IMAGE caption - The woke concept has morphed from social licence to caricature.
"A history of “wokeness”"
Where ‘woke’ came from and why marketers should think twice before jumping on the social activism bandwagon
September 9, 2019 6.00am AEST
Author Abas Mirzaei Senior Lecturer - Branding, Macquarie University
First used in the 1940s, the term “woke” has resurfaced in recent years as a concept that symbolises awareness of social issues and movement against injustice, inequality, and prejudice.
But popularity has diluted its meaning and the idea has been cynically applied to everything from soft drink to razors, attracting criticism if too liberally applied.
One recent stretch for this term is the New Yorker magazine’s headline for a story about a vegan chef’s output, which read: What’s in a Woke McRib?
Being woke was originally associated with black Americans fighting racism, but has been appropriated by other activist groups – taking it from awareness and blackness to a colourless and timeless phenomenon.
Now, there are dangers associated with appearing overly concerned with consciousness-raising – see Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau being described as seeming “like a social-justice Twitter account on two legs” .
Woke history
Black Americans in their ongoing fight against racism and social injustice have used the term “woke” at key moments of history.
In literal terms, being woke refers to being awake and not asleep. One Urban Dictionary contributor defines woke as “being aware of the truth behind things ‘the man’ doesn’t want you to know”. Meanwhile, a concurrent definition signals a shift in meaning to “the act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue”.
The Oxford dictionary expanded its definition of the word “woke” in 2017 to add it as an adjective meaning “alert to injustice in society, especially racism”.
In the 1942 first volume of Negro Digest, J. Saunders Redding used the term in an article about labor unions. Twenty years later, a 1962 New York Times article was titled: If You’re Woke You Dig It: No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.
On June 14, 1965, Martin Luther King Jr, gave a commencement address called Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution at Oberlin College:
conix, Political correctness. "Woke". Critical Race Theory. Now Kendi. The latest conservative/GOP whipping post. Policy? C'mon. We just attack. Kendi has always been with the others on the conservatives dart board. Just more in the background. Some others P - "Ibram X. Kendi is the false prophet of a dangerous and lucrative faith" P - Gawd, false prophet. Which right-winger labeled him a prophet first? Dangerous and lucrative faith. I didn't know Kendi was one of those 'money is good' Christian tv evangelists. You're right he's not. [neater now] https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166080529
It was quaint, really. That feeling I had in the months after the 2016 presidential election, where I convinced myself I’d do everything possible in the next four years to prevent Donald Trump from becoming normalized.
It was our duty to never stop shouting about his abnormalities, and I believed that this conscientiousness had an unlimited bandwidth. (How could it not?) I’d be obstinate and cantankerous. I’d be unflinching. I’d be resolute. The fate of the republic depended on it.
But there I was on a lazy Saturday three years later, sitting in my living room and choosing to binge watch “Queen Sugar" instead of recaps of the impeachment inquiry. If I hadn’t been doing that, I would have browsed Zillow to scout shelving space ideas for open concept kitchens. Or maybe I would have done a search for the what’s in the chorizo that Steel Cactus uses in its tacos.
Either way, while my disdain for the president and his supporters remains, my capacity for hyper-consciousness has faded. I don’t possess the stamina for the sort of vigilance necessary to stay cognizant of everything he’s doing, nor do I wish to. Someone has to do it, though, but I’m just not woke enough.
Drat, there’s that word: “woke.” Rarely has a colloquialism had as many mutations. When I was in college in the late 1990s, “conscious” was the term du jour, a cultural phenomenon reflected in zeitgeist-molding musicians (Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, the Roots), movies (“Love Jones,” “Slam”) and TV shows (“Def Poetry Jam”). “Militant” was a variant of it — conscious, but also ready to throw hands for the cause.
Woke, however, described a racial awareness and cynicism so extra that it bordered on parody; where you’re so awake that your “third eye” saw things that aren’t there. The movies “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” and “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” satirized this concept. Each film’s most racially conscious character was either married to a white woman or willing to trample a sista to get to one. Also, woke was used exclusively by black people to refer to other black people. It was our word, because only we were mindful enough to recognize when that pro-blackness was a performance.
