Woke up this morning, Woke was on my mind ...
Once we Whites learn Black words, they’re no longer Black words
I’d always thought I was keeping up with the real world but I had to have been dozing for several years before I heard this on NPR radio back in 2018, just before New Year’s:
LEILA FADEL, HOST: It's the end of the year, which means it's time to think about all of the things we don't want to take into the next one. NPR's Sam Sanders is hoping one word doesn't make it to 2019 – “Woke”. We'll let him explain why.
And he did:
SANDERS: “Woke” – your annoying friend probably uses it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: “You are so Woke.”
SANDERS: Politicians and celebrities use it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: “To me, being Woke means that you recognize.”
SANDERS: Everybody uses it.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #5: “Are you even Woke?”
SANDERS: I want us to stop.
So by now, my brain is shouting at me, “Oh, great! Just as you’re hearing this word being used in this context for the first time, it’s already so out of date that it’s about to disappear into history?”
(In retrospect, of course, I should have been so lucky.)
SANDERS: ... First, what exactly does Woke mean?
EMILY BREWSTER: It's defined as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice.”
SANDERS: That's Emily Brewster. She's an associate editor at Merriam-Webster, the dictionary. The Black Lives Matter movement is largely responsible for the rise of Woke this century. The word is tied to this idea of valuing and respecting blackness. Activists used it to urge people to take issues, like the deaths of black people at the hands of police, seriously.
Nicole Holliday is a linguist at Pomona College. She says before that, the word Woke appeared in an essay decades ago.
NICOLE HOLLIDAY: "If You're Woke You Dig It" by William Melvin Kelley - and that was in 1962.
In his New York Times essay, Kelley, who’s first novel “A Different Drummer” was coming out later that year, plays the good-natured Black tour guide for us white people into the secret language of the hip “Negro” (his word) community, slang which Kelley noted with a certain amount of justifiable racial pride was being “borrowed” by the beatniks of the day.
Kelley grew up in New York City in a family that included a father who was a longtime editor of the Black-nationalist newspaper Amsterdam News, and his mother’s mother, who was born the daughter of a slave and a Confederate colonel. He attended the “nearly all-white Fieldston school in New York, where he became student-council president” in his senior year. A member of the class of 1960 at Harvard, he was taught by John Hawkes and Archibald MacLeish, but dropped out just before graduation to become a writer:
In early 1966, Kelley got his agent to secure him an assignment from the Saturday Evening Post to cover the trial of the men accused of the assassination of Malcolm X.
Kelley became convinced that two of the accused, Norman Butler and Thomas Johnson, were being railroaded, which led him to lose his belief of the independence of the judiciary, and take the decision to "depart the plantation" and move abroad.
But after the MLK and RFK assassinations in 1968 happened while he and his wife were living in Paris, rather than returning home, they “decided they did not want to raise their family in the US”, so they moved to Jamaica, where, “[h]aving rediscovered the Bible, they embraced Judaism.”
The full headline of that article, printed in the New York Times on May 20th of 1962, was “If You're Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today's Negro idiom without a hip assist. If You're Woke You Dig It”.
Although Kelley’s piece is remembered by history as “being the first to commit the term ‘woke’ to print”, the word does not appear anywhere in it other than in the headline and a companion sidebar, ‘SAYING SOMETHING’ LEXICON (“Here are some phrases and words you might hear today in Harlem or in any other Negro community. – W.M.K.”), which defines not only present day well-known terms such as “fox” (“a beautiful girl”) and “the man” (“the police or a policeman”) but also some lesser-known today, such as the “other man” (“the liquor dealer”), “mickey mouse” (a “square”), “ralph bunche” (“to talk one’s way out of a difficult situation”), but also “grays” (“white people”) as well as “a member” (“a negro”).
I’m sure I’m not the only white person who’d never heard of “grays” and “members”, but within the article itself, Kelley explains the utility of this code-talking by citing his grandmother:
My grandmother told me that “ofay”, a word for a white man, was “foe” in pig Latin. This would mean that the language was used primarily for secrecy, exclusion and protection. If your master did not know what you were talking about or planning, he could not punish you...
Kelley suggested that the language of “Negro” neighborhoods was always adapting:
To many of these people, the words and phrases borrowed from them by beatniks or other white Americans are hopelessly out of date. By the time these terms get into the mainstream, new ones have already appeared, although some (such as to dig or cool) remain staples of the idiom despite wide non-Negro use.
A few Negroes guard the idiom so fervently they will consciously invent a new term as soon as they hear the existing one coming from a white’s lips.
