The NY Times has an opinion piece up today entitled In Defense of ‘Woke’ (on the web front page it reads “Stop Giving The ‘Woke’ A Hard Time) by Damon Young, the author of “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker.†The subhead even reads “Donald Trump and his supporters want the rest of us to stay asleep.” I was expecting a bunch of whiny-assed Woke stuff. What I didn’t anticipate was blatant racism. Not raaaaacism, but racism.
After several paragraphs of whiny, in which his “disdain for the president and his supporters remains, my capacity for hyper-consciousness has faded”, we find out that Woke is a black term
Drat, there’s that word: “woke.†Rarely has a colloquialism had as many mutations. When I was in college in the late 1990s, “conscious†was the term du jour, a cultural phenomenon reflected in zeitgeist-molding musicians (Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, the Roots), movies (“Love Jones,†“Slamâ€) and TV shows (“Def Poetry Jamâ€). “Militant†was a variant of it — conscious, but also ready to throw hands for the cause.
Woke, however, described a racial awareness and cynicism so extra that it bordered on parody; where you’re so awake that your “third eye†saw things that aren’t there. The movies “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka†and “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood†satirized this concept. Each film’s most racially conscious character was either married to a white woman or willing to trample a sista to get to one. Also, woke was used exclusively by black people to refer to other black people. It was our word, because only we were mindful enough to recognize when that pro-blackness was a performance.
But, hey, they white people started using the term!
It was no coincidence that this happened alongside Barack Obama’s political ascent. Being liberal — and communicating exactly how radical you wanted people to believe you were — had cultural benefits. For the first time in my lifetime, you could earn progressive social capital by merely just supporting the commander in chief. “I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could†wasn’t just the most effective joke in the movie “Get Out.†It was the bumper sticker real-life (white) progressives stuck to their foreheads.
And now? Well, woke floats in the linguistic purgatory of terms coined by us that can no longer be said unironically, levitating next to “swag†and “twerk†in the “Words Ruined by White People†ether. What was a compliment just a few years ago has become, at best, an eye roll. If a stranger at a dinner party is introduced — or introduces himself — as woke, I know that I’ll need some whiskey before talking to him.
First, it’s funny that this race baiter is slamming his Progressive, Democratic Party voting brethren. But, to him, they aren’t really his brothers, because they’re white. His book very much seems race baiting, denigrates anyone not black, but, especially white people, as does the website he helped cofound, VerySmartBrothas.com, which now is part of The Root, very much a black supremacist website.
Second, imagine the NY Times allowing a white person to write the phrase “Words Ruined By Black People.” You’re having a hard time imagining that happening, eh?
Bonus points for understanding the graphic.
So, a white person claiming to be “woke” is guilty of cultural appropriation?