I Am Awake

The Republicans have seized on the work ‘woke’ and twisted it out of all shape. The word has become for them the newest expletive. In a New York Times article from May, 2021 Allan Smith and Sahil Kapur write, “Republicans, looking to dent President Joe Biden and win back Congress next year in part by rousing a voting base animated by culture was issues, have increasingly settled on a single word to describe what it is they stand against: "woke." What the word actually means remains vague, but the Republicans seem to consider it a term that refers to a radical socialist agenda proposed by Democrats that advocatse for social justice. The authors write, that the word is “directly linked by the Republicans to language like ‘political correctness’ and ‘cancel culture’ — which are also at the forefront of conservative messaging.” In the meantime these same Republicans have proposed eliminating certain books from libraries, cleansing the language of gender neutral terms, advocating the continual celebration of traitors (Southern Civil War rebels) racist murderers and thugs, and engagement in rude and insulting speech and behavior that no civilized person should tolerate.

             In the recent confirmation hearings for now Justice Jackson the Republicans threw ‘woke’ and ‘wokeism’ about defiling the hearings as if the terms were excrement picked up off the ground or served for them as Molotov cocktails intending to destroy the character of this esteemed justice. To be ‘woke’ was intended as an insult. The article continues: “Woke,” which has a log history in Black culture, was propelled into the mainstream in 2014 by activists protesting after Michael Brown, a Black teenager, was shot and killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri. "Stay woke" was a warning to be vigilant as Black Lives Matter protests were met with considerable police force. It evolved to encapsulate a broader social justice mantra — to be "woke"is now designed to be cognizant of racial and social injustices."  This is what Republicans choose to ignore: not merely the word but the social injustice it means to combat. But in fact the term appears much earlier in the 1939 novel Whose Names Are Unknown by Sonora Babb. This book narrates the lives of families suffering the Great Depression and the dust storms that swept through at least Oklahoma during the 1930s. The narrative reads, “Was not Christ a man with blood in his veins and a heart for people? He did not die that they might be saved; he was murdered, as good as lynched, for his ideas that woke the poor enduring people like the ones now in this little church in town, he was killed for his ideas that threatened the enthroned greed of the times.” Woke was a term Babb chose to refer to an awareness that somehow things were not just, that some were benefitting from the suffering of others; that while some grew fat others died of starvation. I think here of Ted Cruz boarding a plane to Cancun for a family vacation while his constituents suffered pandemic conditions and lockdown. Now he cannot utter a sentence without the word  ‘woke’ used disparagingly. I will have to say that he does not offer much advertisement for a Harvard law education. 

I wonder what it would mean to not be ‘woke.’ Wouldn’t it mean to accept endemic racism authorized even in the Constitution, growing economic inequality, gender discrimination, anti-Semitism, voter suppression, totalitarianism and ignorance. It would mean to ignore climate change that threatens our survival. Maybe they don’t care. History be damned, they say, and so will we be. 

Oh yes, I am incensed. I watched the Republicans filed out of chamber yesterday insulting the confirmation of a new Supreme Court Justice. Fortunately, their tails were tucked between their legs. I have spent my life in education and would have been castigated for behaviors displayed regularly by Republicans. It is not only embarrassing but infuriating to have to suffer their disgraceful words and actions. May they all go back into the holes out of which they have crawled. And may their children not take lessons from them and not follow their lead.