Note: This article also appears in Medium.com/@sojneighbor
There’s a confusing linguistic fog enveloping the words racist and woke and their opposites: anti-racist and anti-woke. There are arguments in print, podcasts, and even legislation that provide competing, value-loaded definitions of these terms. It’s gotten so bad that people legitimately concerned about racial relations and racial history don’t know how to characterize themselves anymore. For instance, are White people racist at heart or are they themselves the victims of racism by Black people? Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility considered this question, coming down on the side of racism running only in the direction of White prejudice leading to Black victimization. The fragility in her title refers to White people not being magnanimous in sharing their cultural privilege with other people, who they see as adversaries.
In some ways this confusion of what words mean is a natural result of a concept taking on power. In the normal course of language growth, a concept becomes lexicalized, a linguistic term meaning that it gets mapped onto a word. When this happens, the word itself embodies the power of the concept. Since power is exactly what politics is about, words with power can have connotations that differ for different political ideologies.
This is what happened with “woke,” which originally was coined by African-Americans to indicate the concept of being alert to danger. It was commonly used among Blacks in the days of Jim Crow in the warning “Stay woke!” It meant “Keep alert to the dangers around you.” These dangers loomed when a person was not staying aware of or was violating the laws of segregation. In the Jim Crow era, transgressing those laws came with consequences, at a minimum public humiliation and debasement and at worst lynching. “Stay woke,” in other words, was meant to prevent harmful actions of White people on Black people. It was a word born of racism and it was probably taught by parents to their children to educate them to the coming realities of their lives.
But then, as Aja Romano laid it out in an influential article in Vox, A history of “wokeness,” the context for “woke” changed. Jim Crow had officially been laid to rest some fifty years earlier with the passage of the Civil Rights Law, but effects of bad laws can persist in social undercurrents for long after. The indignities and dangers that “Stay woke!” originally warned against got uploaded to indignities and dangers associated with police actions against Black people. The immediate trigger was the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO at the hands of the police,
It’s not my intention here to wade into the issue of whether the out-of-proportion actions of police against Black people, especially Black men, is warranted, but the statistics do show a significant skewing in that direction. That skewing isn’t easily or convincingly accounted for by law enforcement.
In any event, the word “woke” was still around and it fit the new context. But the power that the word now assumed, put it at odds with people who did believe — mostly White people — that the police are almost always justified in their actions. The clear implication was that Blacks apprehended by police must be, had to be, in the wrong almost always. This meant that the word “woke” was not just inappropriate and slanderous, but dangerous in that it was fomenting rioting in Black communities. It’s what they believed and they began saying it out loud.
As the word continued to assume greater and greater power, as police actions against Black individuals continued, woke became a meme of the Black Lives Matter movement. The official credo of BLM, Stay Woke, appeared under that title in a TV documentary in 2016 and then in book form in 2019.
With the greater awareness of “woke,” the concept and word began spreading beyond Black communities, percolating into colloquial usage. Conservative politicians and commentators felt something had to be done to stop that spread. “Woke” had to be neutralized, trivialized, defanged so to speak. And so it began, the war to contain the damage. And the strategy for doing this was to upend the definition and making it a synonym for hate, the hate of Black people for White people.
Mainly Southern, conservative politicians came brandishing their pitchforks and the Battle of Woke ensued, a battle that is still being fought. There’s no winner yet, but I don’t think it’s looking good for “woke.” Consider Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis, one of the leading cultural warriors in this battle, who successfully pushed the legislature to pass the so-called Stop Woke Act. There’s no surer way to cripple the power of a word than by criminalizing its use.
Sides are shifting in the battle as people reassess how they feel about the word. As its power becomes weakened, some former advocates will abandon it. Others will hold fast and put up defenses and add new justifications to keep it alive and relevant. To do that, new terms are being added. So we now have “anti-woke” and “anti-racist” as antonyms. It turns out, though, that these are also contentious terms. It must drive dictionary makers crazy, not to mention textbook writers and journalists. It’s why you see air quotes around the terms so often, including those I’m using in this article.
And then the battlefield muddies, as competing forces gain and lose ground before they can agree to stop the fighting. Leave it to say that there is at this writing no cease fire on the horizon. For instance, John McWhorter, an African-American linguist at Columbia University, coined the term “woke racism” to defend the anti-woke position and wrote a book about it under that title. He likens wokeness to a kind of religion whose adherents and true believers perpetuate a tradition of demeaning and infantilizing Black people, condemning them to permanent second class status. So “woke” to him is itself a racist word and concept. Around and around we go.
McWhorter’s book predates Florida’s Stop Woke Act, so it’s unclear if he believes in the potential harm that the law will have on teaching Black racial history in Florida schools. For example, how do you teach the reality of Black people’s wariness of the police without using the word that they themselves use to describe it? Isn’t that defanging history, white-washing it? And isn’t it somehow cheating the individuals whose ancestors have actually lived that history?
The intent of the Florida law, which claims to be anti-racist, is to make education and social interactions “race neutral,” so that no one’s sensitivities are bruised in the telling of racial history. But, really, would Black, Asian, Latino, and Indigenous persons whose histories in the United States haven’t been rosy, to say the least, be bruised to hear the facts of their histories? Or would they be relieved to know the truth? Isn’t the truth supposed to set you free?
I personally don’t see how history can be equitably told by sweeping facts and truth under the rug. Any person of whatever race needs to know who they are and how they got here. And that includes White persons who need to know the truth of their ancestors too.
But words come and words go. Our dictionaries are full of words once in common use that are dusty and fussy or even dead. If “woke” doesn’t survive, we’ll still need another word to take its place, because the concept and the threats of racism aren’t going away, it looks, anytime soon.