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Why So Many People Are Blaming "Woke" For the Last Election Results
They're making the term rooted in black culture a scapegoat
As the dust settled from the last presidential election cycle, many have attempted to explain America's political shift to the right. While some adopted race-neutral explanations, such as the presumption that voters were motivated solely by economic anxiety, others embraced a more provocative explanation. For example, political consultant James Carville publically blamed the party's losses on "woke era" politics. From his perspective, the Democratic party should begin to distance itself from racially progressive policies. Yet, this critique is problematic when considering the term's etymology.
When the Black American folksinger and songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly, first used the phrase "stay woke" in spoken word, introducing his 1938 protest song, "Scottsboro Boys," he chose to shine a spotlight on the injustices Black people routinely endured throughout the Jim Crow era. The song tells the story of nine teenagers, Haywood Patterson, Olen Montgomery, Clarence Norris, Willie Roberson, Andy Wright, Ozzie Powell, Eugene Williams, Charley Weems, and Roy Wright, who "collectively served more than 100 years in prison" after being falsely accused of raping two…
