To Be Among the Woke
One of the early examples of the term “stay woke” appears at the end of a recording of Huddie Leadbetter, better known as Lead Belly, singing his 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys” and explaining his advice to “all colored people”. The Scottsboro Boys were nine black Alabama youth, between 12 and 18, who were framed for raping 2 white women. They were convicted by an all-White jury and forced to serve several years in prison, even after the women had recanted their accusations. It’s a sad story like many sad stories in the troubling history of race in America, but in states that have recently passed anti-woke laws, it’s not a story that can be told in many classrooms of American teenagers. Singing of Scottsboro, Lead Belly warns, “Be a little careful when they go through there. Best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
The cautionary “stay woke” from African American vernacular traveled through the Civil Rights Movement and on into the Black Lives Matter Movement until the Right cleverly appropriated the term “woke,” repurposing the cautionary expression into a derogatory dismissive rebuke. Even more elastic than its predecessor “political correctness,” “woke” has become the Right’s ubiquitous term to apply to the ideas, people, books, and media they scorn, they fear, or they simply seek to dismiss.
Invoking the term “woke” has allowed states like Florida to outlaw other terms from school curricula, words like “diversity,” “equity,” inclusion,” “gay,” “homosexual,” “same-sex,” “Trans,” “LGBTQ,” “race,” “racism,” discrimination,” and now, even “period,” when referring to a girl’s menstrual cycle. In this name-calling decade in which we live, the Right call those “Woke” who value multiculturalism, who favor more governmental efforts to achieve social justice, and who regard the notion of meritocracy in America as a work in progress. The so-called Woke freely acknowledge that one’s race or gender may affect one’s treatment in the workplace, in the justice system, in acquiring housing, in obtaining healthcare, in shopping at the Mall, in driving, and even in knocking on the wrong door.
The anti-woke movement, like the MAGA movement, harbors a nostalgia for a time, maybe in the post-WWII years of the 1950’s, when Americans were more united or their differences more suppressed and closeted, a time when gender roles were more clearly defined, when America was a more Christian nation and its citizens, according to the Right, more patriotic.
Skeptical of unfettered, free-market capitalism and the pure machine of wealth development, the Woke want the corporations and industries they invest in and work for to consider the secondary and tertiary effects of their actions. How, they ask, can we make any progress in combating a galloping climate crisis if corporations, together with state and federal governments, don’t pitch in? The only problem is that the anti-woke conservatives often deny climate change or want government to get out of the way and let corporations come up with their profit-making, pollution-eating, plastic-vacuuming, and coal-capturing devises that will, as if by corporate magic, ensure the habitability of our planet not just for us but for the flora and fauna we need to survive. So we wait.
Wrenching the term “woke” from its cautionary meaning to beware of racism and wielding it to demean not just African Americans but all who call themselves Democrats, is an attempt at cultural dominance by the Right. One need not look too far, though, to spot the fear boiling behind the bluster, the fear of an America in transition: from a majority white nation to a multi-racial one and from a producing/manufacturing nation to a consuming one. In this America in transition, gender is no longer a fixed binary, if it really ever was; women and members of minorities are assuming leadership roles in business, government, even in the military; migrants, fleeing insecurity in their own lands, are trekking to America’s southern border in ever-increasing numbers; and the pandemic, though weakened, is not extinguished. The anxiety that comes with change might be assuaged were we not so polarized and were there not such powerful forces committed to deepening rather than mending our divisions. Until some of the acrimony and finger-pointing stops, I am proud to be among The Woke. What’s the alternative? The deadening delusion of the sleepwalkers? And if you believe the legend, that the soul leaves the body of the sleepwalker, I think it best to “stay woke.”