Not to be ‘woke’ is to willfully ignore reality.
Right-wingers, the emotionally damaged, and “lazy ideologues” who hurl being “woke,” like an epithet studded with sharp spikes to wound the object of their disdain, appear not to appreciate the word’s context or meaning.
The writer Bijan C. Bayne recently wrote in a WAPO essay that “wokeness” was originally used to explain an awareness that developed among “U.S. Blacks who had been mentally conditioned into philosophical slumber by centuries of oppression, intimidation, miseducation and social frustration.” He cited 1930s usage of the concept by the Nation of Islam and Marcus Garvey, followed by Huddie Ledbetter (Black people “best stay woke, keep their eyes open”–1938), Malcolm X, and others later, including by Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1965 commencement address at Oberlin College in which he said: “There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution… The great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake.”
NYT columnist David Brooks, in 2017, applied the term broadly, out of its original context, with an unjustified mischaracterization: “To be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures.”
