The term “woke” originated in the African-American community sometime before the 1930s. In 1928, blues artist Thomas “Ramblin” Jones released a song titled “Sawmill Moan” which has the lines “If I don't go crazy, / I'm sure gonna lose my mind / 'Cause I can't sleep for dreamin', / sure can't stay woke for cryin'.” 1928 was also about the time that African-Americans had come to dominate industries like the sawmills, which involved difficult work. These were jobs whites didn’t want to do—and, increasingly, didn’t have to do—and in the jobs whites did want to do, there were unions whose job it was, in part, to keep non-whites out of those jobs.
Obviously, these pointed to structural injustices in the United States at the time. Those who were admonished to “stay woke” were being told to continue to be aware of these structural injustices against them, to continue to be aware of the racism that affected their lives, and to not forget who it was who was making their lives difficult. “Ramblin” Jones’s song, superficially a love song, shows its hand in its title. It’s really about what’s happening at the sawmills, about how the workers are being treated.
The admonition to “stay woke” became particularly prominent during the 1960s, during the Civil Rights Era, when being aware of racial prejudice and discrimination became more widespread. By this time, though, it had been appropriated by the beatniks and later the hippies—mostly in support of civil rights for African-Americans, true, but their use of it did make it seem less special within the African-American community.
I’m not going to go through the entire history of the term. It has periodically popped up in songs and in the culture when some atrocity has taken place against an African-American, and it has mostly maintained its original meaning. However, something has changed of late—specifically, around 2010—where the term “woke” has taken on an entirely different meaning. And yes, it’s because of white people.
On the Injustices of the World
The world is full of injustices. African-Americans continue to face explicit and institutional racism in this country. Europeans treat African immigrants terribly. Jews have been hated throughout history. Women are still fighting to be treated as equal to men throughout the world. Advances have been made in many countries, but the fact of the matter is that there is still a lot of room to grow.
While some of that growth has to come from individuals overcoming their own prejudiced beliefs, the desire to overcome them has to come from the culture itself. The depiction of black families on TV shows that attracted white audiences did a great deal to improve white people’s attitudes toward blacks. Will & Grace did the same for people’s attitudes toward homosexuals, and was, I believe, central to changing peoples attitudes about gay marriage. How could you not want Will or Jack to be happily married? And Will especially gave you the idea that he was the kind of man who wanted to settle down. Movies and TV shows depicting women as being as physically tough as men, as being capable businesswomen, and generally doing anything a man can do are (perhaps too consciously) designed to help people think of women as equal to men.
Another aspect that has to change is institutional prejudices. We typically hear about institutional racism, but there is also institutional sexism and institutional prejudices against neurodivergent people as well. While we also typically think of institutional bias as being found in police practices—and it certainly is—it can also be found in any number of other things, like the minimum wage, city zoning, and job interviews. Left-handed people have more accidents around the house than right-handed people because so many things are designed for right-handed people. Think about how many left-handed desks you’ve seen in schools. There are never as many left-handed desks in a classroom as there are left-handed students. Is that fair?
You may think that’s a little thing, but if you do, you’re probably right-handed. White people equally dismiss black experiences. Men dismiss women’s experiences. And many people don’t even realize what and how many things stand in their way.
A good example of that is the minimum wage. The minimum wage was created specifically to prevent teens from competing with adults, women from competing with men, and blacks from competing with whites. And when the minimum wage is raised, those groups continue to be most highly affected. When the minimum wage was first proposed, its proponents specifically brought up the fact it would create unemployment among blacks and protect white jobs from competition. They knew good and well what it would do. However, as it became less culturally appropriate to openly say you wanted to harm other races, that rhetoric was dropped, even as the same people continued to support it. Now, it was about the injustice of poor people working for so little. The rhetoric changed, but the reality didn’t.
