What’s Woke?

The anatomy of a poisoned word

Disowned by the left and disdained by the right, “woke” is a loaded word that often invites misunderstanding. And yet, this out of fashion four-letter word continues to animate progressive politics like the proverbial nightmare from which we cannot awake.

What is woke? Where does it come from? Does it simply mean “aware and empathic,” as some assert, or is there a deeper set of trade-offs involved that bond us with some while exiling others? How does woke operate as a political style?

In my inaugural post, The Book of Daniel, I describe how the non-profit I started in 1994 became something else over the final half of the last decade. When Real Change amended the mission to include “taking action against racism,” we got more than some of us bargained for.

Within just a few months, Real Change drew first blood and laid the foundation for my own defenestration five years later. The obligatory feeding frenzy was underway, and I was all in.

It began, innocuously enough, with a weekend-long anti-racist training by American Friends Service Committee. The walls of our South Seattle workshop location were scotch-taped with a timeline of race in America, with events ranging from Jamestown Colony to the Buffalo Soldiers and Tuskegee Airmen to the election of Obama. We were encouraged to wander the chronology on our breaks, adding our own points of interest with post-its.

I recall little of the training itself. There we were — staff, board, and volunteers together — demonstrating our formal commitment to anti-racism. On Sunday afternoon, white people went into one room to discuss, and People of Color took their heightened melanin and standard box lunch to another.

One board member’s decision to leave early rather than participate in race-based caucusing came to define the entire retreat. It did not help that the person in question was an older, affluent, straight white-male who sometimes got on people’s nerves.

The only thing I remember us white folks talking about that day was how “Mike,” we’ll call him, had left, and why this was a slap in the face to us all.

Nor did it help when Mike invoked the universalism of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr and, God help him, Bill-fucking-Cosby, to defend his stance. Later, in two special meetings, he was required to explain himself to both staff and board.

Mike did not, he said, “see color.” He believed in a future where little black and white boys and girls could hold hands on the playground and be judged solely by the content of their character. Race, he insisted, was “a construct,” and it was unhelpful to focus on our differences.

That shit was not gonna fly in Seattle in 2016. Not at Real Change anyway.

“He damn well better see color,” said one black woman staff. That sentiment spoke for us all. He was called to defend himself a third time and resigned instead. His departure was mostly regarded as a predictable result of “the process.”

But not by everybody. I was alone in our meeting room, getting a few minutes of stretching in ahead of our board meeting, when two people I was typically aligned with arrived early.

“What’s happening to Mike is disgusting,” they said. “It’s wrong for us to treat him this way.” Their visceral objection caught me by surprise. They were not his biggest fans either, but they objected to the meanness.

Real Change was midway through our first scapegoating and I did not see the problem. We were woke. Mike was not. Real Change was water and he was oil.

In the end, Mike’s principled objection found no sympathy. His reluctant allies, as I recall, never spoke up in public. Neither, to my later regret, did I. Whatever inklings of ambivalence I held were unshared.

Ten years later, the question occurs: Would it have been so wrong to allow the man his beliefs? What was the big risk there? What would we have lost? What was this lock-step intolerance of his fundamentally unthreatening view really about?

Evolution of an Abandoned Word

Musa Al-Gharbi dwells for three pages in We Have Never Been Woke on the contested history of the word. While it mostly arrived in this century as a replacement for the similarly discredited “politically correct” of the 60s through the 90s, “woke” has roots going back to the Wide-Awakes, a northern, urban youth abolitionist movement in the 1860s.

Being “wide awake” took on broader meaning, and by the post-Civil War period, to “stay woke” in black America, he says, was to “be alert to potential threats; to be wary around whites.” The term continued in use within black circles through the 1950s.

In 1962, the Streisand Effect showed up before it had a name when the New York Times ran an op-ed discouraging cultural appropriation of the term. Usage of “woke” among whites rose, and by the 70s the word was part of the social justice landscape.

Woke made another leap into popular culture when Erykah Badu had a hit 2008 song with the refrain “I stay woke.” Before #BlackLivesMatter, there was #StayWoke.

A mere decade later, woke suffered the same cycle of abandonment that “politically correct” did earlier. First, confusion was introduced through ironic usage that mocked the earnest zealotry of extremists.

Then, along with Social Justice Warriors, woke became a term of derision on the right and a culture war staple. To criticize woke or SJWs was to align with MAGA. As the left mainly lost political power in 2016, cohesion nudged its way toward cultishness and we found targets nearer at hand.

