My New Band Is: Four Letter Word
It's probably not the one you think it is.
One of the advantages of having a personal newsletter is that there’s no editor to tell you can’t just write something about A Thing That Bothers You, Specifically. You can just do it! And no one will stop you! So here’s a fingernails-on-a-chalkboard-thing for me:
I hate it when white people use the word “woke” derisively. (If you know me IRL, this is not news to you.) It’s obvious what right wingers mean when they use it, but when people who are not right wingers and think of themselves as liberals use it, I’ve started to think of it as a kind of telling thoughtlessness. And not from a place of personal purity—because I’m incapable of thoughtlessness or above it; I’m not. I’ve thought thoughtless things, written them, done them. But I don’t want to be thoughtless. I try not to.
With that in mind: I always have a gut punch of disappointment when someone I like and/or admire uses the word in that way, and I can only imagine how much worse it is for people for whom the word really means more directly. It’s a word that comes out of the Black activist community, and in its original usage, not of my generation. I don’t claim any personal connection to it.
But lately I think a lot about what it means to use it as a slur.
Gleefully Exercising in Gym Futility
I know I’m rolling a boulder up a hill here, but as it happens, Sisyphean boulder nudging is my favorite sport. It’s why I argue with Trumpists, love extreme underdogs, still maintain that Eric isn’t the dumbest one, and am convinced that one day I will convince everyone that Timothy Dalton was the second best James Bond.
This feels like a boulder because the word has been so thoroughly co-opted by the right that even white liberals throw it around as shorthand for some kind of cartoonish lefty overreach. It does not mean what it originally meant.
But I think it’s important to understand what it originally meant, and I think it’s a lazy and thoughtless way to describe a kind of rhetorical excess, which is what self-proclaimed liberals are usually doing when they deploy it in that fashion. I’m going to put a lever under the boulder with the simple fact that once you understand the history of the term, you can’t un-know it. (It’s like Roko’s Basilisk**, but not unintentionally funny.) And if you can’t un-know it, it should materialize in your brain every time you hear or use the word.
[Note: If you’re a certain age and you’re not white, you already know what it means, and this is a boring, useless column for you. Sorry about that.
I am also assuming that if you’re reading this, you are probably not a Trumpist who uses the word “woke” very specifically to signal to their in-group that they’re angry at liberals who display any kind of empathy for people who aren’t exactly like them and can only fathom expressions of empathy as performative, unless those expressions of empathy are directed at you. (“Dad, I love you,” = obviously sincere. “Dad, maybe we should remove Confederate monuments that have only been up since the 1960s and serve no real purpose” = virtue signaling, because virtue can only ever be performative.) ]
Recent history, etc.
“Woke” went mainstream recently in the aftermath of Ferguson, which I don’t have to explain because the city name is now shorthand for a piece of history, in the same way that “Columbine” is. We build these scaffoldings of meaning around difficult ideas and events that are composed of single evocative words because it’s hard to really address the foundational problems, which are often multivariate in nature, and might require a complete demolition, which no one is prepared for.
But woke is not a new term generally; it’s just a new term to white people who want to wield it as an insult. I don’t think I could do a better Short VersionTM explainer than this Vox article, so I’m going to just link to it. Read it; skim it, even, (please). Then continue.
Woke is a word that was originally shorthand for political consciousness in the face of a complex systemic problem. And now it’s become useful scaffolding for an apparitional structure that scares the shit out of white conservatives but doesn’t exist: an America where women and minorities are fully enfranchised, and not because they’re fully human and equally capable (if not more), but because they’re cheating white conservatives out of power they’ve always had and cannot imagine life without.
But there is no consistent meaning, you say! You are correct, but:
One of my pet peeves in the political work I do is how often Democrats internalize conservative talking points and spit them back out. We are, as a party, more reactionary than we should be. The Trumpists I know (because I’m related to them, went to high school with them, etc.) assume everything Democrats do is being done in bad faith because that’s what their preferred media sources tell them and that’s what their friends tell them. Most of the Democrats I know believe some percentage of Trumpists are justly aggrieved on some unspecified level and if you just reason with them, they’ll understand why we’re all in this together and we have to take care of the poor as well as the rich and universal healthcare benefits everybody and not everything’s a zero sum game and so on, and so on, until we all die.
