Why is woke a dirty word now?

Post Reply New Topic

Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics.

But as use of the word spreads, what people actually mean by “woke” seems less clear than ever.

After all, none of these recent political concepts has anything to do with the idea of demanding that people “stay woke” against police brutality. Despite renewed activism against police brutality in 2020, the way that terms like “woke” and “wokeness” are used outside of the Black Lives Matter community seems to bear little connection to their original context, on either the right and the left.

Shifting a Black Lives Matter slogan away from its original meaning is arguably the least woke thing ever — yet that seems to be just what happened with, of all things, “woke” itself.

[...]

... 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.

Lead Belly says at the end of an archival recording of the song that he’d met with the Scottsboro defendants’ lawyer, who introduced him to the men themselves. “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.”

Lead Belly uses “stay woke” in explicit association with Black Americans’ need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America. Lead Belly’s usage has largely stayed the common, consistent one ever since, including during one notable brush with the mainstream in 1962, via the New York Times.

That year, a young Black novelist named William Melvin Kelley wrote a first-person piece for the Times called “If You’re Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.” In the piece, Kelley points out that the origins of the language of then-fashionable beatnik culture — words like “cool” and “dig” — lay not within white America but with Black Americans, predominantly among Black jazz musicians.

Kelly’s piece doesn’t explain what “woke” might mean. But his argument implies that to be “woke” is to be a socially conscious Black American, someone aware of the ephemeral nature of Black vernacular, who might actively be shifting that vernacular away from white people who would exploit it or change its meaning:

[...]

“Kelley’s description suggests that to be woke is to have a native relationship to Black language, culture, and knowledge of social issues that arise in our lived experiences,” miles-hercules told me, singling out Kelley’s piece as an example of the connection “woke” had even in the ’60s to its current political connotations.

Given that this oldest-known introduction of “woke” to the mainstream comes in a 1962 opinion piece about how white Americans are always appropriating the Black vernacular, it’s almost as though the word predicts its own fate.

Looking up some articles on the history of the term "woke," I came across A history of “wokeness”: Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war, by Aja Romano, Vox, Oct 9, 2020. Among other things it says:



The article discusses subsequent shifts in meaning of the word "woke," and then says:

Lets face it “woke” is a lot easier to write then something like “the illiberal wing of the progressive movement”

But it would be easy enough to make up a shorthand term that means "illiberal progressive" and has no other meaning. How about "ill-prog" (a word I made up just now)?

"Ill-prog" is clearly an outsider's term, and intrinsically a bit insulting. But it would be better (at least for a moderate), I think, than hijacking and twisting a term used by people inside one or more branches of the progressive movement (people who vary a lot as to whether and how "illiberal" they are).

Twisting the other side's terms is something partisan propagandists do. It should not be something moderates do, in my opinion.

It's because so much of it isn't. Too often it's racist and sexist and generally self-serving. It's also become a way of pitting one group against another so that the elites can avoid having to let the people benefit from government policies.

And, it's hardly just right-wingers. Those on the progressive left aren't necessarily terribly keen on it either, as it is a wedge issue intended to distract from real efforts to address any major issue.

Oversimplifying the video
The 62 percent of Americans who fear sharing their political views are being bamboozled, there is nothing to fear there. This comes off as gaslighting.

This isn't "oversimplifying" the video; it's completely irrelevant to the content of the video, which says nothing at all about people who fear sharing their political views.

On the latter topic, the survey question in the article you linked to is worded as follows: "Agree/Disagree: The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive."

One question I have is, when did most people NOT fear sharing their political views, at least on the job and in most ordinary social settings? When I was young, it was commonly said that "sex, religion, and politics" were topics "you just don't talk about."

Also I notice that the question is worded as a binary "Agree/disagree" with no in-between. I would expect that, for most people, the most accurate answer would be somewhere in-between, depending on circumstances and on whom they are talking to. Throughout my adult life, I've always felt that there were some settings in which it was safe to share my political views, and other settings in which it was not safe.

Anyhow, in today's highly polarized world, it is understandable that many people would feel less even safe than normal about expressing their political views. Also, the advent of social media makes it even riskier, at least on platforms like Facebook where people are expected to use their legal names.

As for "strong liberals" feeling more comfortable than other people about expressing their views, I would hazard a guess that this may be because "strong liberals" tend to skew young. Older people, of whatever political persuasion, are more likely to have had the kinds of hard experiences that would lead people to be reticent (at least in some settings, like on the job) about their opinions on controversial issues.

