OpinionLife and styleWhat does the word ‘woke’ even mean? We asked our panelistsMalaika Jabali, Laura Kipnis, Rebecca Solnit, Bhaskar Sunkara, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zaid Jilani and Derecka PurnellAOC and James Carville just got into a spat over the word. But what does it actually mean? Tue 9 Nov 2021 10.08 ESTLast modified on Tue 9 Nov 2021 12.51 ESTMalaika Jabali: ‘Woke has become distorted beyond recognition’It’s mostly people who don’t understand the original connotation of “woke” who still say woke. They can have it. Whether we’re talking about “critical race theory” from Black scholars, “identity politics” from Black feminists, or “woke” from Black slang, terms indigenous to our way of thinking or advocating get co-opted and distorted beyond recognition in mainstream society.Woke was another way to say “conscious”: having awareness of our conditions and history in an America that lulls us with myths of a post-racial, colorblind, meritocratic society. Amid police killings in that “post-racial” society, these myths became untenable.Slang is organic. It arrives from particular conditions. There is no authoritative body of people who get to determine what terms get used and why. And just as “woke” evolved into a call to action to keep fighting, Black Americans will continue to birth terms that define what we do. And others will continue to co-opt and distort.
Malaika Jabali is the senior news and politics editor at Essence Magazine
Laura Kipnis: ‘Wokeness is about style, not substance’The term “woke” wasn’t around in 1921, when Somerset Maugham wrote his short story Rain about the downfall of a professional rebuker – the Christian missionary, Mr Davidson, whose public fulminations against sin masked less-than-upstanding private impulses. But I think Maugham was animated by similar instincts as mine when I deploy “wokeness” against contemporaries who I find too full of their own rectitude.The instinct is that something’s going on with you, the rebuker, that you can’t see in yourself; all this hectoring and exhorting is compensatory in some way. Excessive. “Woke” is a one-word hermeneutics of suspicion, shorthand for the sort of characterology Maugham was performing, dissecting a fulminator’s self-relation and self-delusions.I believe it’s more useful as applied to political style than political substance, however: I can agree with the woke on politics – I’m for social justice too! – though I may be warier about righteous vanguards and missionary zeal.Mr Davidson says things like: “If the tree is rotten it shall be cut down and cast in to the flames,” referring to the South Sea Islanders he and his wife mean to convert. “We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions,” says she, his equal in uprightness. Note the punitive rigidity underpinning the “good works”, the authoritarian streak, the self-congratulatory religiosity. Compare to your Twitter feed.
Laura Kipnis is a writer. Her new book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, will be out in February
Rebecca Solnit: ‘Woke was kidnapped and has died’Once upon a time, the past tense of “wake” left its life as a verb and became an adjective of sorts, a term for describing the quality of having awakened, especially to injustice and racism. Like other vernacular words in the English language, Woke’s youth was among young Black people but its illness and decline came after it was kidnapped by old white conservatives. They were often angry at words, especially new words, most particularly words that disturbed their rest – awakened them, you could say – and Woke was such a word.This fairy tale ends badly. Rather than kill Woke, they tried to turn him into a zombie mercenary sent out to sneer at those who were concerned about racism and other injustices. This backfired and “woke” became a marker of the not-OK Boomer, a bilious word whose meaning was more in who said it than in what it meant or mocked. In other words, Woke died. Cool young people were not sad that Woke was dead, because he was no longer their word, and mean old people were not sad because they did not know he was dead. The end.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
Bhaskar Sunkara: ‘Language on the left can be a problem’To be “woke” once meant to be alert to the continued realities of oppression, particularly the oppression faced by Black Americans. But today, its meaning has shifted. To be “woke” is to lack urgency about building the coalitions that can win over working-class people and actually redistribute money and power to the oppressed.This isn’t to say that progressives have to avoid questions of social justice to win a mythically conservative working-class, but that we need to acknowledge the reality that working-class people of all races want basically the same things: good jobs, secure housing, dependable health care, and the ability to provide for themselves and their families. Framing universal concerns with identity-focused messaging or language stolen straight from academia is a huge mistake.James Carville absolutely has a point when he talks about Democratic party messaging being too far removed from ordinary voters — including the party’s base of black and brown voters. But he’s quick to conflate unpopular rhetoric with popular demands like Medicare for All pushed by the figures he maligns like Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders.Our language on some parts of the Left is a problem. But that’s an easier problem to fix than the fact that Carville and Clintonite Democrats have lost the trust of millions of Americans with their defense of elite interest and decades of unpopular policies. Progressive have a program that can win — we now just need the right way to communicate it and new approaches to organizing people around their most pressing economic concerns.