As the aughts approached, the term started to lose its racial connotation, becoming instead a catchall for any sort of progressive behavior. You were woke if you recycled, or maybe just retweeted an infographic on the virtues of recycling. White people were deemed woke. Some, painfully, even took it upon themselves to be the arbiters of wokeness.
It was no coincidence that this happened alongside Barack Obama’s political ascent. Being liberal — and communicating exactly how radical you wanted people to believe you were — had cultural benefits. For the first time in my lifetime, you could earn progressive social capital by merely supporting the commander in chief. “I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could” wasn’t just the most effective joke in the movie “Get Out.” It was the bumper sticker real-life (white) progressives stuck to their foreheads.
And now? Well, woke floats in the linguistic purgatory of terms coined by us that can no longer be said unironically, levitating next to “swag” and “twerk” in the “Words Ruined by White People” ether. What was a compliment just a few years ago has become, at best, an eye roll. If a stranger at a dinner party is introduced — or introduces himself — as woke, I know that I’ll need some whiskey before talking to him.
Mostly, though, it’s used as a pejorative. Bill Maher seems to consider wokeness his personal albatross as he’s apparently blind to the paradox of getting paid likely millions of dollars a year to complain about what he believes he’s no longer allowed to say. Progressives have to be careful not to be so woke that we’ll scare moderates into voting for Donald Trump, warn (usually white male) columnists in every major American newspaper.
When the beloved and iconic Deadspin was effectively killed this fall, haters crawled out of the internet’s crevices, cheering the demise of a marriage of sports and wokeness they considered sacrilegious. Even Mr. Obama recently chided wokeness as “not activism,” which, well, is exactly what I’d expect him to say about it now.
Admittedly, woke’s current iteration has been earned. It became a thing you can accessorize like a hoodie. But to be woke, essentially, is to recognize and reject the damage power inflicts on the most vulnerable. And when the president’s only real purpose is to maintain the status of whiteness, he and his supporters have clear incentives for the rest of us to stay asleep.
Today, however, when I turn on the news and attempt to slog through the impeachment inquiry, I’m reminded of some of the inane conspiracy theories my wokest college classmates considered gospel. There was the Tommy Hilfiger one, where we shouldn’t buy his clothes because he went on Oprah and expressed disgust at black people wearing them. There was the Timberland one, where we should stop buying those boots because the emblem (a tree) represented lynchings.
These conspiracies could be debunked with superficial research. (Tommy Hilfiger hadn’t even appeared on Oprah’s show before that rumor circulated, the Timberland rumor apparently came from a poem wrongly attributed to Maya Angelou.) But even as we’d roll our eyes at them for believing these untruths, we knew they weren’t wrong about America. They just had bad information.
Because, well, the Tuskegee experiment did happen. Cointelpro did happen. Redlining did happen. Gerrymandering is happening. Black people were targeted for subprime lending. We are arrested and incarcerated today at wildly disproportionate rates. While the perpetually woke are dismissed, they’re also the canaries in our coal mines, alerting us to dangers we might be too drowsy to see.
Also, while the people who can genuinely be considered woke are increasingly less inclined to use that word to describe themselves, perhaps we’re witnessing it undergo another shift. Like “virtue signaling” and “social justice warrior,” woke now says more about the politics of the speaker than it does about the object. But maybe two years from now the word will change again.
Today, however, the president of the United States is possibly involved in a multinational scheme to suppress votes, discredit rivals and threaten whistle-blowers. This fever dream feels like the premise of a John Grisham novel that his editor rejected for being too absurd. But I am bored out of my mind with the impeachment proceedings and would rather watch my shower faucet drip. Or perhaps just go to bed early and catch up on some sleep.
And when I find myself giving the insufferably woke a hard time, I remember: Someone has to stay awake.
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Damon Young is a contributing opinion writer. He is the author of "What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir In Essays" and a co-founder of VerySmartBrothas. @damonyoungvsb
conix, Political correctness. "Woke". Critical Race Theory. Now Kendi. The latest conservative/GOP whipping post. Policy? C'mon. We just attack. Kendi has always been with the others on the conservatives dart board. Just more in the background. Some others P - "Ibram X. Kendi is the false prophet of a dangerous and lucrative faith" P - Gawd, false prophet. Which right-winger labeled him a prophet first? Dangerous and lucrative faith. I didn't know Kendi was one of those 'money is good' Christian tv evangelists. You're right he's not. [neater now] https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=166080529
Exhibit A Bill Maher: Why White People Should Stop Using The Term ‘Woke’…Immediately
""A history of “wokeness” Absolute clarification of what "woke" originally meant. Step right up! If you have any minuscule of doubt about wokeness this is the article for you!! LOL Seriously, you'll understand how the right has dishonestly mutilated the original meaning of the word to distract from an important social concern. Toss the social in the trash . It's all political man!!! A history of “wokeness” Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war."
