What it means to be “woke”

https://www.naacpldf.org/woke-black-bad/

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THE WORLD DISCOVERS WOKE
It’s perhaps this very context — Black people’s awareness of their history and their power to resist injustice — that made woke so ripe for the pernicious mutation it has now undergone. Indeed, the forced transformation of the colloquialism echoes how countless other Black ideas and intellectual contributions have been maligned.

“When people during the civil rights movement began saying ‘Black power,’ all of a sudden it became a term that people equated with communism and anti-white sentiment — and then it eventually gave birth to ‘white power,’” Harriot tells LDF. “The ‘1619 Project’ [which centers the ramifications of slavery and the contributions of Black people in American history] has become an insult. ‘Black Lives Matter’ became an ‘anti-white sentiment’ that was banned in school and spawned ‘all lives matter’ and ‘blue lives matter.’”

And like Black Lives Matter became known to the world through the power of Twitter, so too has social media aided in the rapid spread of woke and other Black cultural creations beyond the radius of the communities in which they were formed.

Erykah Badu’s 2008 track “Master Teacher” (featuring spoken word by Georgia Anne Muldrow) is widely credited with re-introducing “stay woke” to the modern lexicon. However, Watson believes it was Badu’s use of the phrase on Twitter while advocating for the freedom of Russian feminist protestors that ultimately helped propel woke around the globe.

“[Kelley] spoke to this — how these words evolve,” says Watson. “We see how quick they evolve, even quicker, with the advent of social media. It just amplifies the speed in which things no longer belong to the creator, and especially as that pertains to Black people. We see this with our dances, with our language — what starts off as ours quickly becomes appropriated.”

Add in the traditional media outlets that ran articles presenting woke as “trendy new slang” for readers to add to their vocabularies — and the spread, appropriation, and ultimate dilution of woke was practically guaranteed.

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