an animalistic, tribal grunt. So I grant you that hate-speech is obnoxious. I just wish we didn't have to weaken ourselves to demonstrate the weakness of that kind of hateful drivel. Hate-speech should be opposed on humanistic principles, not because we're oversensitive and intolerant to the slightest opposition.