Lime Time, Just so we know you know how ignorant and insensitive your "... Go Woke. Go Broke." really is. "Another Trump hate rally: The threats get worse, and polite America turns away Trump spreads the poisonous gospel of white supremacy week after week — and we keep pretending it's not happening" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168711703
Dana Brownlee Former Contributor I help professionals navigate workplace challenges
As a 50-year-old Black woman, I have to confess that for years every time I heard the term “race card” interjected into a conversation, it felt like nails on a chalkboard. Immediately, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck, and my amygdala warned me that the person I was engaging with was both insensitive and dangerous. Now, our society is arguably in the midst of a racial reckoning nearly a year after George Floyd’s murder, and the public relations winds have radically shifted. Companies and individuals who previously eschewed (if not demonized) racial justice platforms/protests like Black Lives Matter and Colin Kaepernick have instead raced to affirm their support and solidarity with anti-racism related hashtags, social media posts and donations. No, we don’t hear the phrase “race card” mentioned much in daily conversation any longer, but a new term, just as insidious, has cropped up to take its place—woke.
Woke is problematic for two primary reasons. First, it’s an offensive cultural appropriation. As is disturbingly often the case, White people (or any racial group outside the term’s origin) will sometimes begin using a term that originated in a community of color often as a term of pride, endearment, or self-empowerment years or decades later while either willfully or inadvertently distorting the original meaning of the term. While any significant analysis of what cultural appropriation .. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-cultural-appropriation-5070458 .. is and why it’s problematic is beyond the scope of this article, suffice it to say that hearing White people randomly label individuals and organizations “woke” is very often an unsettling, if not infuriating experience.
I first heard the term “stay woke” within the Black community more than a decade ago to mean “stay vigilant”, “don’t be fooled”, or “don’t sleep” (to revive an even older relic of colloquial Black parlance). Soon, the term “woke” found its way into broader society to connote someone who is racially conscious. While this version is still intended to connote a positive quality, its use is arguably still problematic. “‘Woke’ is an example of good intentions leading us to hell,” explains Michael Bach, diversity expert and author of the best-selling book Birds of All Feathers: Doing Diversity and Inclusion Right. “People who say they’re woke, are never woke.” Dr. Kathy Obear, President, Center for Transformation and Change questions, “Is proclaiming ‘I’m woke’ just the latest variation of how we white people try to dodge scrutiny and critique by saying, ‘I’m a good one! My best friend is Black!’”
However, in more recent months, the term has increasingly traded it’s more positive-intentioned “conscious” connotation for a pejorative, condescending one. Increasingly, influencers (oftentimes but not always White) have latched onto the term “woke” and weaponized it as an easy way to dismiss or discount a racial issue, platform or grievance offhand as extreme or utterly nonsensical. To be fair, are there issues, platforms, or grievances on the topic of race that are extreme and utterly nonsensical? Certainly, as that would be true of any topic, but this deceptively simple four-letter word has become the anti-racism napalm that we don’t need in the struggle for heightened awareness and sensitivity around complex racial issues.
Second, the term’s use often prevents the deep, honest, sometimes uncomfortable conversation that arguably is our only pathway to real reconciliation. Let’s face it – engaging in sensitive, nuanced conversations around race is challenging enough without the irresponsible insertion of the term “woke” providing an ideological off ramp that shuts down any real listening, learning or self-reflection on issues that really require all three for authentic progress.
