As I write this, I’m out traveling the United States recording interviews for Season 9 of Scene on Radio. Though I won’t say much about the season just yet(!), I will note that I’m posting photos from the trip on my personal Instagram account, @jbiewen. Follow me there to follow along. Here, a few samples of photos I’ve posted so far — of interviewees encountered along the way.

A week ago in New York’s Central Park, I approached a man in his forties who’d set up his easel and was dabbing paint on a small canvas, rendering an image of skyscrapers rising in the distance above the trees. He introduced himself as Philippe, a French immigrant who’s been in the U.S. for ten years, working in the nonprofit sector. He said he was willing to have a conversation, but when I asked a broad question about how things are going in the U.S. these days, he made a gesture to stop the recording. He would have to be careful, he said, because he’s here on a green card and worries about ICE coming after him if someone in the Trump administration doesn’t like his opinions. I said I understood his need to be careful and ventured another big-picture question, but it was clear Philippe didn’t feel comfortable saying anything that could be remotely understood as political. With shrugs, we decided mutually to end the interview.

I like to believe that Philippe was being overly cautious, that ICE wouldn’t actually haul him away for expressing himself. But I don’t blame him in the least for choosing not to risk it. This is where we are, folks. In the land of the free and the home of the First Amendment, a legal resident is afraid to speak.

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If you follow the establishment punditocracy – and, well, I read the New York Times most mornings – you’d get the impression there’s now a solid consensus when it comes to the whole woke thing: Woke was terrible. It was oppressive. And it was a political mistake for the left that only fueled the rise of MAGA. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a standard bearer for the progressive left, said recently, quoting a New York City council member: “Woke 1 was crazy.”

Well. Was it?

Back in the days of peak woke – or “Woke 1,” whatever that means – the word was not part of my spoken vocabulary. I’d heard it and understood it, of course, but rarely if ever uttered it. I certainly never called myself woke. These days I will refer to wokeness, sarcastically, in its co-opted usage as an accusation flung at the left. (My co-host Chenjerai Kumanyika used it that way a couple of times, with a laugh, in our latest season, The News, imagining attacks on the likes of us as “woke journalists.”) But back before the backlash, I understood “woke” as a word that didn’t belong to the likes of me.

And yet I would certainly stand convicted as one of the White people who got on board – and actively stoked – the woke train. I made a podcast series about Whiteness, for heaven’s sake. I followed that series with another about patriarchy during the height of the #MeToo moment in 2018. And so on.

The word woke has been wrenched from its origins and weaponized. What did it mean when it was coined? I can’t improve on an account Jamelle Bouie gave recently on the Times podcast, “The Opinions”: “’Woke’ is a term that comes from African American vernacular. It has its origins in the 1930s, and it has traditionally meant something along the lines of: Be aware of the ways that this society is not built for you. Be aware of the ways that you may face disadvantage and oppression in this society. … And that is, as far as I’m concerned, what the term means.”

In other words, “Are you woke?” was one Black person saying to another: Do you know how the world is, as opposed to the way those people present it on TV and in the news?

In that podcast conversation, Bouie’s Times colleague Michelle Cottle interrupted to remind Bouie – as if he didn’t know – that the word means something different now to most people. No kidding. Merriam-Webster now offers, as a secondary definition of the slang term: “Politically liberal or progressive (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme.”

Bouie and Cottle also tangled over the notion that the backlash against woke was key to Trump’s victory in 2024. “At peak woke [in 2020],” Bouie said, “when Nancy Pelosi was wearing Kente cloth” – and, I would add, after millions of Americans had been in the streets marching for Black Lives and against police violence – “Democrats won a trifecta.” If the public hated woke so much, why didn’t the revolt come in 2020?

Cottle proposed there was a time lag to the backlash, finally catching up to the Democrats in 2024. Bouie doesn’t buy it. “Why did Trump win [in ‘24]? Because inflation was high and people didn’t like it. And people backfilled a lot of cultural reasons. They wanted to read the election as a big cultural backlash against woke.”

The turn against woke clearly happened, but anti-wokeness never constituted a strong consensus. The Pew Research Center found, for example, that public support for the Black Lives Matter movement dropped fifteen points from its peak in 2020. But even in the months after the 2024 election, when pundits were going on about a “vibe shift” and perhaps a lasting right-wing realignment, 52% of Americans still supported BLM. There’s reason to believe that, today, acknowledging and addressing racial injustice is far more popular than the sitting president.

There’s been much talk, from the right and the reactionary center, about the horrible, oppressive atmosphere that prevailed during peak woke. People couldn’t express themselves for fear of cancellation, public shunning, lost career advancement and even the loss of their livelihood. There were excesses. To the extent that people were fired for saying things that shouldn’t have been firing offenses, that’s bad and if possible should be made right. To the extent that DEI and antiracism efforts took on a tone of shaming and language-policing, that was wrong, not to mention strategically stupid.

(Some of my favorite endorsements of our work on Scene on Radio, especially Seeing White, were along the lines of: Hey white people, listen to this podcast! Don’t be scared — you’ll learn stuff but it’s not out to shame you!)

Of course, much of the yelping about the oppressiveness of woke was demagogic or reflected its own kind of snowflakery – yes, White fragility. After centuries of silence and silencing, scholars, activists and others began describing accurately this country’s history of White supremacy, patriarchy, and economic exploitation, and people with deep investment in the status quo cried foul. I’d venture that for every instance of actual woke excess, there was ten times as much whining in the face of belated truth-telling.

You know what didn’t happen during Woke 1? Federal agents grabbing someone on the street, handcuffing them and hauling them away because of words they wrote or spoke. That has happened under Trump 2. Under the influence of wokeness, maybe some conservative immigrants felt they couldn’t speak freely in a corporate or academic environment. If they felt they couldn’t do a racism or sexually harass a colleague, that’s good. If they believed they couldn’t express their more honestly-held views on public policy for fear of losing an opportunity, that’s a problem. In any case, unlike Philippe in Central Park, they didn’t need to worry the U.S. government would handcuff them and fly them to a third-country concentration camp because of their views.

Any social movement, even the worthiest, will include people who go too far, and it’s right to point out those mistakes, correct them, and avoid them in the future. But the vast majority of people engaged in the work of educating or getting educated about this country’s injustices have played no part in those abuses and have nothing to apologize for. Thinking of that old Churchillian line about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others: Woke, too, was the absolute pits except for what came before and after: the centuries of injustice that wokeness sought to describe and combat, and the entirely predictable backlash against it.

Black Lives Matter was not and is not wrong. Antiracism and the study of Whiteness are not wrong. #MeToo isn’t wrong. DEI, in its general thrust, is not wrong. So much else is vastly more wrong.

In a nation facing a swarm of profound crises, most of them self-made, woke scarcely registers as one of our problems.  

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