Woke

Words shift meaning. Some, like Methodist and queer, start as slurs and later get adopted by the groups they concern. Some, such as silly, sink from positive to pejorative. By the time I heard woke as an adjective within the past decade, its senses had expanded from neutral to cautionary, admiring, mistakenly-would-be supportive, or insulting, depending on who’s saying it and why.

Woke has long been a literal form of awake in African American vernacular. By the 1930s, stay woke was also a metaphor for remaining vigilant and alert. Singer-songwriter Lead Belly used the term after recording a song about the Scottsboro Boys, a group of Black teens wrongly convicted of raping white women. You’ve got to be a little careful when you go down South, he told a radio interviewer. “Stay woke. Keep your eyes open.”

Staying woke broadened to mean challenging systems of racial injustice. In 1940, after Black coal miners in West Virginia went on strike for pay equal to that of whites, a Black union leader said, “We were asleep. But we will stay woke from now on.” Not until decades later did I encounter woke in mainstream media. It burst into public awareness with the Black Lives Matter movement after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. Merriam-Webster added woke to its dictionary in 2017 as U.S. slang for “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).”

Perhaps inevitably, some whites coopted woke for their own purposes, twisting its connotations in the process. Opponents may use it to attack progressive ideas in general or to issue a racist dog whistle. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said, “We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die.” Aspiring allies may mistakenly appropriate this adjective born of specifically Black experience. As a white woman, I have never felt truly threatened when pulling out my cell phone or stopped for speeding. When police questioned my kids for riding bikes after curfew, I never feared they wouldn’t come home alive. I’ll strive to honor woke but I’ll never claim it for myself.

​Images: (left) singer-songwriter Lead Belly; (right) then-Congresswoman Marcia Fudge of Ohio, 2018.