[Insert: conix, As you know woke is aware. 'Nice opinion piece from a "woke" professor justifying what he wants to teach." When will you finally be aware we see through your tedious misrepresentation of woke. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171943290 ... and ... If Dems Fought an All-Out Culture War, They’d Win https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=169596447 P - In Defense of ‘Woke’ "A history of “wokeness”" Donald Trump and his supporters want the rest of us to stay asleep. https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=170204395 ... and ... conix, Free Speech for Me but Not for Thee [...]A speech code doesn’t have to be illegal to be problematic. Private universities have broad authority to regulate speech (the First Amendment protects citizens only from government censorship, not from private regulation). But speech codes are antithetical to the mission of American education, a mission that the Supreme Court has described as preparing students “for active and effective participation in the pluralistic, often contentious society in which they will soon be adult members.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168714505 ... and ... conix, No, because the overuse abuse of the notion of "woke" in the article as used as an attack on the Democrats is misleading misinformation. Even disinformation, for one. Also because your source is muchly funded by the Koch Foundation. And because the integrity of your source is questionable .. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/spiked-magazine/ .. at best. [...]And because the the woke and the cancel cultures was actually initiated by conservatives. See https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=168197064]
“Throwing terms like ‘woke’ around as a way to dismiss the very real and consequential concerns of an entire group of people is just another way of saying, ‘I don’t want to be inconvenienced by your pain,’” insists equity consultant and C-suite advisor, Tara Jaye Frank. In fact, when White people weaponize the term “woke” during a discussion, it doesn’t just disrespectfully discount that specific person or issue but also sends a not-so-subtle message to their peers that if something feels extreme to you, you have license to just discount it. This type of signaling is counterproductive if not dangerous. After all, White people prioritizing their feelings over racial justice progress is arguably what has held us in a purgatory of racial inequity for centuries.
Widely considered a White liberal thought leader, Bill Maher frequently weaponizes the term “woke” to discount, ridicule or otherwise belittle an issue or idea related to race on his HBO show Real Time with Bill Maher. While Maher continues to acknowledge the scourge of racism and has arguably raised and supported issues of racial equality and justice over the years, during this particular season of heighted racial sensitivity and curiosity, he perplexingly seems to have doubled down on a convenient, self-affirming formula of selecting a fringe, outlier or otherwise provocative or misunderstood race related issue, then playing a game of ideological hacky sack with a group of often all-White commentators (with no particular expertise in anti-racism). Yes, it’s easy to toss up a broad slogan like “Defund the police” and spend the next several minutes taking turns swiping critiques, but it would be so much more instructive to engage a racial justice expert to help move the discussion beyond the slogan. As noted in this Brookings Institute article .. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/19/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-and-does-it-have-merit/ , they’d possibly explain that “defunding the police” doesn’t imply abolishing policing but instead “means reallocating or redirecting funding away from the police department to other government agencies funded by the local municipality.” As many localities grapple with the realities of police forces that are arguably overburdened, undertrained and yes, often tragically influenced by racial bias, it’s more than reasonable to begin reimagining what policing looks like going forward. For many localities, this might involve reducing the scope of the traditional policing model, standing up “quality of life” or social service programs or patrols to help address non-violent incidents or mental health concerns, and yes, possibly redirecting some funds to support said programs. But, instead of having that thoughtful discussion, the idea is labeled “woke,” then ridiculed and disposed of.
[Fact check: The GOP’s dishonesty-filled barrage of ‘defund the police’ attack ads "Poseur B402, You now are the board's biggest misinformation problem, and i for at least a few am getting fed up with it. Your suggestion that 80% of Dems would be in favor of fewer police is scurrilous, untrue, dishonest, rubbish from you .. Despite 'defunding' claims, police funding has increased in many US cities" https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=174143523]
During Maher’s recent Sharon Osbourne interview after her highly-publicized departure from The Talk .. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/26/entertainment/sharon-osbourne-leaving-talk/index.html , there was a conspicuous omission of any specific discussion of her reported on-air outburst (for which she later apologized .. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/12/entertainment/sharon-osbourne-apologizes-intl-scli-gbr/index.html ) which in concert with subsequent race related allegations prompted CBS to place The Talk on hiatus .. https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/03/15/cbs-the-talk-on-pause/ . Instead, their discussion focused on fault they found with others. Osbourne called out Prince Harry as the poster boy for White privilege. She declared herself to be “angry and hurt” by the recent events, expressed frustration with the difficulty of knowing what is “correct and woke for your language that day,” and referenced former colleagues as “disgruntled ladies” while Maher blatantly stated that his view was that “nothing happened” during the incident. He later rejected the concept of either of them reeducating themselves on the topic of race. He insisted that because Osbourne has “traveled the world, is married to a rock star and has been with the A-listers,” she couldn’t possibly need re-education. The goal of the “interview” seemed much more focused on painting Osbourne as a victim than exploring or considering any range of perspectives or underlying racial considerations. In contrast, MSNBC host Tiffany Cross’ response to race related dustups involving the likes of Meghan McCain .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjjlKd9sTR8 .. and Sharon Osbourne .. https://twitter.com/crossconnection/status/1373303504345894914?lang=en —whether you agree with her perspective or not—illuminates the fact that as these high-profile incidents surface, there really are deep underlying issues and varying perspectives to consider, and dismissing them as woke extremism is more than a missed opportunity.
