“Woke” is a Perfectly Meaningful Word - BCB #43

We don't use it at the Bulletin, but that doesn't mean it isn't real.

If you were Very Online last week you probably saw people making fun of conservative author Bethany Mandel stumbling when asked to define “woke.” Blue commentators seized on the moment as proof that the Red use of “woke” doesn’t have any substance – that its fluidity is “a feature, not a bug” or that it's really just a dog-whistle for “hate.”

While it’s true that “woke” means radically different things to different people, it’s hardly meaningless. Saying that Red usage is incoherent or bigoted is a way to ignore criticisms of Blue excesses (whether those criticisms are warranted or not). And of course the word was created on the Blue side to describe something real.

At this point there are several good explanations of the term's origin in Black politics and the labor movement of the early 20th century. But the contemporary usage coincides with the birth of Black Lives Matter circa 2012. Kathleen Newman-Bremang explains,

From Kelley and King in the 60s, woke made its way to the 2000s when Erykah Badu re-popularized “stay woke” in her song “Master Teacher.” Black women scholars of course have been using the word in their works for decades. But once pop culture got a hold of woke, it was everywhere. There was the Jesse Williams-led BET special Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement, Childish Gambino’s "Redbone," which got the refrain stuck in all of our heads, the Hulu comedy “Woke,” and from 2016 to 2020, being woke just meant that you were aware of injustices unfolding around you and that you were paying attention. It became synonymous with Black Lives Matter and the fight against police violence but at its core, “woke” is a Black slang term, one used by Black communities to succinctly reference progressive thought and radical intention. It was a word to signify our quest for freedom.

“Woke” was one of many previously niche words that flourished in the Blue politics of the early 2010s. An analysis of New York Times headlines and Google search trends confirms that social justice language of all kinds took off around 2014. 

If you are one of the 56% of Americans who see “woke” positively, as an overdue societal reckoning with injustice, then you may perceive criticism of “wokeness” as thinly veiled bigotry. This is reminiscent of takedowns of the claim that the Civil War was fought for “states’ rights.” 

Cartoon from The Devil’s Panties by  Jennie Breeden and Obby

There’s no doubt that some people complain about “wokeness” as a cover for prejudice. But this is not the whole story. 

If you are one of the 39% of Americans who see “woke” negatively you may be using the word to criticize a broad, substantial, and not universally positive set of changes in American society. There’s definitely a Red/Blue split in perceptions of “woke,” but there’s plenty of criticism from the left.

Rio Veradonir, writing for Queer Majority, distinguishes “wokeness” from liberal social justice (LSJ) that stands for “equal treatment under the law, regardless of sex, race, sexuality, religion.” He contrasts this with critical social justice (CSJ) which he says means supporting equality of outcome for all groups, and blaming any inequality on systemic oppression. This is a dodgy simplification – any distinction like this has to be – but there’s definitely a leftist school of politics that parts ways with traditional liberalism. 

Veradonir says your understanding of “woke” depends on whether you support one, both, or neither of these two conceptions of social justice.

Rio Veradonir

Veradonir says that “CSJ embodies ‘wokeness’ in its negative and correctly pejorative sense” and argues that critical social justice weakens liberal social justice by empowering the right, who conflate the two and fight to diminish both. This backlash threatens liberal gains in other areas, such as LGBT rights.

But this isn’t a very precise description of what, exactly, is bad about the bad parts of woke. Exhausted by the gleeful skewering of Mandel’s failure to define the word, Freddie de Boer – who identifies as a Marxist – put together his own careful description of modern wokeness:

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. ... Woke is defined by several consistent attributes. Woke is

Academic - the terminology of woke politics is an academic terminology, which is unsurprising given its origins in humanities departments of elite universities. …

Immaterial - woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real. …

Structural in analysis, individual in action - the woke perspective is one that tends to see the world’s problems as structural in nature rather than the product of individual actors or actions. …

Emotionalist - “emotionalist” rather than emotional, meaning not necessarily inappropriately emotional but concerned fundamentally with emotions as the currency of politics. …

Fatalistic - woke politics tend towards extreme fatalism regarding solutions and the possibility of gradual positive political change. …

Insistent that all political questions are easy - woke people speak and act as though there are no hard political questions and no such thing as a moral dilemma. …

Enabling people who aren’t Black or Southern to say “y’all” - this one is unforgivable.

If you see “wokeness” positively this has got to be grating to read, and will doubtless feel unbalanced. Yet the dysfunction it skewers will be recognizable to many, as the unhealthy flipside of the same strain of liberatory politics. Whatever you think of it, “woke” refers to a genuine shift in American political culture that hit the mainstream around 2014, sometimes dubbed “The Great Awokening.” This is the mirror image of the radicalization of Red politics – the two sides are locked in an escalation feedback loop. 

“Of course you know what ‘woke’ means,” de Boer says. “I'd rather use any other term at this point, but can we get real please?”

Our editorial policy is to avoid the term, not because it’s meaningless but because it means too many different things. It refers to a genuine political movement, but it’s a word that starts fights rather than resolving them.