Woke Is a Term Stolen by Radicals. We’re Stealing It Back.
“This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles. We’re stealing it back.” (Bono before U2 rips into Helter Skelter)
Memes have replaced muskets as the weapon of choice in America’s modern day Civil War. In our war of words, some punches land harder than others.
Offensive words inflict pain from two ends of a spectrum. On one end is ignorance, when people unwittingly leave a trail of destruction with unintentional offenses. On the other end is hatred, from those who weaponize words — deliberately choosing the ones they know cut the deepest.
In today’s American political battlefield, trolls hurl insults from both sides.
Libtard! Racist! Socialist! Selfish! Elitist! Nut job! Woke!
Woke as a slur
The term woke originates from Black America, traced back to blues singer Huddie Ledbetter’s 1938 song Scottsboro Boys: “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.” The term was coined to encourage a well-informed state of awareness as an antidote to systemic oppression, and became popularized during the Black Lives Matter movement as a rallying cry to keep vigilance levels high: Stay woke.
But woke has since been appropriated and its meaning got hijacked as it became a slur. A modern day version of politically correct, calling someone woke is a one-syllable bomb that instantly renders an adversary so overly progressive as to be completely disregarded. Woke, a short cut for overzealous “virtue signaling,” carries implications of having become radicalized. From which there’s no easy comeback.
But, what does it actually mean to be woke?
Chatting over a campfire with mutual friends, my wife and I recently compared notes with a worldly Swiss couple who relayed incredulous reports from their kids in college in the States. “The campuses there are so woke it’s crazy! It’s political correctness gone mad!”
Democrats abroad, and also with a son in college in the US, we echoed their sentiment and agreed it feels like too much. But, I offered, aren’t campuses where young adults are meant to push and experiment with new social and cultural norms, moving the boundaries from where we once knew them?
And, as those boundaries get tested and adjusted, do they sometimes get moved too far, too fast? Absolutely. For example, when wokeness itself becomes used as a weapon to silence others and snuff out ideas before they’ve even had a chance to breathe, it has gone too far. Still, I suggested, don’t we need pioneers who challenge status quo terminology, and establish new norms on the way we describe our ever-evolving ideas?
Other fellow empty nesters we know unanimously agree that our kids’ generation is the most naturally inclusive generation the world has ever seen. Their utter lack of judgment on topics like gender identity and sexual preference fluidity is dazzling. The generation acts unphased by these things because they genuinely are.
When my own boundaries inadvertently reveal themselves as out of date, an eye-roll and a pointed “OK, boomer” from my 16 year-old puts this Gen-Xer right back in his place.
Understandably, as social and cultural norms evolve, the vocabulary we use naturally lags behind and is constantly out of step. New terms get introduced, tried on for size, and either stick or get discarded. You can ask zhem all about it.
Eventually, even the slowest to evolve upgrade their dictionary, once universal taboos reach critical mass and become mainstream.
Overcoming ignorance
In the meantime, though, a lot of unintended damage gets inflicted from sheer ignorance along the way. We’ve all been there. When I was a kid in the ‘70s, I got schooled on the playground that it wasn’t kosher to refer to the other Jewish kids as Jews. Good to know!
In the late ’80s, as a community service initiative during college, I executed a fancy high-tech fundraising campaign, featuring WordStar, a mail-merge, and a new-fangled laser printer, to solicit donations on behalf of local charity named the “Association for Retarted Citizens.” I sent personalized form letters to 326 local businesses across three counties across Durham, North Carolina— consistently and reliably misspelling the word ‘retarded’ no less than seven times throughout the pitch as I plead their case. It is memorable to this day the moment I eagerly opened the envelope of the first returned letter, hoping for a donation check, and instead got a spell check. Inside was my original letter, with seven angry red pen strokes circling each offense. In the ‘80s, the clumsy misspelling was itself the offense part. Looking back now, the entire thing is a cringy mess that demonstrates how far language norms evolve over time.
Those frat bros had a lot of fun ribbing me for that blunder. And when I called them that, they never failed to chide me: “You don’t call your country club a cunt, so don’t call your fraternity a frat.” Crass, right? The point is that even privileged, wealthy, educated, white punks in the ’80s weren’t immune to feeling being butthurt in the face of a “harmless” sleight.
How can woke be taken seriously as a slur?
Offensive word choices happen both intentionally (hatred) and unintentionally (ignorance). The collateral damage from ignorance is an excusable yet unnecessary unforced error. Ignorance is only bliss because of the lack of awareness of the pain one has caused. From simply not knowing. Being asleep. Staying un-woke.
If staying woke then, is about being enlightened and evolved, how can woke be taken seriously as a slur? I mean, who thinks it’s better to be un-woke when the worse alternative is being a hater?
Woke became a slur when wokeness went too far.
Where wokeness goes wrong is when it is used as a weapon against haters, rather than it’s more effective use in nudging those who benefit from steering once in a while (ala “OK, boomer”). Woke police radicals citing haters for infractions inevitably leads to ugly standoffs with two sets of snowflakes ineffectively hurling insults at each other (or worse).
Woke radicals go too far when they stifle open dialog and silence opposing views on the basis of being offensive and morally reprehensible — for example in 2017 when UC Berkeley flat-out prohibited conservative speakers Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter and David Horowitz from speaking on its campus in succumbing to an outraged mob (later reversed by a court ruling), or as Netflix employees pressure its employer to remove Dave Chappelle’s The Closer from its lineup for the provocative and offensive transphobic themes in his performance art.
But silencing others in the name of wokeness is what justifiably fuels cries of “cancel culture!” by the right, even if they deny they invented cancel culture in the first place when Colin Kaepernick had the gumption to take a knee to educate the world.
All of this drama gives staying woke a bad name.
Weaponizing wokeness by the radical left is as reprehensible as haters being deliberately offensive on the radical right. Both sides’ radicals have hijacked the word, and it’s time to take it back.
Hey red team: Calling someone woke is not owning the libs, even if it is effective in shutting them down. Instead, you’ve just identified yourself as either being un-woke at best (slow to evolve) or a hater at worst (deliberately offensive). Call off your dogs and stand down before anyone embarrasses themselves further.
Hey blue team: The “woke police” are not also judge and jury and need reigning in. Defund the police? More like defund the woke police: put the safety on, and take your twitchy finger off the trigger. It’s not helping. Give others their own chance to be heard and be understood without censorship, even if it means being occasionally offended along the way.
Woke is not a slur.
True to its origins, staying woke is about overcoming ignorance and becoming enlightened. In today’s context, woke represents narrowing the gap between society’s fast evolving cultural norms and the lagging vocabulary we use to describe them.
Staying woke is a state of higher awareness, elevated empathy, and keeping current with the times — to elimate unnecessary pain inflicted on ourselves and each other.
Sounds like a pretty good state to me. So, go ahead and call me woke. (Just don’t call me a boomer, OK?)
“Woke is a term stolen by radicals. We’re stealing it back.”
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Brad Porteus likes to take too long to make a point, with tangents along the way. There is plenty more where that came from — both here on Medium and the complete set on porteus.com.