Bhaskar Sunkara is the editor of Jacobin and a Guardian US columnist
Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘Woke is not a viable descriptor’Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right. “Woke” is not, and has not been for some time now, a viable descriptor for anyone who is critical of the many serious excesses of the left yet remains interested in reaching beyond their own echo chamber.The term has been co-opted and diluted of meaning by lazy ideologues and bad-faith actors on the right, which is a shame, since it’s more poetic and evocative than any pithy substitute I can think of.The challenge for anyone interested in something deeper than culture-war point scoring is to develop new language that is specific enough to persuade those who don’t already agree to consider the same old questions from new angles.Fairly or not, “woke” and “wokeness” now overwhelmingly signal that you’re not fundamentally interested in that rhetorical labor, and those who need the most convincing give themselves permission to stop paying attention.
Thomas Chatterton Williams is the author of Self-Portrait in Black and White. His next book, Nothing Was the Same, will be published by Knopf
Zaid Jilani: ‘You’re either with us or against us’The word woke loosely refers to a social media-fueled, leftwing political ideology that emerged in the English-speaking world in the early 2010s. The term is derived from the state of being awake to or conscious of structural inequalities in society and being hyper-aware of one’s own role in those inequalities. Someone who is woke is constantly inspecting every institution in society, looking for the presence of racism, sexism, and other forms of pervasive prejudice.What separates someone who is woke from someone who is merely progressive is not only this vigilance and awareness but a fervent belief that everyone must be enlisted into their social causes at all times and that the end justifies the means when battling injustice.Unlike traditional liberals, woke Americans place very little stake in value-neutral norms like freedom of speech and non-discrimination. As the antiracist activist Ibram Kendi says, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Kendi also informs us that you can only be racist or anti-racist, there is no middle ground, echoing former president George W Bush’s instruction that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”.
Zaid Jilani is a journalist who has worked for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, the Intercept and the Center for American Progress
Derecka Purnell: ‘You have to wake people up – then you get action’From street corners to kitchen tables, friends and I have laughed and shouted each other down about the state of Black America. We argue about whether our people are “asleep” – unaware of, uninterested in, unconcerned with the violence that white people inflict upon us. Such violence can be found in demeaning interpersonal interactions with individual white people, and in the structural white supremacist violence in our housing, hospitals, jobs and schools.If “sleep” prevents us from collectively resisting this savagery, then one must remember Malcolm X’s message: “The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action.”Political expressions derived from Black activism, including “stay woke”, “Hotep”, “Black Lives Matter”, have strange careers. Like our heroes, they are lauded, branded, dehistoricized, co-opted and caricatured. For example, the Democratic strategist James Carville bastardizes “wokeness” as a “stupid”, inflexible commitment to ideas that seek to drastically improve society. His usage robs the term of its value to make us more politically aware and active on our terms. Why? James Baldwin explains that “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost, almost all of the time.” This rage threatens the status quo, what Carville and other wealthy, politically powerful people fight to protect.Ironically, Carville’s condemnation is exactly why Black people continue to tell each other to stay woke: elite white actors and institutions benefit from exploiting Black votes, activism and culture while telling us to bury our grievances about their violence. It’s how the Democratic party scribbles “Black Lives Matter” on banners for their conventions yet give more money to the police who kill Black people quickly.I suspect that, like his rightwing counterparts who are antagonistic to “critical race theory” and “white privilege”, Carville refuses to learn why Black people historically use wokeness to inspire our activism.I suggest he starts with Langston Hughes: “Negroes Sweet and docile, Meek, humble, and kind. Beware the day They change their minds!” Or Malcolm X: “… there will come a time when black people wake up and become intellectually independent enough to think for themselves … this type of thinking also brings an end to the brutality inflicted upon black people by white people and it is the only thing that will bring an end to it. No federal court, state court, or city court will.”
Derecka Purnell is a Guardian US columnist and the author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom
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