activism, slang and politics collide, and a slur goes viral
UK feature-writer Sirin Kale took to Twitter last week to voice a complaint heard often recently, particularly from the ‘left’ and ‘centre-left’: ‘I would really like it if people stopped using “anti-woke” and “woke” as lazy journalistic descriptors when they can’t be bothered to actually spell out what a person’s views are. Say what they believe and the reader can decide for ourselves what we think of it.’ In the ensuing conversation @yoyomorena was blunt: ‘The sooner we can understand ‘woke’ as the anti-black, racist code it has become, the sooner we can get back to normal lives.’ Yesterday, on the same platform, a query by Tom Whyman pointed up the way a once-proud self-ascription by the socially aware (dating from an exhortation by blues singer Leadbelly in 1938 to ‘stay woke…keep your eyes open’) had fully transited to become the go-to pejorative for conservative journalists and politicians, fighting back, as they see it, against an array of enemies: ‘Is it me or have the right wing press in the past few weeks started using the word ‘woke’ as if it refers to an organised political tendency, as opposed to just a loosely arranged constellation of things they don’t like?’ As if to furnish instant corroboration a Telegraph headline of the same date announced…
Citizens advice service’ launches to help employees in woke workplaces
The organisation will provide help to ‘casualties of the culture wars’
London journalist Kate Ng had asked me about the same red-flag-buzzword last week and her subsequent piece in the Independent is here…
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/woke-meaning-word-history-b1790787.html
As it has morphed from positive to negative in its connotations, (by 2019 Urban Dictionary‘s top definitions were emphatically negative: ‘The act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue’ and ‘Deluded or fake awareness’) woke has spawned elaborations along the way: woke-washing, by analogy with whitewashing and greenwashing, was coined to describe brands attempting to use, or at least proclaim, a concern for social justice as a marketing strategy; wokerati, woke-worthies and woke warriors dismiss critics of white privilege and social inequality, while Wokeahontas was invented in the US to define and mock a female enthusiast for native American rights.
The question that Kate and I had discussed briefly has not, I think, been raised before: must the victims of sneering and jeering by powerful opponents abandon their identity label, attempt somehow to reclaim it, or find a substitute for it? I canvassed an assortment of people, most of them it must be said not identifying as conservatives, on possible candidates to replace ‘woke’. Nobody suggested the words that progressives of my own generation once embraced; ‘radical’ or ‘liberationist’, but this is no surprise. The first now sounds ambiguous while the second was appropriated by neocons and conservatives in the US more than a decade ago. No real workable favourites emerged and no consensus was reached, but the formulations we considered are gathered in this wordcloud for what it’s worth…
An earlier article in the Guardian traces in some detail the trajectory that ‘woke’ has undergone, with useful comments on the controversies accompanying its mutation…
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/21/how-woke-became-the-word-of-our-era
In March, after two months of articles in the conservative press excoriating the ‘woke agenda’ and its followers, came news, via the Sun, that steps were being taken to curb the influence of leftwing comedy…
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/14311062/bbc-tim-davie-axes-nish-kumar-the-mash-report/
In April Clyde McGrady wrote in The Washington Post about the parallel history of ‘cancel’, conservative America’s scare-word of choice…
And in the Guardian Evan Smith suggested that the UK right’s ‘war on woke’ is nothing new…
In late April, I came across a Twitter comment by Joshua Adams which sets out perceptively and pithily the links between the word’s transitions and Black responses to it…
JOSHUA@JournoJoshua Hope folks realize that a part of the reason the Right pounced on “woke” and now use it as a meaningless catch-all pejorative is because folks on the Left stripped it from its context in the Black experience, and made it mean “excessive social awareness.” It didn’t mean that.
Joshua more recently posted longer articles on the subject…
https://journojoshua.medium.com/the-right-isnt-the-only-reactionary-about-wokeness-3c296d467954
Just over one year on, and none too soon I feel, Guardian columnist Nesrine Malik wrote on the failure of progressives to rally, and the role of the Labour ‘Opposition’ in this…
In May Kate Eagles quoted me in a (rightly) partial piece for Yahoo News…
In November 2022 SydesJokes posted …
But simultaneously Spiked magazine printed a rare view of language appropriation from a rightwing viewpoint…
In January 2023 New Yorker editor David Remnick interviewed me for the magazine’s Radio Hour feature. A short sequence from our conversation about the ongoing significance of ‘woke’ is here…
In March 2023 I contributed to Matthew Crowley‘s wide-ranging and instructive review of the term, published in the US by PolitiFact…
https://www.politifact.com/article/2023/mar/07/what-does-it-mean-to-be-woke/
In the same month Freddie de Boer posted an interesting commentary coming, somewhat unusually, from a centrist US perspective…
In September 2023 I spoke to Christian Caurla for a DW News piece, posted on social media platforms…
From February 2024 an ecclesiastical perspective…
tony thorne 