Any student of the American civil rights struggle should be well acquainted with the White liberal’s history of complicated and capricious commitment to true anti-racism progress. Arguably, this current boomerang effect of sorts may be the result of White progressives deeming themselves to be “woke” (in the sense of being racially conscious and progressive) and therefore in a position to become the arbiter of what is “too much” on the road to racial equity. “The act of ‘being woke’ is racial arrogance/ignorance, at best, or intentional White supremacy, at worst,” insists anti-racist leadership consultant, Tracey Benson, Ed. L.D. “The woke White is and has always been the most dangerous racist in our society, because they outnumber self-realized racists at least 100-1, and furthermore because they have absolved themselves from complicity in White supremacy, shielded themselves from criticism and further learning (especially from people of color) while simultaneously contributing to and benefitting from societal racism.” Indeed, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in his famous letter from a Birmingham jail .. https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf , “I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the White moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the White moderate who is more devoted to order than justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’”
[Controversial Civil Rights Activist Angela Davis Draws Big Crowd to BU Talk [...] She was charming, erudite, self-deprecating, and funny. She did not ignore having been a polarizing figure over the years, and even brought up the recent roller-coaster events in her hometown of Birmingham, Ala.: the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute selected her for a human rights award, then rescinded the award amid protests over her support of a boycott of Israel, only to reverse itself—amid a new outcry, this time in support of Davis—and announce she would be given the award after all. P - It was hardly her first brush with controversy. In her many books and lectures around the world, Davis has been outspoken on issues from race relations to poverty to gender violence. She was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted List in the early 1970s, was fired from her position as a professor at UCLA, was accused of being a communist organizer, and spent more than a year in jail .. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/topten-history/hires_images/FBI-309-AngelaYvonneDavis.jpg/view . P - The audience laughed when, flashing a big smile, Davis said, “I keep asking myself, why do I end up at the center of all these controversies? I’m actually happy this happened. It gives us a new opportunity to understand the ways in which the different forms of violence connect, the relationship between racism and anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and it allows us to combine our scholarship and our activism with our collective imagination and our passion.” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=171588379]
While there’s very little to be certain of in this moment of racial reckoning, I’m certain that real progress will require more listening, not less, an inclination towards learning, not a stubborn resistance to new ideas, more opening up, less shutting down, more introspection, less defensiveness, more facts and truth, less visceral dismissiveness, more grace and respect and less self-righteous indignation. Using the term “woke” to stigmatize someone else’s perspective is immature and offensive. It feels dehumanizing…just like “the race card” because after all, for many of us racism isn’t a game.
The fact that any particular ideology, policy or idea can go too far or lose the benefit-cost ratio battle should go without saying, and it’s preposterous to even entertain the suggestion that simply because a person of color suggests or promotes an idea or platform, it should automatically be adopted (again, beyond obvious). So, when you find yourself in disagreement with an idea, platform or policy related to race, just say so. If the issue is that flawed, it should be easy enough to pick it apart on the merits, right? Everyone is entitled to their opinion and offering a different perspective, asking questions, analyzing pros and cons all show a basic level of respect for all parties involved, but labeling something as “woke” as a means of arrogantly dismissing it often feels like a convenient cop out for those who seem allergic to self-reflection, thoughtful analysis….or maybe accountability.
[ Here here ]
Note: The author reached out to ABC, CBS, Warner Media, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Sharon Osbourne’s reported representative for comment, but did not receive a response prior to publishing.
Dana Brownlee I’m a keynote speaker/trainer and workplace antiracism thought leader. Author of the LinkedIn Learning courses How to Speak Up Against Racism...
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