By John Carr
The metaphoric use of ‘woke’ reached mainstream Australian media only during 2020 – when there were lots of more important issues to worry about. It appeared to be used as a derisive term for any annoying or stupid Left-wing person, practice or language that aroused the ire of the Right-thinking commentator. ‘Heavens’, I thought, ‘I might be woke myself’.
But I knew from past experience that the term had probably been around in this sense for some time. I also guessed that its use might have undergone a sea-change or two. Many adjectives have crossed over from approbation to derision, or vice versa. I’ve written before about terms of abuse that have been appropriated by the abused as a badge of honour – ‘desert rats’, ‘nigger’, ‘blackfella’, ‘queer’ and so on. However, I wondered if ‘woke’ had moved in the opposite direction, from ‘in word’ within a segment of the progressive community to all-purpose term of derision.
My intensive, minutes-long research at Bing University proved that I was probably right. (As you see, we woke folk have already moved on from the evil, big-business Google Uni to the worker-friendly Microsoft Bing, because Bill Gates is definitely woke. By billionaire standards, of course.) According to Prof Bing’s first website hit, ‘woke’ began in the African-American community meaning ‘perceived awareness of issues that concern social justice and racial justice’. Credit for its reaching wider usage is sometimes given to the rapper Earl Sweatshirt in his rap ‘Still woke’ more than a decade ago.
Nevertheless, I shall shirtfront anyone who calls me woke, because it’s lazy and is meant to be offensive. It is particularly offensive because the ideals of ‘wokeness’ are generally benign, compassionate and life-affirming. At the same time, I shall continue to be anti-woke myself when woke activism goes too far. I have to acknowledge that, very occasionally, it can be a case of ‘political correctness gone mad’, as Sky News claims.
Disclaimer: views represented in SOFiA blog posts are entirely the view of the respective authors and in no way represent an official SOFiA position. They are intended to stimulate thought, rather than present a final word on any topic.
Photo by Edrece Stansberry on Unsplash
Indeed John well said and keen topic.
For me woke is a sign of the Lefts incoherence just as Trumpism is for the right. Yet Left and Right are of little substantial meaning nowadays just as Woke seems to be bereft of solid content more that of the ebb and flow of political opportunism. In the US i just don’t see any mainstream party with a coherent narrative. Like Trumpism coned the workers to accept a fragmenting country with greater inequality and resources going to well Trump et al – who else? Wokeism has taken the Left in the US down the rabbit hole of self delusion and illusion at a time where the West needs social justice, a green new deal and so forth. Its all a bit bemusing for me as a senior as decades long struggle seems to go no where like a river flowing into a desert not a sea.
It’s difficult to see how ‘woke’ is substantially different to the old ‘politically correct’. Both are now used mostly in a derogatory sense, often by those who wish to defend a status quo which is frequently unjust.
Is it ‘woke’ to point out that women do worse than men following a heart attack, or to suggest the fact that our medical systems are centred around men (the ‘default humans’), and that women tend to pick up where they left off – disproportionately burdened with home duties, caring for elderly relatives etc – could be relevant factors?
I think it’s instructive to consider what you might be if you’re not ‘woke’: asleep? Perhaps, even better: plain ignorant.
Can ‘woke’ be overdone, or involve complicated motives? Of course. But that doesn’t delegitimise the injustice being commented upon.
I suggest a better term than either ‘woke’ or ‘politically correct’, one that ultimately covers the same territory: decent.