I just Woke up

For several years now, I kept hearing this word in political conversation that was meant to express an ideology of social awareness, particularly in affairs of racism and justice.

That's what it was to be "woke." At first, I thought it was a misuse of the past tense and past participle of wake, and yet, in its urban dictionary context, it somehow made sense.

It certainly did in the Black community, where the colloquial "woke" originated as far back as the 1930s, if not earlier. Back then, it meant to be aware of your surroundings, especially while wandering in a racially dangerous and unjustly biased world. It even showed up in a protest song, "Scottsboro Boys", by Lead Belly (He sings "Stay woke" at the end of the song).

The word gained resurrected credence (or "cred") with the Black Lives Matter movement, especially after the deadly police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. "Woke" was added to the BLM rhetoric after the fatal police shootings of Eric Gardner and Tamir Rice and others and soon, its meaning came to encompass gender equality, gender identity, reproductive rights and voting rights, among a host of other social issues.

Somewhere along the way, the word "woke" was co-opted by the Republican Party as a pejorative and as a way for them to "own the libs", which seems to define the very existence of the party these days since it has no other serious platform to explain itself.

Ironic, isn't it, that a party committed to restricting voting rights and healthcare issues (to the point where maternal mortality is actually rising in a country that styles itself as advanced) should commandeer a word that originated in the Black community? Because of the GOP cynicism, we now have illogical absurdities like college boards and school boards banning books, of all things. Critical Race Theory (which is a theory and discussed only in graduate college courses) and the 1619 Project can no longer be subject material, by law, in some schools. Once again, whites have found a way to subjugate African-Americans, only now it's 2023.

Actually, I'm not sure anybody really knows what woke means, much less Republicans. It just might mean anything you want it to mean. I guess if you shout "woke" often enough, people might think you're on to something.

If being woke means to be socially aware, then why is the GOP so intent on being asleep? All I hear coming out of the mouths of Republican politicians like Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, et al, is woke, woke woke. It's a call to move our society backwards, to a time we can no longer be.

They've misused the word to mean something else and it's become a political rallying point for the GOP. If anything, each time they scream woke, or to become anti-woke, it tells me how uniformed they truly are. If I am woke, then I wear the word as a badge of honor. We all should if being woke means moving social justice forward. We all should if it means not being afraid of new ideas and perspectives.

We all should if it means accepting people into our circles who are not like us. In my world, that is being woke, and it's not wrong.