The original intent of ‘woke’ has been lost

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This article was published 03/08/2022 (1202 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Seemingly any person or political position can be disparaged and dismissed these days with a single four-letter word: “woke.”

Justin Trudeau, and progressives in general, are routinely scorned as woke, the update of politically correct, with the assumption that its meaning is clear, and clearly negative.

But the concept of “waking up” to social and political realities is not new; it dates back to the early 20th century. The original meaning of being “woke,” before its critics transformed the term into derision, was to be awakened to the empirical reality and effects of inequality of conditions in society.

Early in the 21st century, African American communities urged each other to “stay woke,” meaning to stay vigilant and keep watch for systemic racism in general, and for police brutality in particular. More than that, as Aja Romano at Vox explained in their detailed history of wokeness, “the #StayWoke hashtag arguably served an equally important emotional and spiritual purpose: it allowed Black citizens to unite around a shared perception and experience of reality — and to galvanize themselves and each other for a very long fight for change.”

“Woke” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary currently defines it as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”

However, today “woke” has rapidly degenerated into a pejorative term of laughable derision, a mocking insult du jour used by the political right for those on the left who have been awakened to multiple forms of social injustice beyond racism.

It has been co-opted, weaponized and even legislated by the political right, such as the Stop W.O.K.E. Act passed by Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Two linguistic processes help explain the transformation of the term. The first is the “euphemism treadmill,” coined by Steven Pinker and narrated by John McWhorter of the New York Times as “A well-used word or expression is subject to ridicule or has grimy associations. A new term is born to replace it and help push thought ahead. But after that term spends some time getting knocked around in the real world, the associations the old term had settle back down, like gnats, on the new one. Yet another term is needed. Repeat.”

The second linguistic process is “semantic bleaching,” which occurs when the denotative content of a word is stripped away, after which it can come to connote anything.

But the crux of wokeness remains its character. Critics such as political commentator Andrew Sullivan described the “Great Awokening” as a “cult of social justice on the left, a religion whose followers show the same zeal as any born-again evangelical,” and who “punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame.”

In reply, proponents such as Steve Rose observe that “Criticizing ‘woke culture’ has become a way of claiming victim status for yourself rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status. It has gone from a virtue signal to a dog whistle.”

Perry Bacon Jr. suggests that an “anti-woke posture” is a product of the long-standing promotion of backlash politics by conservatives who fear social activism and changing cultural norms.

True, even most of the left is leery of and frustrated with the radical fringe of woke culture who damage their own cause, as is true of every political camp. Previously labelled social-justice warriors, these extremists include those who take an overzealous, performative and ultimately disingenuous approach to social justice.

As Romano rightly observed, their claim to wokeness “is often about maintaining the superficial trappings of progressive idealism without doing the real work to understand and change systems of oppression.”

The woke capitalism, or “woke-washing,” of companies that use insincere progressive messaging as a substitute for genuine reform is one egregious example.

Nonetheless, historian and Christian theorist Jemar Tisby does indeed find wokeness as a religious awakening to be a powerful concept, despite that it “now has become either sort of kitschy, or actually almost an epithet.” Wokeness is indeed akin to enlightenment, in that those once blind now see.

When used knowingly and respectfully by its proponents, “woke” can overcome its cultural misappropriation by whites of an idiom of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in pursuit of social justice. When used unknowingly and disrespectfully by its critics, it becomes little more than sneering juvenile name-calling and labelling.

Perhaps it’s best to drop the term entirely, in keeping with the progressive commitment to avoid labels that categorize and denigrate people.

Dennis Hiebert is a professor of sociology at the University of Manitoba.