Many conservatives have defined colleges as ‘woke.’ What do they mean?
You’ve heard and read the word. Maybe this is the third time you’ve seen it today — on your social-media feed, in new state legislation, in a video clip from the White House press corps, or on The Chronicle’s website.
Woke.
It’s seemingly everywhere, but what does it mean, and where did it come from?
The exact origins of “woke” are hard to pin down, but it is a shortening of the phrase, “stay woke,” said Marisa Parham, a professor of English and digital studies, director of the African American digital and experimental humanities initiative, and associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland at College Park.
During an interview about his 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” the blues musician Lead Belly explained that he wrote the tune after nine Black teenagers and young men — known as the Scottsboro Boys — were accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. The ensuing court cases struggled with racism and the right to a fair trial. In an interview Lead Belly said writing the song was a way to tell other Black people to be careful when they went South and to “stay woke. Keep your eyes open.”
In blues tradition, many artists wrote about their daily lives or situations discussed among peers, Parham said. Lead Belly warned Black listeners about the dangers of traveling to the Jim Crow South when he sang about the Scottsboro Boys. Though his music was originally largely listened to by Black people, musicians like Lead Belly helped move the phrase from folk culture to pop culture, she said.
In American culture, there’s an impulse to behave as if nothing is wrong, she said. The phrase “stay woke” is a way of telling someone in a covert way that you’re taking something seriously because someone else could be potentially policing or watching you.
Later in the 20th century, “woke” rode the wave of another form of pop culture, film. Spike Lee’s movies Do the Right Thing and School Daze both use the phrase “wake up.” Characters who say it want others to notice the developing high-tension situations. Lee used his films to remind Black people that there are always larger political issues going on and to “put aside interpersonal stuff between Black people (like rivalries and jealousy), and keep your eye on the bigger picture,” Parham wrote in an email.
Lee also used the phrase to reference the past, she said. It was a way of openly declaring that you’re being policed.
“So much of Black life, going back to the blues example, a very important mechanism of survival is understanding when you’re being surveilled while not acknowledging it or looking like you’re acknowledging it,” Parham said.
‘We’re all using the same language’
Childish Gambino’s song “Redbone” from his 2016 album Awaken My Love! launched the phrase “stay woke” into today’s lexicon. The song repeats the phrase in the chorus and was played during the opening credits of Jordan Peele’s 2017 horror film Get Out.
Peele’s movie is a racial commentary packaged as a horror film. The phrase “stay woke” soon became associated with a pop-culture archetype — white characters in the movie who emphasized that they were progressive and not racist, said A.D. Carson, an assistant professor of hip-hop and the global south at the University of Virginia.
Today, “woke” is like “trap,” a word that is taken from the Black vernacular and divorced from its original meaning when adopted by the wider culture, Carson said.
Now there’s the political element. When words are separated from their original definitions and context, they become vessels for the user’s ideas or definitions, he said. Today woke can mean anything. Someone who recycles or specifies what pronouns they go by can be woke. Someone who reads a book on antiracism may be called woke. A picture book that teaches children about a progressive cause is a woke children’s book.
During the civil-rights movement, in the ’60s and ’70s, activist groups developed new language to legally describe and define their rights, Parham said. Opponents of establishing rights for communities of color, women, and LGBT people later used the new terms to push back against activists. For example, in the early women’s-rights movements, activists who wanted women to be able to vote called themselves “women’s suffragists,” and those opposed to the cause called themselves anti-suffragists.
Today, those who oppose policies or structures that, among other things, teach structural racism in classrooms, programs that make an effort to retain students of color, and affirmative-action policies may call themselves anti-woke or against woke culture. Conservative lawmakers often use woke as a placeholder for those who value diversity, equity, and inclusion work, Parham said.
“The reason it’s so difficult is because if we’re all using the same language and we all think the words mean the same thing, then how could they be doing something that’s quote, unquote wrong,” Carson said.
What else?
I’m curious: There are other words from pop culture or activism that have become widely adopted. And in that adoption, their meanings changed. One phrase that comes to mind is “politically correct.” Write to me about the other words and phrases you’ve seen evolve: fernanda@chronicle.com.
