People Keep Asking Me about Woke
After a third interview request about the word woke, I thought I’d put my responses in one place. (Especially since, again, these thoughts end up cherry-picked and misrepresented in their published versions) TL;DR Words change; it’s okay!
Can you remember the first time you encountered or used the word “woke,” and if so, please describe the usage then. How has the meaning of the word changed since then, if at all? Is it part of your own vocabulary?
The first time I encountered woke in the sense it came to recent prominence was likely in 2015 after the death of Sandra Bland. At that time the hashtag #sayhername was making the rounds, and the conversations around her death in police custody really demanded that for understanding of this incident people looked beyond the typical, graphic, and violent portrayals of police brutality to the more expansive consequences of biased behaviors and structures. Placing and resisting the death of Sandra Bland and others like her calls for wokeness.
I wouldn’t say that woke is currently part of my vocabulary. I think that the word became much more known because of its application to White people who had done the work to gain a complexified and nuanced understanding of Black life, knowledge which is otherwise acquired through existing in a marginalized body and/or with marginalized identities. I don’t need to describe myself as woke because surviving to this day has afforded me a deeper and qualified understanding of White Supremacy. I also don’t use it to describe White people very often because I recognize that the word has undergone a (rapid, in Linguistic terms) pejorative shift, meaning that it no longer marks the good and necessary work of individual awareness building but instead the hollowness of so much neoliberal flotsam. One example would be the 2020 summer’s barrage of antiracism statements by organizations, the NFL’s for example, which want to claim the mantle of wokeness but have in no way critically examined their own positionality within oppressive and embedded structures. The word has effectively been semantically bleached.
Some people say that the word and its derivatives have strayed so far from the original meaning in the Black community that it’s no longer useful. (Meaning, usually when you see it, it’s being used in a negative sense, such as conservatives decrying a “woke mob.”) Do you believe that is the case? If so, can the word recover the power it used to have, and if so, how?
Yes I would agree that the original meaning is lost on most users. This is not uncommon, as White Standardized Spoken English’s largest pool for neologisms are Black linguistic traditions; we are accustomed to our words rising to the level of general awareness and then being sapped of their original meaning. Other contemporary examples might be items like lit or bet or sis.
I wouldn’t say the word is no longer useful, because people are using it!
Just because the application of a term has diverged from its original semantic field doesn’t erase the reality of its extensions and reanalysis. This is exactly how language change works, and I do not believe that what we see going on with woke is particularly special, just prominent because of its racialization. There is, of course, debate among Linguists and Lexicographers about how and when to add new senses of terms, or to classify different usages as different words, but I think most experts would classify what woke has become (a primarily negative term meaning something akin to Left leaning/progressive) as a legitimate usage with the same history as the woke of William Melvin Kelley’s “If you’re woke, you dig it”. The thing about staying woke, for Black people, is that it is a necessity. We don’t choose to be woke, we must be woke to stay alive, to know when we are being lied to or exploited in some way. We need to stay woke to know when we are in danger. It is a reflection of the vigilance inherent in Black life.
And this points to something really special about lexical histories: they are born from lived experience, and thus are constantly in flux.
There are two treatments of these terms (woke (92.2) and stay woke (91.2)) in American Speech’s Among the New Words column. But for some resources that aren’t behind a paywall, I’m also linking to two sources which cover the origin of the term briefly and are from the 2016–17 time period.
OED Appeals Section: https://public.oed.com/appeals/woke/
PR Buzz Word: https://brightlightsbigcity.co.uk/pr-buzz-word-8-woke/