(Opinion) Linguistic absurdities abound.
Every day we are invited, dare I say bludgeoned, to stretch credulity with breathless reports such as: “The woke woksters almost woke the economy”, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes’ punny send-up of the absurd idea that the demise of the Silicon Valley Bank was to be blamed more on the bank’s ‘woke’ diversity policies than its investments and risk mismanagement.
“I mean, this bank, they’re so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff. I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission,” Florida governor Ron DeSantis told Fox Corp.’s Maria Bartiromo, according to AlterNet.
That he failed to mention the rollback by ex-president Donald Trump of previous banking regulations, which more than likely would have prevented the bank failure, was hardly surprising.
In a Bulwork video posted by Tim Miller, the GOP strategist apologized to his brethren: “I’m sorry to all the MAGA Republicans: There’s one thing that didn’t get us here no matter how much you wish it did: ‘wokeness.'”
Welcoming the great ‘awokening’ of American politics may be more than a little over the top but it’s getting harder and harder to escape wokeness wherever we look.
And it certainly invites limitless puns.
Across the pond, even the brits are bemoaning that poor Harry and Megan have become in fact too ‘woke’ for their own good.
Nailing down a consistent definition of the term ‘woke’ is no easy task. Right-wingers love to use it as a pejorative grenade to lob at liberals and progressives in their culture wars but still with no consistent explosive power.
I asked my trusty Bing for help and after whisking me through dictionary definitions, it directed me to a hilarious demonstration “of conservative author Bethany Mandel falling completely apart when asked in an interview to define ‘woke’, a concept she had devoted an entire chapter in her book denouncing. Ms. Mandel couldn’t do it.
“So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that, um…” she stammered before admitting it “is something that’s very hard to define,” and then failing utterly to get close.
One culture warrior down: how many more to go?
Wrote Thomas Chatterton Williams in the Atlantic: “The idea that patriarchy, white supremacy, transphobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, and other ills inexorably saturate our lived realities and that the highest good is to uncover and oppose them is, I think, a central component of ‘wokeness’ as both its proponents and critics understand it.”
“The ephemerality of ‘woke’ is what makes it so valuable. ‘Woke’ morphs into being when a right-winger needs to feel outrage and evaporates into thin air should anyone try to ask a rational question about it.”
Left-wingers are often equally stretched for a definition. In many ways it’s reminiscent of the United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s dilemma when in 1964, at odds to provide a solid definition for ‘obscenity’ in Jacobellis v. Ohio, he demurred to define it but wrote perceptively, “I know it when I see it”.
The real problem with the expression is that it is derived from a slang term from Black America which meant a refusal to be complacent about social injustice.
As that’s the exact opposite of the MAGA attitude towards social injustice, the right picked it up and weaponized it as an act of racist revenge.
And ‘woke’ has come to connote the opposite of what it means.
As the Guardian has pointed out, criticizing ‘woke culture’ has become a way of claiming victim status for yourself rather than acknowledging that more deserving others hold that status. It has gone from a virtue signal to a dog whistle.
‘Woke’ is one of those expressions which will (or should) get so worn out with over-use that it disappears and lets language get back to meaning what it says.
If, as Governor DeSantis has proclaimed, “Florida is where ‘woke’ goes to die, let’s all look forward to its funeral and rejoice at the ‘woke’.
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