In fact, he wrote,
... the word for a white man has been at various times, an ofay, a fay, a paddy, a gravy, and a gray.
“Woke” was on Kelley’s list, an adjective that merely meant “well-informed, up-to-date” but without all the anti-racism specificity of today’s version of the term. But the word did suggest racial alertness in earlier iterations, in 1938 and 1940:
Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly, uses the phrase near the end of the recording of his 1938 song "Scottsboro Boys", which tells the story of nine black teenagers accused of raping two white women, saying: "I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there – best stay woke, keep their eyes open." ...
J. Saunders Redding recorded a comment from an African American United Mine Workers official in 1940, stating: "Let me tell you buddy. Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we'll stay woke up longer."
In 2017, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) included the word, noting Kelley’s 1962 article, but also Woke’s even newer meanings:
In the past decade, that meaning has been catapulted into mainstream use with a particular nuance of ‘alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’, popularized through the lyrics of the 2008 song Master Teacher by Erykah Badu, in which the words ‘I stay woke’ serve as a refrain, and more recently through its association with the Black Lives Matter movement, especially on social media.
But they added this delicately-phrased comment:
This well established but newly prominent usage of woke has become emblematic of the ways in which black American culture and language are adopted by non-black people who don’t always appreciate their full historical and cultural context.
(Ahem.)
And then, according to Wikipedia:
After seeing use on Black Twitter, the term woke became an Internet meme and was increasingly used by white people, often to signal their support for BLM, which some commentators have criticised as cultural appropriation.
Yeah, but once again, it has also
... been used as shorthand for left-wing ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.
In fact,
By 2020, parts of the political center and right-wing in several Western countries were using the term woke, often in an ironic way, as an insult for various progressive or leftist movements and ideologies perceived as overzealous, performative, or insincere.
In turn, some commentators came to consider it an offensive term with negative associations to those who promote political ideas involving identity and race. By 2021, woke had become used almost exclusively as a pejorative, with most prominent usages of the word taking place in a disparaging context.
Uh oh! Looks like this once-powerful “social justice” term has fallen into the wrong hands! Odd as it seems, Woke now seems to represent something vaguely antithetical to its original meaning.
It seems the right has appropriated Kelley’s grandmother’s story about the secret lingo of the slaves! As long as the Democrat “foe” thinks we’re talking ignorant gibberish, we Republicans can get away with discussing things they can’t understand, out in the open!
EXAMPLE #1:
You’d think that Florida Republican voters would eventually come to understand that CRT (aka, “Critical Race Theory”) – which is defined as “a cross-disciplinary intellectual and social movement of civil-rights scholars and activists who seek to examine the intersection of race, society, and law in the United States and to challenge mainstream American liberal approaches to racial justice” – is already NOT being taught to third graders, so there’s really no need to lobby for laws against it.
But the joke’s on you, since what Republicans mean by CRT is not what encyclopedias think it means, it’s what Republican VOTERS think it means – which is, discussing “Blackness” and “race” and certain facts from American history in school, which would just embarrass certain kids, a bald-faced attempt to make whites feel it’s their fault that our (mostly white-controlled) country has mistreated its non-whites – which, of course, is just not fair to “our” children.
EXAMPLE #2:
You might think “Socialism” – which is defined as “any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods” – is not at all what the majority of Democrats believe, and that maybe Republicans should stop accusing all Democrats of being “socialists”.
But no, once again, you’re a knuckle-headed nincompoop if you think that’s what “socialism” means, at least to Republican elected officials (and those who vote for them.)
You’re a socialist, apparently, if you keep trying to grab wealth away from the makers to give to the takers!
And if you keep trying to get the vote of “the Blacks” and the other “coloreds”, you’re just exploiting the “unfortunates,” merely to get power, which is all you Democrats care about.
Okay, then, what do conservatives want with our “Woke” word?
The usual custom has been to turn “leftist” words and phrases around to be used as a sort of bludgeon with which to bop-bop-bop the heads not only of the Black people who originated the terminology but also the white liberals who, at some point, liked the ideas so much, we copied-and-pasted them into our OWN vernacular, as we often do.
And what part of being “attentive” to “racial and social justice” does the right have a problem with?
(You mean other than it sounding kind of communist-y?)
“No part”, they’d probably say, since that isn’t what they think Woke means, at least not anymore, if it ever did.
They might also tell us, as they often do, that all Democrats really care about is getting votes and getting into power, and then advise you to ignore all those platitudes you always hear from Democrats, that not even THEY believe the waste matter they’re always shoveling.
(I disagree, but you already knew that.)
While all that might be the mindset of the street politicians down in Florida, there’s a more serious discussion of Woke Theory going on in pundit media.
