The earliest known examples of wokeness as a concept revolve around the idea of Black consciousness “waking up” to a new reality or activist framework and dates back to the early 20th century.
[In 1962], a young Black novelist named William Melvin Kelley wrote a first-person piece for the Times called “If You’re Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.” In the piece, Kelley points out that the origins of the language of then-fashionable beatnik culture — words like “cool” and “dig” — lay not within white America but with Black Americans, predominantly among Black jazz musicians.
Given that this oldest-known introduction of “woke” to the mainstream comes in a 1962 opinion piece about how white Americans are always appropriating the Black vernacular, it’s almost as though the word predicts its own fate.
That’s where things get really complicated — and where white culture’s appropriation of “woke” begins to dominate the conversation.
It seems, then, that the evolution of “woke” since 2014 is almost a direct reflection of a larger cultural evolution during the same period. Since Ferguson, the ideas and idealism behind various social justice movements have frequently been co-opted and distorted. In the case of the Black Lives Matter movement, conservatives have even reframed the protests as being a contributor to — even the cause of — the violent system they inherently oppose. This has typically been done through petty, disingenuous, exhausting semantic arguments, assisted by bad actors, bots, and trolls, and all of it has been done through and around the word “woke.
“My sense is that by ‘woke,’ what people mean is a new form of being ‘enlightened,’ repackaged for our modern era,” she said. “The Enlightenment was meant to be an era of new progressive ideas, and folks fancied themselves awakened by new ideas and knowledge.” Similarly, “people today who identify as woke also see themselves as having been awakened to a new set of ideas, value systems, and knowledge. The mode and the values are different, but the sensibility — the idea that previously you were blind, and now you can see — is the same.”
That powerful concept, however, “now has become either sort of kitschy or actually almost an epithet — as if there’s this sort of superficial, performative effort at justice,” Tisby said.
“Wokeness is costly,” he continued. “When people claim the label without enduring the difficulties that go along with truly anti-racist actions, then it’s in a vacuum.”
In other words, while many people on the right may be disenchanted with wokeness because they see it as an upgraded form of “political correctness,” many people on the left may be just as frustrated with it. That’s because claiming wokeness is often about maintaining the superficial trappings of progressive idealism without doing the real work to understand and change systems of oppression.
“The solution [I’ve] arrived at, when someone does use a term like that as an insult, [is] to ignore the insult [and] respond to what might underlie the insult ... the bigger concern. Because the polarization is only going to be defeated by transcending the binary categories of the argument.”
[link:
https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy|
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