This asymmetry plays out all of the time in terms of the way people on the right and the left talk about values. The right wields “woke” to mean anything that in any way works to protect marginalized people, who they maintain are not actually marginalized, just whiny and lazy. White liberals internalize that and use it to describe anything they believe might be overreach because they think the right wingers might be reasonably making an argument about the downsides of having to adhere too strictly to a narrowly defined set of public norms that might limit or create consequences for speech. They have fundamentally different definitions of the word.
So there’s a repulsive irony here: the language of activism is being weaponized by the right as an indictment of the same activism, and one that rests on the assumptions that the problem the activists are fighting—systemic racism—is a fiction, and that any opposition to the problem is largely or entirely performative.
To what end? Who knows? (I guess technically there are people who believe George Soros writes you a check every time you have a thought that is not strictly about the advancement of straight white guys, but again, this column is not for those people. And if you are those people who somehow stumbled here: I’m happy to debate this with you because as I’ve already established, I love rolling boulders up hills.) But then people who are not right wingers and have no connection with the history of the word (read: they’re not Black) start to buy that definition either because they think the criticisms must have a germ of good faith truth to them, or because they listen more frequently to white people they don’t agree with more they listen to Black people they ostensibly do.
To be fair, language is not frozen in amber, unchanging for eternity.
I should note here that language is a living thing and it changes all the time, as it should. And norms shift. That’s part of what my last newsletter was about.
But this is about who owns definitions, and why white people on the right and some on the left have been able to twist the word “woke” into something that is so far from its hopeful, meaningful origins that it constitutes an insult. I also hate that right has appropriated the term “patriot”, the American flag, and other symbols of what are supposed to be positive American values, but there’s something particularly repulsive about appropriating something that has its roots in the Black civil rights movement. It’s an on-the-nose reminder that for the right, “American” means white, very specifically and exclusively.
And I think there’s a difference between norms that shift generationally (sorry, you can’t say the n-word directly anymore in a mention context when “the n-word” is perfectly available) and manipulating language with the explicit intent to belittle people who are fighting to have their humanity fully recognized. There’s a reason why the right wing uses this word specifically. It’s not a coincidence that it comes out of the Black activist community; that’s the entire point.
I’m not sure there’s any rolling it back, though. It’s ubiquitous now.
But I think about what it would feel like to have been around when you’d only hear it as a watchword for political consciousness and to hear the term inverted to mean its opposite. It’s an insult because it trivializes something that for a lot of people is fundamental: maintaining an awareness of how power is wielded in this country and how it is often wielded against its own citizens just because they’re Black or because they belong to a marginalized class in general. (The right now uses “woke” to mean activism on behalf of not just Black people, but other minorities and women.)
If you want to argue that it means something else now, fine. I never argue for banning words, even terrible ones—though I think there should be consequences if you choose to use them. But I also think it’s important to understand that this is not an abstraction for some people, a minor element in (some simulacrum of) discourse on the internet.
It has also allowed the right to shift the discourse so that any display of civil rights activism is cast as “wokeness,” which has been redefined to mean an inherently superficial performance. It reinforces the insidious fiction that bigotries are not and cannot be systemic and that any acknowledgement of them is theater. To use it derisively enables that.
And as always, there are plenty of other words at everyone’s disposal.
I don’t necessarily expect anyone to take my columns to heart, but listen to Lead Belly’s song about The Scottsboro Boys and this archival interview:
If nothing else, you should hear this word used in a very different context. It’s not a word that should have ever been deployed as an insult. It’s a word that means being alive and aware and politically conscious and engaged and has a meaning for Black people that it doesn’t for white people. It’s also an indictment against passivity. Being woke, among other things, means not closing your eyes when you’re exhausted by it and it’s easier to do so.
Anyone who believes that our shared values include justice and egalitarianism should hope to live up to it.
(** shout out to SSC fans who’ve subscribed just to look for dunking material. )