Wokeism

 

True confession: I am woke. Further true confession: I am proud that I am woke. The evolution of the word woke is a fascinating one and indicative of how language is borrowed, interchanged, and used over time. So how did woke come to be a pejorative for the political right?

Although Wikipedia is frowned upon as a definitive reference, it is a useful place to start a search. The article Woke notes African-Americans first used this term to indicate a necessity to remain alert to the world around them, a world which frequently was hostile. By the mid-20th century, woke came to mean “well-informed” or “aware”, especially in a political or cultural sense. The police shooting and death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 led the founders of the Black Lives Matter group to apply woke to the need to be aware of police abuses. 

BLM, along with Antifa (a whole other phenomenon to be explored), became the bête noirs of the political right in the United States, blamed for any of the social ills that led up to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Woke was appropriated by other activist groups to more than racial discrimination and antipathy; rejection of American exceptionalism, the concept of white privilege as an extension of deep-seated white supremacy, flaws of capitalism, systemic sexism and misogyny, all became attached to the idea of wokeism on the progressive left. To be woke for the politically left meant to have sympathy and empathy with others who were discriminated against.

So, the political left broadly accepted woke to apply beyond its narrower meaning from the early 20th century to more than the racial context, at the same time the political right adopted it as a derogatory term that was applied to liberal ideas with which they disagree. Woke has become a buzzword, a single syllable that is used mostly by those on the center-right, center-left, and right as an epithet for people (blacks, LGBTQ, feminists).

We were once told by a politically conservative resident here at our retirement community that we were too woke. We recognized it as an insult but did not engage in a fight with him. We both agreed we are woke – by which we mean we maintain sensitivity to what it means to be aware and well-informed. It is harder to be woke than non-woke; being woke means constantly integrating new data into your worldview, reading, thinking, being skeptical, questioning. It means being intellectually alive. Stay woke.