‘Woke’ latest term for what the right doesn’t like

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/04/2023 (913 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Anyone reading this is doubtlessly immersed enough in media to have come across the term “woke” once or twice. It’s everywhere in our political discourse, mostly being thrown around as a pejorative by politicians and pundits on the conservative side of the political spectrum. But exactly what does it mean?

One could be forgiven for not having a specific answer, since some people trot out the term reflexively to affix blame for any grievance in their immediate vicinity, the way one might curse a couch on which they stub their toe.

For example, more than one conservative pundit tried to blame the recent Silicon Valley Bank collapse on the bank’s supposed “wokeness.” These woke policies boiled down to things like running a blog for LGBTTQ+ coming-out stories and having a diverse board of directors.

Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler even mused “I’m not saying 12 white men could have avoided this, but the company may have been distracted by diversity demands.” Which is, of course, saying the thing without directly saying the thing. If you’re holding your breath waiting for someone to connect the dots between any of this and the bank’s collapse, please exhale.

To many conservatives, “woke” is the latest catch-all term for every vaguely liberal thing that can be clumsily juxtaposed with any of society’s ills. But it is not a new term.

It has been in the lexicon of Black Americans since long before we have a record of it, though the earliest recorded instance I’ve found comes from Lead Belly, the early 20th-century folk singer. In a discussion of his song about the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black youths who were falsely accused and raping a white woman in Alabama, Lead Belly urges people to beware the violent racists of that southern state. “Best stay woke,” he warns. “Keep your eyes open.”

Ironically, Lead Belly’s sage advice to stay alert for the threats of racism are not so different from the way that conservatives weaponize the term today.

When pressed in a recent legal battle, a lawyer for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is perhaps the most prolific decrier of all things woke, provided a definition for the term as follows. “The belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

This is what conservatism seeks to protect us from? Talk about saying the quiet part loud.

While Lead Belly may have been cautioning against a more obvious threat of racism, DeSantis is still urging people to close their eyes to bigotry with his anti-woke campaign.

Under the guise of protecting children from sexual content, the possible presidential candidate has implemented policies that have libraries pulling books from their shelves simply because the literature engages with the lived experience of LGBTTQ+ people, even if there is no actual sex in the text. He is crafting educational policy that whitewashes American history and glosses over the struggles faced by people of colour.

And he is only one of many legislators who would drag us back to a time when history was an exercise in cheerleading western chauvinism, and when sexual education was left in the hands of children to stumble into themselves.

Some conservative pundits love to say “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But few of them have risen to challenge DeSantis in his campaign to shield children from the discomforts of history and biology.

Perhaps the strangest thing is how many of us fail to recognize these things are just the Christian right doing the same things they have always done. Somehow, conservativism is successfully re-branding itself as the ideology for freedom of speech and lifestyle. But a broad cohort of conservatives are trying to enforce a normative society where the centred experience is that of heterosexual white people. Several states are even pushing to expand their restrictions on gender- affirming health care for children to include adults.

Yet, somehow, when a corporation discontinues a Dr. Seuss book or makes a gender-neutral potato toy, concessions that were asked for by no one and are perhaps little more than craven vies for publicity, it is the left wing that is denounced as suppressively puritanical. It just goes to show how effective the right-wing propaganda machine truly is.

So what of the future of the term “woke?” Sometimes it’s hard to know how history will judge a segment of contemporary culture. But the swaths of people rigidly demanding that society be less woke, insisting on continuing to misunderstand the plight of our oppressed neighbours in both the contemporary and the historical, are so cartoonishly on the wrong side of history I shudder at the thought of how our pages of history books shall be received. At best, with derisive laughter.

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg-based author.