Childish Gambino, the musical stage name of actor Donald Glover, used “woke” in the chorus of 2016’s “Redbone,” a song also featured in the 2017 horror film “Get Out.” And Erykah Badu sings of “staying woke” on “Master Teacher.” It’s also true that culture can be a conveyance of activism, and the other way around. As they did, social media included an urgency to “stay woke” against police actions and other threats. In 2014 in Ferguson, Mo., citizens marched nightly to protest the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager shot by a white police officer. The first time many younger people heard “woke” in its current context was likely during the ascent of the Black Lives Matter movement. In that recording, it was used to describe staying aware of the potential for racist violence as a Black person in America. In fact, one of the term’s earliest uses was in a historical recording of the protest song “ Scottsboro Boys” by blues musician Lead Belly, about the 1930s trials of nine Black teens falsely accused of raping two white women. But the series drew its own criticism for striking an outdated and too-centrist political viewpoint - that is, for not being “woke” enough, as Vox reported. A 2020 Hulu comedy series - called, what else, “Woke” - attempted to deconstruct the identity politics behind its current use. True enough, someone might be labeled that way whether or not they ever claimed such a title.Īs might be expected, defensiveness around “wokeness” invites ironic blowback. On the political left, to be “woke” in modern terms means to identify as a staunch social-justice advocate but, in particular, one who is in sync with contemporary political concerns. Related: House Republican crusade against ‘woke’ means subpoenas for former school-board officials It was a claim that prompted an Associated Press fact check. Reeled in recent days after the swift demise of Silicon Valley Bank - the biggest American bank failure since the 2008 financial meltdown - some social-media users joined cable-news pundits in pinning the collapse on its socially aware, or “woke,” agenda. (Here’s what’s really going on with safety studies around stoves and the incentives offered for a switch to electric.) shares common ownership with MarketWatch publisher Dow Jones’s parent, News Corp, outrage over a purported “gas-stove ban” gave way to “woke” mobs coming to rip those appliances out of American homes. On some programs on Fox News, whose parent Fox Corp. Greg Abbott, a fellow Republican, has also publicly announced his desire to stop “a woke agenda” by ordering state agencies to eliminate diversity-driven hiring. Ron DeSantis, an anticipated Republican presidential contender in 2024, said earlier this year that his state would “never surrender to the ‘woke’ mob” as he said state pension-fund money would be removed from the world’s largest fund firm, BlackRock, to avoid environmental, social and governance, or ESG, investments. She recalled the author using the term maybe one additional time, in a novel, and in the context of a relationship, not politics.įlorida Gov. “That piece was more prophetic, it turns out, than even my dad could have imagined,” Kelley said in an interview. (Here’s a recent podcast from Elijah Watson looking at Kelley’s writing legacy and an exploration of “woke” origins.) The senior Kelley, known for “A Different Drummer” and other works, addressed co-opted cultural language in a 1962 New York Times essay, “If You’re Woke, You Dig It.” In it, the then-Harlem-based author pointed out that much of what passed for “beatnik” slang (“dig,” “chick,” “cool”) originated with African Americans. Black people essentially stopped using ‘woke’ awhile ago, unless maybe using it with a side-eye,” photographer Jessica Kelley, the daughter of the late novelist and essayist William Kelley, told MarketWatch. The Oxford English Dictionary has extended the definition of “woke” as not only a verb but now an adjective. There has been an official response in word world. Or is it simply that “woke” is a tidier natural evolution from “ cancel culture” and “ political correctness“? But given its widespread, often lazy interjection in political, cultural and ironic use cases today, “woke” has both too many definitions and nowhere near enough examples that elevate it, or at least cushion it, in fair context. In actuality, “woke” is a decades-old, sometimes casually used, bit of Black American vernacular.
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