What is 'woke'? It’s my trigger word

Overview:

"Woke" is either the new "libtard" or it means nothing. Either way, it triggers me.

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Woke is the mot du jour. It’s everywhere. It’s what Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News, uses incessantly. It’s what presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis platforms against with his “anti-woke” campaign agenda. It’s what my father-in-law uses when he’s angry with, in his own mind, some new nonsense—“Oh what’s that word…yes, that’s it, bloody ‘woke’!” It’s what the Daily Mail rails against. It’s what the BBC supposedly is. Or Disney. Or Goodyear.

There is real confusion about what this now-surprisingly-common word actually means. Conservative author Bethany Mandel recently had a car crash of an interview where she froze, completely unable to define what “woke” means. This is somewhat surprising given that she is an author of a book against “wokeism” (Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation) in which she attacks “wokeness” as “a new version of leftism that is aimed at your child.”

It seems commonplace that people on the right accuse the left of “wokeism” that underwrites a “cancel culture” instituted by the left. The reality is somewhat different, as I argued against evangelical Christian and 2016 presidential candidate David French on Premier Christian Radio.

Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said in 2021, “What you see now with the rise of this woke ideology is an attempt to really delegitimize our history and to delegitimize our institutions, and I view the wokeness as a form of cultural Marxism. They really want to tear at the fabric of our society.”

I am probably the them to his us, the sort of person who wonders why “social justice” has become something bad to aspire to.

So what does “woke” actually mean?

In this general context, not what it originally did.

In its earliest iteration, woke was part of the phrase “stay woke”, being a phrase used within Black communities referring to being awake and “alert to the deceptions of other people.” It was “a basic survival tactic.” The phrase appeared in a 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by blues musician Huddie Ledbetter (known as Lead Belly)—a reaction to nine Black teenagers accused of raping two white women. Lead Belly said of it, “I made this little song about down there. So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there—best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

At the same time, “stay woke” also literally meant to stay awake, in Black vernacular. in 2008, R&B artist Erykah Badu released a politically themed album with the song “Master Teacher” that included the phrase being used in several different contextual meanings, bringing the phrase back to the fore.

Fast forward to 2014, when Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and the phrase came back to life. Needs must.

The context of the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement saw the phrase, now shortened to “woke”, being associated with anything to do with racial equality. It was only a hop, skip, and a jump to it representing anything and everything liberal in the world.

Because racial equality is the purview only of the left?

A Black person on a BBC show where you might not expect to see them? Woke. (Think the new Little Mermaid film or the recent Lord of the Rings series.) Silicon Valley Bank collapsing? Woke. Yale physician advocating sensible Covid policies? Woke (a “mind virus attempting to destroy civilization,” according to Elon Musk). It’s rather dizzying, keeping an eye on the myriad uses of the term.

In fact, here linked are more than 200 things conservative TV channel Fox News has labeled as woke. A few examples might help to show how woke has become the bogeyman of the right. And it’s a little embarrassing now.

So on and so forth. It’s a long list. And when you look at every subject included in that list, you quickly realize that “woke” is a very large umbrella term. Gathered under the protection of this term is every single liberal. And every single centrist. And every single person who happens to hold an opinion that someone angrily hopping about on the far right doesn’t agree with.

When you use a term so much, in so many contexts, to attack so many ideas and so many people, it loses any coherent meaning or utility. In economics, this is the Law of Diminishing Returns. The first pint of water in the desert is very useful and rather refreshing. The 31^st? Somewhat less so. We are now at a point that the term “woke” is empty, vacuous. It is the new “libtard”. If that’s where we are at, count me out.

It’s a very lazy term.

And the label now triggers me. If anyone mentions it, I take an instant dislike to their politics, to their morality. Because it says more about them than it does about me or their intended target. I can very often successfully sum up someone’s political positioning with their single use of that term in the same way that I can if they use the pejorative “libtard”. It carries about the same degree of nuance.

If you have issues with the use of pronouns and gender identity (and let’s face it, it’s something of a complex philosophical battlefield), then let’s have a reasonable debate. The same goes for climate change. And pandemic responses. And equality—racial, sexual, or otherwise. And…and…

However, if you are going to add into your debating rhetoric the use of the word “woke”, then you have lost me because not only is it completely simplistic, but it is a pejorative: It is used as a term to insult the opposition.

If I was to call every position or person I disagree with “fascist” or “Nazi” then these terms would lose their strength and utility and I would rightfully not be taken seriously. For “woke” I would prefer the term to be replaced with “progressive” in many of the cases because the intention of the target people or ideas is to make the world progressively better. The use of the word “woke” does a real disservice to the original meaning. When used as a pejorative like this, it becomes crass.

I am a socially liberal, economically centrist philosopher and politically motivated person. In the political psychology underwritten by the work of psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt (and his moral foundations theory), there are traits that are more associated with liberals than conservatives and vice versa. For example, liberals tend to be more inclined to an openness to new experiences, and fairness, whereas conservatives (the clue is in the name) tend towards conserving the status quo, being driven more by tradition.

We can see how some shifts in modern society might irk conservatives and motivate liberals. Some of these ideas are consistently seen as the beating heart of “wokeism”—perhaps gender identity, critical race theory and suchlike. (And so often, they are completely blown out of proportion.) Unfortunately, much of the problem comes when every other idea that (conservative) critics don’t agree with also get incorporated into the label.

We must remember that it is often ill-advised to listen to those with the loudest voices. The UK is following America’s lead when it comes to the right shouting about culture wars issues. All you need to know is that when politicians and pundits shout about the war on Christmas, or transgender restrooms, or political correctness gone mad, or the woke BBC, then they really have nothing substantial to talk about. Culture wars discussions belie a fundamental lack of policy.

We have seen this in successive US elections and it is starting to creep into UK campaigning. One side is serious about governing, and the other side has nothing in the locker but a woke checklist.

Do not be fooled.

The bandwidth of political discourse is being strangled with culture wars whinges about woke, and it helps nobody. We have existential crises facing us the likes and scale of which humanity has never faced: climate change and ravaging wildfires, the reignition of the Cold War into a very hot one, population, pandemics, wealth inequality, healthcare, and education. The list is long and worrying.

But when the right distract you with the woes of woke, they are deceiving you. They care little about these other topics, let alone have any actual workable policies on the matters.

There’s an awful lot of work to do without being misdirected by a shoddy magician’s sleight of hand.

It’s probably a tad inappropriate here, but the words of British comedian Kathy Burke (unlikely to be labeled “liberal elite”) are apropos: “I love being ‘woke’. It’s much nicer than being an ignorant fucking twat.”

If I was to be less abrasive and confrontational, I would simply say, “I’m woke. And?” Or, better still, “I’m nuanced. Challenge me on substance rather than throwing about lazy, childish labels.”

The progress towards a better future will be fraught with bumps in the road. We won’t always get things right, but shouting “woke” at anything and everything will end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Simply put, if someone brings up wokeism at the beginning of a political discussion, then they have their priorities firmly in the wrong place.

What is ‘woke’? It’s my trigger word

Overview:

Related

Jonathan MS Pearce

Sign In