In Defense of ‘Woke’

It was quaint, really. That feeling I had in the months after the 2016 presidential election, where I convinced myself I’d do everything possible in the next four years to prevent Donald Trump from becoming normalized.

It was our duty to never stop shouting about his abnormalities, and I believed that this conscientiousness had an unlimited bandwidth. (How could it not?) I’d be obstinate and cantankerous. I’d be unflinching. I’d be resolute. The fate of the republic depended on it.

But there I was on a lazy Saturday three years later, sitting in my living room and choosing to binge watch “Queen Sugar" instead of recaps of the impeachment inquiry. If I hadn’t been doing that, I would have browsed Zillow to scout shelving space ideas for open concept kitchens. Or maybe I would have done a search for the what’s in the chorizo that Steel Cactus uses in its tacos.

Either way, while my disdain for the president and his supporters remains, my capacity for hyper-consciousness has faded. I don’t possess the stamina for the sort of vigilance necessary to stay cognizant of everything he’s doing, nor do I wish to. Someone has to do it, though, but I’m just not woke enough.

Drat, there’s that word: “woke.” Rarely has a colloquialism had as many mutations. When I was in college in the late 1990s, “conscious” was the term du jour, a cultural phenomenon reflected in zeitgeist-molding musicians (Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, the Roots), movies (“Love Jones,” “Slam”) and TV shows (“Def Poetry Jam”). “Militant” was a variant of it — conscious, but also ready to throw hands for the cause.

Woke, however, described a racial awareness and cynicism so extra that it bordered on parody; where you’re so awake that your “third eye” saw things that aren’t there. The movies “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” and “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” satirized this concept. Each film’s most racially conscious character was either married to a white woman or willing to trample a sista to get to one. Also, woke was used exclusively by black people to refer to other black people. It was our word, because only we were mindful enough to recognize when that pro-blackness was a performance.

As the aughts approached, the term started to lose its racial connotation, becoming instead a catchall for any sort of progressive behavior. You were woke if you recycled, or maybe just retweeted an infographic on the virtues of recycling. White people were deemed woke. Some, painfully, even took it upon themselves to be the arbiters of wokeness.

It was no coincidence that this happened alongside Barack Obama’s political ascent. Being liberal — and communicating exactly how radical you wanted people to believe you were — had cultural benefits. For the first time in my lifetime, you could earn progressive social capital by merely supporting the commander in chief. “I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could” wasn’t just the most effective joke in the movie “Get Out.” It was the bumper sticker real-life (white) progressives stuck to their foreheads.

And now? Well, woke floats in the linguistic purgatory of terms coined by us that can no longer be said unironically, levitating next to “swag” and “twerk” in the “Words Ruined by White People” ether. What was a compliment just a few years ago has become, at best, an eye roll. If a stranger at a dinner party is introduced — or introduces himself — as woke, I know that I’ll need some whiskey before talking to him.

Mostly, though, it’s used as a pejorative. Bill Maher seems to consider wokeness his personal albatross as he’s apparently blind to the paradox of getting paid likely millions of dollars a year to complain about what he believes he’s no longer allowed to say. Progressives have to be careful not to be so woke that we’ll scare moderates into voting for Donald Trump, warn (usually white male) columnists in every major American newspaper.

When the beloved and iconic Deadspin was effectively killed this fall, haters crawled out of the internet’s crevices, cheering the demise of a marriage of sports and wokeness they considered sacrilegious. Even Mr. Obama recently chided wokeness as “not activism,” which, well, is exactly what I’d expect him to say about it now.

Admittedly, woke’s current iteration has been earned. It became a thing you can accessorize like a hoodie. But to be woke, essentially, is to recognize and reject the damage power inflicts on the most vulnerable. And when the president’s only real purpose is to maintain the status of whiteness, he and his supporters have clear incentives for the rest of us to stay asleep.

Today, however, when I turn on the news and attempt to slog through the impeachment inquiry, I’m reminded of some of the inane conspiracy theories my wokest college classmates considered gospel. There was the Tommy Hilfiger one, where we shouldn’t buy his clothes because he went on Oprah and expressed disgust at black people wearing them. There was the Timberland one, where we should stop buying those boots because the emblem (a tree) represented lynchings.

These conspiracies could be debunked with superficial research. (Tommy Hilfiger hadn’t even appeared on Oprah’s show before that rumor circulated, the Timberland rumor apparently came from a poem wrongly attributed to Maya Angelou.) But even as we’d roll our eyes at them for believing these untruths, we knew they weren’t wrong about America. They just had bad information.

Because, well, the Tuskegee experiment did happen. Cointelpro did happen. Redlining did happen. Gerrymandering is happening. Black people were targeted for subprime lending. We are arrested and incarcerated today at wildly disproportionate rates. While the perpetually woke are dismissed, they’re also the canaries in our coal mines, alerting us to dangers we might be too drowsy to see.

Also, while the people who can genuinely be considered woke are increasingly less inclined to use that word to describe themselves, perhaps we’re witnessing it undergo another shift. Like “virtue signaling” and “social justice warrior,” woke now says more about the politics of the speaker than it does about the object. But maybe two years from now the word will change again.

Today, however, the president of the United States is possibly involved in a multinational scheme to suppress votes, discredit rivals and threaten whistle-blowers. This fever dream feels like the premise of a John Grisham novel that his editor rejected for being too absurd. But I am bored out of my mind with the impeachment proceedings and would rather watch my shower faucet drip. Or perhaps just go to bed early and catch up on some sleep.

And when I find myself giving the insufferably woke a hard time, I remember: Someone has to stay awake.

Damon Young (@DamonYoungVSB) is the author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker” and a founder of VerySmartBrothas.

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