Woke: The meaning of a tarnished label
The word “woke” used to have a meaning, said Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, but it’s become “an empty, all-purpose insult hurled by conservative propagandists, anti-vaccine fabulists,” and reactionaries who deny the existence of racism and sexism. Originally, “woke” was popularized in the African-American community, to describe waking up to the racism and bigotry that permeated this country’s history and present. “These days,” I never hear people of color, LGBTQ Americans, “or any other constituencies of the supposed ‘woke mob’ use the word.” Instead, you hear it from elites desperate to flout their “populist credentials.” Even NFL star Aaron Rodgers is now whining that “the woke mob” was persecuting him after he lied about receiving the Covid vaccine. Conservatives are master marketers, said Charles Blow in The New York Times, and they’ve made the woke brand “toxic” as a way of demeaning any “assessment of history and society that makes them uncomfortable.”
Wokeness “doesn’t have a branding problem,” said Noah Rothman in Commentary.org. “It is a defective product.” Having grown far beyond an earnest attempt to confront racial injustices, wokeness now encompasses the belief that America is irredeemably racist, men and women are not “biologically distinct”—even when it comes to the ability to give birth—and that the free expression of unfashionable opinions is an artifact of the “‘white man’s culture.’” Wokeness even extends to erasing words and replacing them with ludicrous new terms, said Bret Stephens in The New York Times. If you use “poor” rather than “oppressed,” or “Latino” instead of “Latinx,” you are guilty of a microaggression and must be silenced and punished. “This isn’t silly. It’s Orwellian.”
The solution to left-wing intolerance, however, isn’t right-wing intolerance, said David French in BariWeiss.Substack.com. More than 20 states have introduced legislation that dictates what public schools can teach about America’s racial history. A Texas state official is demanding that school libraries admit whether they have books on a list of 800 titles that might make students feel “psychological distress because of their race or sex,” including such respected works as The Confessions of Nat Turner. In my own Nashville suburb, parents sought to ban books about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights hero Ruby Bridges. Silencing ideas is un-American, whether you call yourself “woke” or “anti-woke.”