A day late on ‘woke’
Dear conservatives, it’s about justice & diversity, not the word
Did I just sleep on woke? Because it seems like the word is everywhere. And the strangest people are using it. Last month, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman from Georgia, mocked the “wokeness” at the Super Bowl, where Sheryl Lee Ralph sang “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” widely known as the Negro National Anthem.
“Chris Stapleton just sang the most beautiful national anthem at the Super Bowl,” Greene tweeted after Stapleton sang “The Star Spangled Banner” ahead of the big game. “But we could have gone without the rest of the wokeness.”
Greene apparently didn’t know that Stapleton has been a vocal supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement for years.
Months earlier, Greene’s Florida neighbor and conservative co-conspirator, Gov. Ron DeSantis, even created an acronym out of the word — Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees — to promote his racist “Stop WOKE” act, which restricts lessons and training on race and diversity in schools and in the workplace, particularly anything that discusses privilege or oppression based on race.
Comedian Bill Maher took it a step further. Rather than just use “woke” in a sentence, he came up with a definition.
In a conversation with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Maher, who hosts a show on HBO called “Real Time,” called woke “this collection of ideas that are not building on liberalism but very often undoing it.”
This from a guy who used to host a show called “Politically Incorrect.”
As in the opposite of “politically correct,” a term that conservatives used to use to mock liberal and progressive ideas — until “woke” came along. Now, woke appears to be on its way to the White House, where President Biden is poised to veto a bill that would overturn a Labor Department rule allowing managers of retirement funds to consider environmental and other factors, like climate change or social and racial equity, when picking investments.
At issue is the administration’s environmental, social, and governance — ESG — benchmarks which set standards for a company’s behavior that are used by investors to screen potential investments.
Conservative critics call the Labor Department strategy “woke economics.”
“What’s happened here is the woke and weaponized bureaucracy at the Department of Labor has come out with new regulations on retirement funds, and they want retirement funds to be invested in things that are consistent with their very liberal, left-wing agenda,” said U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, a Republican from Wyoming.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer disagreed.
“Republicans have been trying mightily to turn ESG into their newest dirty little acronym. They’re using the same tired attacks we’ve heard for a while now — that this is more wokeness,” Schumer said. “This isn’t about ideological preference, it’s about looking at the biggest picture possible for investments to minimize risk and maximize returns.”
Biden is likely to use his first presidential veto on the bill.
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders couldn’t resist a woke reference.
In her State of the Union rebuttal, she ripped into Biden, rebuking what she called, “the radical left’s America.”
“The Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day,” Sanders said.
“Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight.”
Conservatives like Sanders and DeSantis say they’re declaring war on woke. Fine. We surrender.
You can have the word. You’ve poisoned it anyway.
But everything it stands for — environmental justice, social diversity, racial equity and economic parity — is nonnegotiable.
If it’s war you want, then it’s war you get, and you had better come with something stronger than a silly little attack on a four-letter word that no one else even uses anymore.
How’s that for politically correct?