Beginning in 2014 the world became aware of America’s history of racial injustice especially in regards to Black men. That was the year a series of events occurred in Ferguson, Missouri, a majority Black suburb of St. Louis, culminating in the shooting of 18 year old Michael Brown on August 9th, 2014 by Ferguson PD officer Darren Wilson.
The shooting sparked weeks of civil unrest in a city where Black residents routinely felt oppressed by white police officers and city officials. Eyewitness accounts state that Michael Brown was in the process of surrendering with his hands up when gunned down and killed by Officer Wilson while police reports state that Wilson was charging towards Officer Wilson, who described the unarmed Brown as “Hulking up”.
Racial tensions between Ferguson’s Black population and a largely white police force boiled over to the point where civil unrest was met with an extremely heavy-handed police response featuring the deployment of military-grade equipment recently obtained from the US Department of Defense’s 1033 Program, which transferred surplus military hardware to America’s law enforcement agencies.
This heavy-handed response, and the subsequent investigation that exonerated Officer Wilson, captured the nation and the world’s attention, and the Black Lives Matter movement was born.
While the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was used by protesters to organize themselves and share information for avoiding police violence, the hashtag #StayWoke became the Black community’s way of uniting around a shared perception and experience of the realities of living in America — and to galvanize themselves and each other for a very long fight for change.
Around this time the term “woke” started entering mainstream consciousness. In 2017 Jordan Peele directed the film Get Out, where a young Black man (played brilliantly by British actor Daniel Kaluuya who was nominated for an Academy Award for his role) must literally stay awake and alert, or “woke”, in order to survive a racist conspiracy in a white suburban setting.
The film uses Childish Gambino’s 2016 song “Redbone”, which was built around the refrain “stay woke”, but referring to a cheating partner. Said Peele in an interview, “I wanted to make sure that this movie satisfied the Black horror movie audience’s need for characters to be smart and do things that intelligent and observant people would do,” he said. “‘Stay woke’ — that’s what this movie is about.”
That same year the word “woke” began to be used in other political contexts such as the nation-wide Women’s March protesting Donald Trump’s election. However the use of the term drew backlash from political writers such as Boston Globe’s Alex Beam who snarkily condemned the use of the word in his opinion piece “Not woke and never will be.”
“The real purpose of ‘woke’ is to divide the world into hyper-socially aware, self-appointed gatekeepers of language and behavior, and the rest of humanity,”
The backlash continued with NPR writer Sam Sanders writing in his opinion piece “It’s time to put ‘woke’ to sleep”
The argument I am making is not new, or revolutionary, or profound. Instead, it's a cleanup. The last street sweeping at the end of a long parade, that final reminder that the party is really over.
Nicole Holliday, a linguist at Pomona College who researches sociolinguistics and racial and ethnic boundaries in language, argues that the Internet may have sped up the life cycle of a word like woke, sending it from new to played-out in record time.
"So many more people are being exposed to so much more language by people that they wouldn't normally interact with," Holliday says. "The people you follow on Twitter aren't necessarily people that you talk to in real life."
"Some group of young people — usually young people of color — start popularizing a word," Holliday says. "They interact with other young people and people a little older than them."
(To be continued)