It’s a prevailing theme in those fascinating (at least to us few) deep-dive conversations that explore the word, as shorthand, apparently, for all those dubious notions of liberalism itself.
Inside “The Roots of Wokeness”, Andrew Sullivan’s book review of “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity”, by onetime math professor James Lindsay and British academic Helen Pluckrose (posted on Andrew’s Substack back in July of 2020), there are not so many mentions of the word as there are speculations about what goes on inside the collective “postmodern” brain of what I myself sometimes think of as “leftists who probably think too much”:
What the book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture.
(I remember when I first heard the term “postmodern”, I thought it was intended as irony. If “modern” always means “now”, then if something is “post-modern”, doesn’t that mean we’re seeing something now that’s from the future, apparently having travelled in a time machine that we’d never seen before since it hasn’t been invented yet? Okay, then, how did this postmodern thing get here?)
Yes, I’m being silly, but I actually didn’t understand what they were talking about.
Let’s get back to Sullivan, discussing postmodern thinkers:
The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized.
In other words, it was the postmoderns who replaced objective truth with whatever any one individual thinks the truth is. (Anyway, I think that’s true.)
During the 1980s and 1990s, this somewhat aimless critique of everything hardened into a plan for action. Analyzing how truth was a mere function of power, and then seeing that power used against distinct and oppressed identity groups, led to an understandable desire to do something about it...
And all power is zero-sum: you either have power over others or they have power over you. To the extent that men exercise power, for example, women don’t ... There is no mutually beneficial, non-zero-sum advancement in this worldview. All power is gained only through some other group’s loss.
And so the point became not simply to interpret the world, but to change it, to coin a phrase, an imperative which explains why some critics call this theory a form of neo-Marxism.
Okay, I think a lot of the problems on our planet started with too many people giving way too much credence to Marx’s nonsense. I never bought into much of his musings in the Communist Manifesto, and nor did I think my objections were adequately addressed by neo-Marxists when they tried to clean him up.
I’m not really sure, but I suspect one of Sullivan’s points here might be that the mistake “social justice warriors” (SJWs) make is in trying to fix the world, and that maybe the world would be better off if we just let it be?
But as a liberal, I do want to fix the world. Yes, we could just leave the mess as it is, but had those who preceded us all thought that way, we’d still be visiting latrines in the woods behind our humble huts in the middle of moonless nights.
And yet, I might be misunderstanding what Sullivan is saying. Maybe I need to read that book he reviewed.
My problem may originate with not keeping up with the latest literature, as I’m not getting where he locates us liberals in the Woke agenda of these “critical theorists”. Has he not been saying we liberals are the ones guilty of all this current Wokeness?
Maybe he’s not, since he ends his essay with this:
In fact, I suspect it is the success of liberalism in bringing this kind of non-zero-sum pluralism into being that rattles the critical theorists the most. Because it suggests that reform is always better than revolution, that empirical truth is on the side of the genuinely oppressed and we should never fear understanding things better, that progress is both possible in a liberal democracy, and more securely rooted than in other systems, because it springs from a lively, informed debate, and isn’t foisted on society by ideologues.
The rhetorical trap of critical theory is that it has coopted the cause of inclusion and forced liberals onto the defensive. But liberals have nothing to be defensive about.
What’s so encouraging about this book is that it has confidence in its own arguments, and is as dedicated to actual social justice, achieved through liberal means, as it is scornful of the postmodern ideologues who have coopted and corrupted otherwise noble causes.
Wow. Maybe he and I agree on more than I thought we did. Remind me to look deeper into this.
I first became aware of Sullivan years ago while proofreading “Just Above Sunset”, a daily online commentary (since gone dark) of my friend, Alan Pavlik, in which Andrew would pop up periodically as a British expat conservative who would, nevertheless, testify eloquently against those who spoke so much ill of Barack Obama, and for that, it was hard not to hold him in high regard.
And it still is, even as the discussion finally turns toward actual ideological differences, rather than the daily romps of Donald Trump.
I urge you to read his whole review. (Here’s that link again.)
But I still insist that our real problem with Woke today is it has devolved into a weapon used with the aim of mocking and demeaning people of generally good intention and ends discussions that should keep going.
So yeah, I agree with the NPR guy, that maybe we should, as we would with a dog way past innocent puppyhood, just quietly and humanely put Woke to sleep, then tell the kids that old “Wokey” just got too long in the tooth, not to mention randomly incontinent, so we did the only kind thing by putting him on a bus, to live out his old-fart years on some farm upstate.
Who knows, I might meet up with him there someday.
