The War on Woke, Part 1
How "woke" came from the Black community
We keep hearing this word. “Woke” this, “woke” that, “woke” the other thing. Are you “woke”? Is the Democratic Party “woke”? Is “woke” a bad thing or a good thing?
What is this all about?
“Woke” is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as:
aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)
Yet to hear Republicans talk about it today “woke” is something so terrible, so awful, so civilization-destroying that they have literally decided to wage war upon “woke”.
However, “woke” is not a thing to be fought but a concept. An idea. A thought process. A way of looking at the world and seeing it for what it is. In fact for a long time “woke” was something that you only heard in the Black community of America.
“Stay woke and keep your head on a swivel.”
Staying “woke” and keeping your “head on a swivel” was a common survival tactic for Black people in America, who have been treated as second class citizens for centuries in this country. It’s a warning to Black Americans that they need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America.
Before 2014 most non-Black people in America hadn’t heard this phrase before. However in that year Michael Brown was killed by police in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis located close to the Missouri/Illinois border. That singular event shocked the nation and launched the Black Lives Matter movement that still continues today. Protesters at the time were told to “stay woke” and watch out for police brutality and unjust activity.
But where did the phrase come from?
The earliest known examples of the word “woke” as a concept revolve around the idea of Black consciousness “waking up” to a new reality or activist framework and dates back to the early 20th century. In 1923, a collection of aphorisms and ideas by the Jamaican philosopher and social activist Marcus Garvey included the summons “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” as a call to global Black citizens to become more socially and politically conscious.
A few years later, the phrase “stay woke” turned up as part of a spoken afterword in the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. The song describes the 1931 saga of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who were accused of raping two white women.
“I made this little song about down there,” Lead Belly says. “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
The phrase remained largely unknown outside of Black culture until 1962 when Black novelist William Melvin Kelley wrote an article in the New York Times entitled “If You’re Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist” where he explains that terms popular in Beatnik culture such as “cool” and “dig” had actually been appropriated from Black jazz musicians rather than originating with white Americans.
What Kelley pointed out was that white America routinely appropriated Black language and culture and took it as their own in a display of power and control over Black people. Indeed, even in a piece largely focused on linguistics, Kelley directly connects “woke” Black culture back to an awareness of systematized white violence against Black people.
In fact Kelley noted that the use of idioms and coded precautions in Black culture originated from the era of slavery. “[T]he language was used primarily for secrecy, exclusion, and protection,” Kelley wrote. “If your master did not know what you were talking about, he could not punish you, and you could maintain your ignorance and innocence.”
This linguistic subterfuge seems to be how “woke” — the concept and the word itself — flew under the mainstream cultural radar for what seems to have been decades. Not until the late 2000’s, with the rise of social media and a few prominent assists, did wokeness begin its steady, proper push into the broader American consciousness with the rise of Black musicians, such as Erykah Badu and Childish Gambino, using the term in their music.
And then in 2014 all hell broke loose.
(To be continued)
