Are you woke? That’s the question a friend of mine asked me last week after reading a few of my recent columns. The friend assumed I would answer “yes,” but I hesitated. What exactly does woke mean? If you think of yourself as an objective person, do you want to be woke? And who decides what types of beliefs constitute “wokeness?” Does wokeness refer to a defined set of left-leaning political beliefs, or beliefs that continue to evolve?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, and I’m not sure anyone else does either. Realizing that, I asked my friend what he meant by the term. I told him I’d answer his question after he told me what he understood “wokeness” to mean. That question prompted my friend to change the subject.
Since that exchange I have thought a bit about wokeness. I see it as a positive thing in that it suggests an awareness of the need to reassess social and racial justice. But I also see it as implying support for a number of social policy proposals that I do not know enough about to support. Slavery reparations is an example. I understand the concept but am not sure about the cost, how to determine who would receive reparations, and whether it is fair to other groups of Americans who also suffered from injustice during our history.
While I am uneasy with the term “wokeness,” I am not ready to walk away from it. For that you can credit Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, and dozens of other Republicans who regularly condemn wokeness and sponsor legislation in a scary attempt to ban it. Fahrenheit 451 comes to mind, or the nazis burning books.
Because nobody seems to know exactly what wokeness is and is not, efforts by politicians to regulate what is and is not taught in schools, what care doctors can and cannot provide, what corporations can and cannot endorse must be opposed. The legislative proposals of Florida Governor DeSantis and others are blatantly political. They have little to do with “protecting” children or America. Instead, they are an attempt to put a blanket label on diverse groups of people who oppose the MAGA agenda.
The problem with Republicans hijacking a term originally used by Black Lives Matter to encourage others to rethink American history and accept the reality that much of that history was racist and cruel is that Republicans use it to oppose the LGBQT+ community, environmentalists, advocates of ESG investing (considering environmental, social and governance issues in making investments), and a host of other groups and issues.
So, how do I answer the question when someone asks me whether I’m woke? I equivocate. “Sort of,” I answer. If pressed (and only if pressed), I will admit welcoming a reexamination of America’s history, which is necessary to make real progress on race issues. I also am woke on environmental issues. If America doesn’t acknowledge the reality of climate change and do something about it, the Easton Shore will be history in less than a century.
My list could go on, but the problem is that if I admit I’m woke, most people I know will assume I have embraced a number of policies on which I remain neutral or opposed. An example is the idea of “sanctuary cities.” I support a sane, welcoming immigration policy. I do not support cities defying federal law.
I have concluded that, like the idea of “making America great again,” the term “woke” has been poisoned. Rather than serving as a valuable tool to get people thinking, it has become a political cudgel wielded by the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Trump, Boebert, DeSantis, and others. At last week’s CPAC convention, presidential candidate Nikki Haley described wokeness as “a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.” What?
Perhaps in a misguided attempt to out-trump Haley, Republican Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), a man with a way with words, told the group that America cannot be governed by “deeply weird, nauseously woke people who hate George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Seuss, and Mr. Potato Head.” Saturday Night Live needs to hire Senator Kennedy, don’t you think?
I want to deny the right-wing access to the term “woke.” One way to get there is not to try to “fix” the concept of wokeness or to argue with the right over what it means (who wins arguments with the far-right these days?), and let the term die. Simply put, if you want to argue wokeness with me, I’m going to walk away. There are better ways to support equitable, progressive policies or to call out racism, homophobia, environmental recklessness, greed, and Trumpism.
J.E. Dean is a retired attorney and public affairs consultant writing on politics, government, and other subjects.
Gale Drenning says
Well said!
John Dean says
Thank you for reading the piece and for your kind words.
Bill Barron says
At the risk of of having you walk away, I’d like to take a stab at narrowly defining “woke”, street language for “awakened”, as awareness that the relatively good fortune into which most of today’s non-minorities in the USA are born and continue to prosper is not entirely of their own doing. It is, instead, at least in part, a legacy of slave labor and abuse that was never fairly compensated (if compensation is even possible for such an egregious act) and that fueled our early economy, making white folks rich and Black folks very angry. In the years following reconstruction, evil banking practices ensured that Black citizens would never share that good fortune; bankrupting Black farmers in the South to force them off their lands and “redlining” in northern urban areas are a couple of examples.
So, ideally, “woke” behavior would recognize these sensitivities and encourage all of us to behave accordingly in our speech and actions; that’s reasonable. But, for some edgy activists, words and kind deeds will never be enough. Somebody’s gotta pay. So they insist on shared mass white guilt and, by extension, reparations, preferably in cash from the US Treasury. That’s an amusing topic for debate in Ivy League classrooms but anathema for most beleaguered taxpayers who see satisfaction of these demands as one more unfair and undeserved handout.
I agree with you that “woke” has been corrupted, mostly by right-wing Republicans, to include a host of mostly liberal causes and that the term is rapidly becoming meaningless. Perhaps that’s a good thing and will result in it’s not-too-soon trip to the buzz-word graveyard along with “phat”, “synergize” and “out of the box”.
Beryl Smith says
One of our problems today seems to be that we need to attach labels to everything in order to define ourselves. Why can you not just be a “thinker?” Why does one have to select a political party to be an identifier rather than to listen to candidates, turn a blind eye to their label, and hear what they stand for? You certainly point out the unreliability of labels, but if “woke” means aware, then I guess I would accept but not publicize the label.
Bob Moores says
My dark-skinned Indian friend/associate has experienced many instances of white prejudice over the years. He told me that “staying woke” started as staying alert to dangerous aspects of white prejudice. For example, he has been pulled over by police and ticketed for what he considers minor offences such as failing to give a signal when changing lanes on the highway. He will always keep his hands on the steering wheel or in plain sight for the traffic cop. He thinks whites would be given only a warning for violations for which he receives tickets. Whether or not that assertion is supported by factual data I do not know, but that is his perception. I do believe the data shows that justice is meted out unevenly for blacks and whites in this country.
I think woke has morphed into something even more disturbing, the perception that all whites, not just a few bad cops, hold varying degrees of prejudice. It’s probably true that all people are to some degree prejudiced – possibly rooted in evolution. But we must constantly appeal to our better angels in recognizing that prejudice is wrong, that judging by the group is unfair, unwarranted.
From what I’ve seen, it looks like Republicans are more sensitive to being targets of woke than Democrats, that they don’t like what they perceive as blanket judgment by black folks. Is the fact that they get so upset telling us something about them?
I agree that the term “woke” has outlived its usefulness. If a word can evolve to mean anything, it becomes meaningless. But it probably won’t die gracefully. It’s too good a tool for Trumpites.
Thanks, John, for the great article.