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I have become completely confused about what “Woke” means, but one thing I do know is that my version of wokeness does not coincide with other peoples’ versions. Consequently, I’d like to tackle the subject, fully aware that I will piss off everyone.
But then that’s what I enjoy doing.
And everyone knows that once you hit 70, you can say any damn thing you want to.
In truth, the word “woke” and the concept “wokeness” is irresistible precisely because it seems to offend people on both the right and the left, and anything that can do that is certainly worth pursuing.
To begin, how can an word as innocuous as “woke” with so many nice connotations often be despised, or at least looked at suspiciously, by so many, many people, even though few can tell you with any certainty what it means. .
Gov. DeSantis certainly seems not to have a clue, though he knows that “Florida is where woke goes to die.” Even Marjorie Taylor Greene has trouble defining wokeness, except to assure us that it is “sick and disgusting.”
In a way, the far right who hate wokeness don’t have to leap too far from the things they’ve always hated: gays, people of color, poor people living on the dole (unless it’s them), East Coast intellectuals (unless it’s them), and so on. Thus wokeness has provided these right wingers a term that can act as a lightning rod for all of their prejudices. In short, in their exclusive minds, wokeness gives them permission to let the prejudices they have always had shift into hyperdrive.
But the left has also erred by embracing the term at all costs, so that if you don’t buy into every part of their agenda, you are considered “Unwoke,” and thus are disinvited to the next woke get together, usually hosted by suburban white people who practice wokeness from a very far distance away from the disenfranchised people they have become woke for.
Here are some two reasonable examples of how people have defined “Woke.:
“Being woke is being aware, knowing what’s going on in your community and the world, with the willingness to access and critique systems of oppression.”
“Woke is a state of awareness achieved by those dumb enough to see oppression in everything but their own behavior.”
You may not think the second one is “reasonable,” but I think the word “stupid” shows frustration more than rage. If you want rage, all you have to do is to look up what Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene say about the term, depending upon whether they’ve had a hemorrhoid attack that morning.
One reason, I’m writing about this is because, lately, I have been surprised by how many life-long liberals I know are very suspect and/or annoyed by Wokeness. I see this attitude especially in the literary world, where most of the book prizes are given to people of color or people steadfastly embracing what used to be called “alternative lifestyles.” On the surface these liberals actually have a gripe, or as a friend once said about awards, “You would think straight white guys don’t write good books anymore.”
What my friend forgets, though, is that since awards in the arts have been invented, 95% of them have gone to white males. He also assumes that award-winning books written by previously disenfranchised people aren’t deserving because they must necessarily be “token” awards—just as many people believe that when a gay or black gets an Academy Award, they only get it because of how they self-identify.
The above argument is worthwhile, and may even deserve a book—one I have no desire to write.
Part of the problem is that the people who go overboard defending or demonizing wokeness are just too much in your face. They both need to express outrage, and if you don’t agree with them, you’re condemned to Unwoke Limbo.
This limbo is where I happily exist. My limbo is a messy place where I try to see both sides of every argument, as long as long as differences of opinion are argued in good faith. I must admit that I lean more toward the progressive side because they at least seem to care about people and desire to change the world for the better, whereas the far right wants to go backward in time and live in a sanitized world that never even really existed in the late 50s.
The other problem is that the word woke has been so overused and abused that it doesn’t mean much anymore.
In a recent review in the New York Review of Books of Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke, Fintan O’Toole writes that “‘woke’ is an expression so thoroughly absorbed into reactionary rhetoric that it has become a signifier without a signified. When Elon Musk can blame ‘the woke mind virus’ for the poor quality of Netflix shows, the decline of Twitter, the condition of San Francisco, the alleged plot by Yale University to ‘destroy civilization,’ the obstacles preventing us from colonizing Mars, and ‘pushing humanity towards extinction,’ there’s a strong case for concluding that the term can no longer function in rational discourse. Like ‘political correctness’ before it, ‘woke’ has ceased to be a concept and is now a klaxon. It serves both to alarm the right-wing base and to drown out the noise of unwanted voices. To say, as Neiman’s title does, that the left is not woke runs the risk of copying the right’s tribalist strategy of defining oneself not just negatively but against an increasingly empty insult.”
This analysis makes sense, but if it’s true, then why is there still so much bickering about it.
Most people agree that “woke” is a concept from black culture that everyone has borrowed and misinterpreted. Rather than go into a discussion of its history, I’d refer you to Lead Belly’s 1938 protest song called the “Scottsboro Boys.” The song describes of the 1931 tragedy of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who were accused of raping two white women. Lead Belly says at the end of an archival recording of the song that he’d met with the Scottsboro defendants’ lawyer, who introduced him to the men themselves. “I made this little song about down there,” Lead Belly says. “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
Lead Belly uses “stay woke,” then, in explicit association with Black Americans’ need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of living in white America.
I would argue that, to me, being woke is simply being aware of the injustices of the world around us and doing our best to treat people as we ourselves would like to be treated. It’s about feeling responsible for everything and everyone else in life. It’s simply about trying to make the world a better place.
That’s why I like the first image that begins this post.
In this sense, I feel that I was woke while everyone else was sleeping, though I’d be the first to concede that others might disagree with my self-assessment.
You could probably start with my ex-wife.
As a finale, consider, how the below parable from Sherwood Anderson’s great short-story collection, Winesburg, Ohio, relates to all of the above, especially to what happens when people become so myopic that they can’t consider the opinions of others and become grotesques.
“At his desk the writer worked for an hour. In the end he wrote a book which he called The Book of the Grotesque. It was never published, but I saw it once and it made an indelible impression on my mind. The book had one central thought that is very strange and has always remained with me. By remembering it I have been able to understand many people and things that I was never able to understand before. The thought was involved but a simple statement of it would be something like this:
That in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss
When I was young, I slid down many truths, only to plow into a snowbank. Truths later billowed my sails until I ran aground. Now at 80 I use a walker to get around; I don’t get very far, but I’ve learned to take my time.