Racial attitudes among the police became institutionalized in a variety of ways. What didn’t help was the creation of anti-drug laws that were based on racist attitudes (opium banned because the Chinese used opiates; cocaine banned because African-Americans were portrayed as using it and becoming aggressive on it, working harder on it, and becoming bolder on it and going after white women as a consequence; etc.). Worse, drug laws are inherently corrupting. Police are encouraged to go after drugs because they can seize everything and keep it. The police being able to keep what they seize is the very definition of poor incentives. And why not target poorer people who can’t lawyer up? And why not target African-Americans, who are cynical toward our entire legal system?
So now that we have established that there are in fact injustices toward minorities of all sorts, and that they are not just of a personal sort but institutional as well, we can perhaps understand the idea of being “woke.” We can also perhaps see why people would want to expand this idea into other areas where injustices are taking place for particular groups. Indeed, we see precisely this expansion in the most recent development of being “woke.”
Woke Gets Broke
If women, LGBTQ+, neurodivergents (underrepresented still by the current batch of Woke), the poor, workers, racial and ethnic minorities, etc. are being recognized to be facing social injustices about which we need to be woke, then that’s certainly not a problem. We should wake up to the ways in which different groups are mistreated by not just individuals, but by built-in structural biases in our institutions. And we should wake up to not only the institutional biases the left want to recognize, but also institutional biases such as the minimum wage they refuse to recognize.
If this is what is happening with the current Woke movement, I’d happily be a part of it. The problem is that, with Woke becoming white, it’s become narcissistic rather than truly about injustice. It’s become about not being offended—specifically, about the white woke not being offended on behalf of other groups (most of whom often don’t find offense in what’s being targeted). Instead of being about truly fighting injustices, it has become all about virtue signaling and attention-seeking.
When people complain about the Woke, that’s what people are complaining about. There are no doubt racist, sexist, homophobic people who are loudly critical of the Woke, but there are also a great many people who oppose the white woke because we believe they are bringing harm to our fights for justice and equality.
When you have people who think that censorship is more important than freedom, you have people who are making your movement have a bad name. When your idea of change is to threaten people, threaten their livelihoods, and yell at them that they’re racists, sexists, etc. rather than attempting to have an actual dialogue, then you have people making your movement have a bad name. When you can call an African-American racist because he doesn’t obey the Woke and do everything they think should be done, then you have people who are making your movement have a bad name. It is possible to support the right things, but do so in the wrong way. Making your opposition to racism and other injustices all about you and how you feel and refusing to have a discussion with anyone because, after all, you’re absolutely right about everything, is not a sustainable method. All it is is narcissism masquerading as virtue.
The problem is, the Woke are right about there being ongoing problems with racism, sexism, etc., about there being institutional racism and so on, etc. Their virtues are generally correct. And these virtues will win out in the end. Their tactics, however, could not be worse for advancing those virtues. If you want to create knee-jerk defensiveness, you could not come up with a better way than this narcissistic version of woke. And that’s what we’ve seen. Narcissistic white woke pretends to virtue, but is little more than virtue signaling. If we were to be completely honest, narcissistic woke is little more than the projection of the believer’s beliefs and attitudes onto others. That is, they are racists who are ashamed of being racists and so lash out at everyone, accusing them of being racists when it is the accuser who is the racist.
And don’t think most African-Americans aren’t aware of that. The true woke are well aware of what these false woke are really up to. After all, the true woke are, well, woke. It’s time we woke up to these games and rejected the narcissistic woke for being what they truly are.
We can console ourselves that the narcissistic woke movement is one of the final expressions of the dying postmodern culture and that these tactics are precisely what are rejected in the emerging metamodern culture even as we embrace the virtues of fighting racism at both the individual and the institutional levels. But we cannot be consoled by the fact that the narcissistic woke have done some real damage. The belief in institutional racism (and other forms of institutional bias) as a legitimate source of injustice for certain groups of people has taken a hit, even among people who otherwise believe that institutions matter. Part of the work of metamodern artists and scholars will be to recover what is good from what is bad, from the damage caused by the narcissistic woke. But who said rebuilding after a storm was ever easy?