If you follow American politics you’ll know that certain politicians here have as a primary plank in their political platforms a thing about “woke”’ and are going full bore to “kill it”. One, the governor of a sunny southern state who is running for president even calls his state the “place that woke comes to die”.
With all the hoorah and noise, if you’re unfamiliar with American slang, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “woke” must be relating to some horrendously bad plan to corrupt or destroy American society. If you fall into that category please read on while I enlighten (dare I say wake you up) to the reality of the situation, which in my humble opinion fully validates the old saying that politics is the last refuge of scoundrels.
In the first place, the term “woke”, which gained widespread attention as a part of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, a social movement, founded in July 2013 after George Zimmerman, a Florida man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, was acquitted under Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law. BLM, by the way, is also something that keeps certain politicians awake at night, but that’s another story. I’m here to talk to you about the word woke and why it’s such a bugbear to some people.
Woke is a term that originated in African American Vernacular English that means becoming aware of issues of racial and social justice. It was first used by singer-songwriter Lead Belly in the 1930s in a protest song “‘Scottsboro Boys”, referring to nine African American teenage boys in Scottsboro, Alabama who were accused of raping two white women. An all-male, all-white jury sentenced eight of them to death, while the case of the youngest, a 13-year-old, ended in a hung jury when one juror favored life imprisonment for him rather than death.
A mistrial was declared and the youngster spent six years in prison waiting for the final verdict on the other eight. Despite one of the so-called rape victims recanting and the Supreme Court overturning the verdicts as unfair and racially biased, all-white Alabama juries found them guilty in retrials, and they spent decades behind bars. The last of them received a pardon in 1975. In 2013, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles finally woke up and issued posthumous pardons, finally ending one of the most notorious cases of racial injustices in American history.
When you hear today’s anti-woke politicians ranting about wokeness, you’ll never hear about it’s origins, just that it a tactic of leftists to undermines “true” American values. Another case of one group of people expropriating a term, idea, or custom from another group and then altering it to fit their culture. It kind of reminds me of the 1960s and the expropriation of Soul food.
Soul food, for those not in the know, is another term from the African American community. It refers to the food that was first available to enslaved people, made from the parts of animals that the rich folks didn’t eat, like the ears, feet, and entrails, which they made available to the enslaved who used their ingenuity to make it palatable. After emancipation, it was the food of the poor sharecroppers who were economically enslaved and was soon identified with the African American community of America’s rural south.
In the 1960s, soul food was “discovered” by young upwardly mobile professionals (Yuppies) who gravitated to it because of their liberal leanings, found it tasty, and created such a demand for it, the prices rose out of reach of the poor people who ate it because it was all they could afford.
They didn’t mean for that to happen, that’s just the nature of a capitalistic society. But you can bet that the current crop of thieves who’ve stolen “woke” and are misusing, know exactly what they’re doing. They’re trying to make it something it’s not and divorce it completely from its original meaning.
I have a message for this crew. You stole soul food, but you can’t have woke. It won’t die because this time we’re not asleep. We’re wide awake, woke and watching. – NWI