By 2023, the year Al-Gharbi’s book was published, a poll found that while most Americans had positive associations with the word woke, they felt the label did not describe them. The meaning had been muddied from all directions and a comparable, more acceptable, term has yet to emerge.

Woke, however, is more than a word. It is a collection of often strongly held positions with policy implications that are seldom made explicit. These positions have to do with concepts like essentialism, equity, and representation. Additionally, tactics of exclusion and shaming have often replaced education and dialogue, and values like tolerance and grace have been edged out.

The social justice movement, at its more repressive end, has become akin to fundamentalist religion, where, in the words of trans US Senator Sarah McBride, people must “believe in our religion or be satan.”

We have, she says, lost the art of persuasion on the left and turned instead to the assertion of cultural power.

The left preoccupation with language policing, says McBride in a recent interview with Ezra Klein, is “inherently exclusionary,” and mostly “about building capital and credibility with the in-group.” This, perhaps not coincidentally, is the thesis of Al-Gharbi’s book.

Often, these implicit positions come at the expense of long-held tenets of the left such as class solidarity, freedom of speech, and a belief in universalism. Grand narratives about arcs of the universe bending toward justice and such give way to office politics and a sort of political nihilism, where being right matters more than actual gains.

There was a broad shift in what it means to be “on the left” that, in the busyness of lives and superficiality of daily news, seems poorly understood by most. Defining the political outlines of woke is risky business, but that is where we now turn.

The Identity Synthesis

I am not so bold as to define those themes on my own. For that, I turn to Yascha Mounk and his 2023 intellectual history, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power In Our Time. Mounk dissects the roots of woke in post-modernism, post-colonialism, and critical race theory, and ventures a version of the Identitarian Creed by naming The Identity Synthesis. This, by his account, has seven key features:

1. Skepticism about objective truth: This skepticism about the limits of knowledge and even the scientific method extends to a rejection of “grand theories” such as universalism, the perfectibility of liberal democracy, or the logic of class struggle. Following Michel Foucault, the belief is that “there is no objective truth, just an infinite series of viewpoints.”

2. Discourse analysis for political ends: Following Edward Said’s work in Orientalism, this is the notion that we can “change the world by redescribing it.” We are all familiar with the preoccupation with correctly naming things, from BIPOC to LatinX to LGBTQIAA+ and the subtle consequences of being caught out of fashion.

3. Doubling down on identity: “Strategic essentialism” derives from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s postcolonialism and the feminist work of Judith Butler. This says that while race and gender are “constructs,” we must lean into identity as a locus of resistance to domination. Mounk points out that “over time, practice won out over theory,” and identity went from social construct to unquestionable political fact.

4. Proud Pessimism: This rejects the optimism of, say, Langston Hughes’ “America never was America for me, And yet I swear this oath — America shall be!” for Derrick Bell’s contention that racism never goes away; it merely shape-shifts. This fatalism about the prospects for progress, Mounk points out, also extends to advancement for gender minorities, despite such successes as gay marriage.

5. Identity Sensitive Legislation: This is the notion, expressed by critical race theorist Richard Delgado, that “only aggressive, color-conscious efforts to change the way things are will do much to ameliorate misery.” Thus, all race or gender neutral law becomes suspect, and preferential, identity-based treatment finds its way into the mainstream, and universalism is implicitly abandoned.

6. The imperative of intersectionality: This is where Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality loses all original meaning and now implies, Mounk says, that we “require our members to sign up to a very broad catalogue of causes and positions—with the necessary stance on each determined by the group that is most directly affected.” As groups broaden their missions to accommodate this fashion, they often lose focus on who they were intended to serve.

7. Standpoint Theory: This, Mounk says, is a popularization of standpoint epistemology in feminist theory, which advocates for an essentialist position that one must be a member of an oppressed group to understand their struggle. This strained capacity for outside understanding, apparently, diminishes with proximity to power. This finds its way into the sealed logic that, “I have my truth, based on my lived experience, which is impervious to your objectivity and ‘facts.’”

While a concept as nebulous and contested as woke defies neat categorization, this, at least, offers a quick peek underneath the hood. Next week, we continue exploring Mounk’s Identity Synthesis by unpacking how this shift found institutional expression, and what that has meant for our work.

Until then, I’ll be right over here, Yellin’ at Clouds.