How many times this week have you read, or heard, the word ‘woke?’ So often and so liberally applied, in so many contexts and so many settings, it is, by stealth it appears, impacting every society in so many ways. As a pure philosophy, woke, or wokeness should be appreciated, even embraced, however, the executive machine, the ‘movement,’ appears to be taking much of what has been hard fought and hard won in the past, and cast it all aside, good and bad, the baby with the bath water!
“Wake up Africa,” wrote Marcus Garvey in 1923, urging the freedom of Africa, then folk singer, Hud Ledbetter sang of needing to “stay woke, and keep your eyes open.” Novelist William Melvin Kelley, wrote, “If you are woke you dig it,” playwright Barry Beckham wrote, “I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr Garvey (yes, the same Marcus Garvey) done woke me up, I’m gonna stay woke,” while soul artist Erykah Badu tweeted, “Truth requires no belief, stay woke.”
It has links to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement which was enraged by the deaths, in 2012, of Trayvon Williams in Florida, in 2014, of Michael Brown Jnr, and then last year, of George Floyd Jnr, all at the hands of over-zealous police, the latter touching off riots such as America had not seen in decades. BLM divided a nation, and offered an opportunity through its hashtag, #staywoke, to a new wave of discontent, which is now labelled ‘woke.’
Though defined, for the first time as an adjective, in the Oxford Dictionary in 2017 as, “well-informed, up-to-date.” It is now defined as, “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.” That is an absolutely jaw-dropping etymological evolution within four short years, evolving from passive to aggressive in the blink of an eye. Though looking at the impact of woke-ness on our lives, it is a fair description of how far woke has come, from the obtuse, obscure, narrative use of a word we all know as the past participle of ‘wake,’ to something that could have been a resilient, sustainable, movement for social change, liberation and acceptance, but instead appears to have morphed into a much more sinister, corrupted, vision of the future.
‘Woke,’ an awakening, was, and is needed, but its many elements cry out for informed discussion and debate, otherwise we are in danger of being bitten by the very same dystopian beast it seeks to protect us from. Isaac Asimov was of the opinion that the greatest danger to society is the erosion of intellect, “nurtured by the false notion that one man’s ignorance and another’s knowledge are equal.” Yet ignorance in this age is a choice, a lazy choice, the refuge of miserable, bitter, lost souls, because it is the denial of an opportunity, the rejection of society, and the ultimate in self-ness.
George Orwell, wrote, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history,” and that, I fear, is the danger of the woke culture, as it clearly advocates resistance to bigotry, by creating its own, rejecting labels by creating its own, denying difference, and celebration of culture and tradition, in favour of gender. It is virtue-signaling at its worst, and in its indecent haste, its gratuitous appetite for acceptance, woke has, in its naivety, become a tool for political expediency, not social awareness. It arrived at a time of chaos and uncertainty, in a pandemic vacuum, and has been adopted by academia and the intellectual hierarchy as a never-to-be-missed opportunity, a crusade, and may be in the end, a victim of its own success. Woke speaks so eloquently that we don’t know if we are being, as the ancient Russian proverb says, “slapped with the truth, or kissed with a lie.” What do you think?