He is saying conservatives are causing a moral panic which by means people have been fooled into panicking about a minor problem or a non issue ie bamboozled.

The video title has "anti-woke" so I don't think it's out of bounds to talk about fear of censorship.

The video title has "anti-woke" so I don't think it's out of bounds to talk about fear of censorship.

Yes I do remember the "don't talk about sex, religion, and politics" expression. Outside of religion at least in my life that was not true. People were not all reluctant to give their opinions about the anti-war protesters and hippies. All the "America Love it Or Leave" and "A good Hippie is a dead Hippie" decals in my neighborhood did not speak of reluctance to speak about politics. That said there were political things you could not say but it is much broader now. You could not say you were a communist but you could say you were a liberal or opposed to the Vietnam War without people trying to get you fired. I remember my dad telling me around the time of Kent State most of the teachers participated in an anti war protest. He and the rest of the Physical Education participated in a small counter-demonstration. Afterward, everyone ate together in the teacher's lounge. Couples used to joke all the time about canceling each other's vote. Not so much now

Guys were most definitely not afraid to talk about sex.

Yes, but the "moral panic" in question is specifically the one about "cultural Marxism" and the "Frankfurt School."

The point of the video is not to pooh-pooh whatever fears anyone might have about expressing one's political views. The point of the video is specifically to debunk the "cultural Marxism conspiracy theory."

For more about the latter, see the Wikipedia article about the Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory. See also 'Cultural Marxism' Catching On on the website of the Southern Poverty Law Center, written way back in 2003. (In the SPLC article, note also the varying uses of the term "political correctness," a term with many of the same ambiguities as "woke" today.)


The exact title of the video is "The Disturbing History Behind the 'Anti-Woke' Crackdown."

The 'Anti-Woke' CRACKDOWN is NOT your own moderate brand of "anti-wokeness," in which you object primarily to the illiberal excesses of the more fanatical leftists. The 'Anti-Woke' CRACKDOWN is what you've referred to as "right wing cancel culture."

And the 'Anti-Woke' CRACKDOWN is not motivated merely, or even primarily, by a fear of the illiberal excesses of the more fanatical leftists. Although it often uses those illiberal excesses as an excuse, its aim is not merely to curb those illiberal excesses but to roll back the entire trend towards greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ people and towards greater awareness of, and attempts to dismantle, systemic racism.

This kind of confusion is one of the reasons why I think moderates like yourself should not identify as "anti-woke." Your own self-identification as "anti-woke" seems to have confused you into believing that the video was about people like yourself, when it clearly (to me, anyway) was not.

I'll reply to other parts of your post later. Gotta run now.

EDIT: A little more about the following:


In this earlier post here, you didn't just "talk about fear of censorship" (which is indeed relevant, at least if the censorship in question is what you've called "right wing cancel culture"). But you summarized the video itself as follows: "The 62 percent of Americans who fear sharing their political views are being bamboozled, there is nothing to fear there." This seems to me to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the very topic of the video as being a dismissal of concerns about censorship.

He is saying the fear of censorship is real but manufactured and unfounded. I am saying while I agree a lot of the fear is manufactured there is a real reason to fear censorship from the left, it was not all planted in the heads of the 62 percent. Roughly equivalent to being guilty and framed. I feel he and too many progressives don't acknowledge that.

He is saying the fear of censorship is real but manufactured and unfounded I am saying while I agree a lot of the fear is manufactured there is a real reason to fear censorship from the left, it was not all planted in the heads of the 62 percent. Roughly equivalent to being guilty and framed. I feel he and too many progressives don't acknowledge that.

Where are you getting the idea that fear of censorship from the left is even a major topic of the video??? Again, it seems to me that you are fundamentally misunderstanding what the video is about.

Are you at all aware of the history of the "cultural Marxism" conspiracy theory?

There would be no crackdown without fear. "Marxism" is conflated with authoritarian suppression of speech. The use of "cultural Marxism" is meant to install fear of suppression of speech among other things.

Also, the fears promoted by the conspiracy-mongers include much more than just a fear of censorship. The main fear seems to be that the conspirators are allegedly out to "destroy America" and cause a general overall societal collapse.

That is what "and other things" meant in part. Whether it is "Cultural Marxism" or the censorship element he was basically saying "There is nothing to see there, you are being used, you are a sheep, you are a fool". My original rejoinder was people are scared because there is something to see there.