‘Woke’ is not a word recently created by social progressives.
It was first coined by a blues singer: Huddy Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly:
“When blues first started, the entire mindset was about singing what was in your heart. Trying to find the words to sing but can’t sing? That didn’t matter. What mattered was being able to talk about everything that was bringing you down and being able to share that with the rest of the world by bending the life out of your guitar…. Lead Belly’s piece is rippling with rage directed at the widespread racial injustice he saw around him… “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there—best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
So the next time you look at the word “woke”, don’t look at it as the kind of word that some committee put together to make people more aware of their surroundings. Think of it as the word descended from generations of artists that came before, still striving for that change that they don’t know is ever going to come.”[1]
How is it that ‘wokeness’ became a derogatory term used by the Right?
The article “How Woke Went From ‘Black’ to ‘Bad’”, starts with this paragraph about Florida Governor Ron de Santis:
“We must fight ‘the woke’ in our schools. We must fight ‘the woke’ in our businesses. We must fight ‘the woke’ in government agencies,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently declared from the stage at a campaign event. “We can never, ever surrender to woke ideology. And I’ll tell you this, the state of Florida is where woke goes to die.”
Michael Harriot, columnist at ‘TheGrio’, explains that this kind of insidious takeover and flipping of Black vernacular to anti-Black pejorative has numerous parallels in America’s past and runs all the way up to present day.
“When you look at the long arc of history and America’s reaction to the request for Black liberation – every time Black people try to use a phrase or coin a phrase that symbolizes our desire for liberation, it will eventually become a cuss word to white people.”[2]
Jumping forward in time, we see the re-emergence of the term for and by Black people:
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.[3]
From there, it didn’t take long for ‘woke’ the ‘cuss word’ to migrate north to Canada and land in the shit-infused, sou-vide vernacular of the rage-farming, card carrying member of the political elite, career remittance man and (former) leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre.
In the absence of actual policies, Poilievre borrowed from the de Santis school of culture wars and appealed to the angry and the frustrated who felt the most egregious aspect of Canadian society was not climate change, nor income equality, nor reconciliation, but drag queen story time, getting support from his COVID Convoy friends.[4]
At this stage, it may be impossible to reclaim the original meaning of the word ‘woke’. It’s a shame because by reducing the word to ridicule, we miss the original intent:
When an entire political agenda is built around rejecting “wokeness,” it signals a desire to maintain the status quo, where systems of oppression like colonialism, racism, and patriarchy remain largely unchallenged (these are the same systems that underlie and enable environmental destruction, by the way!). By framing “wokeness” as a threat, politicians like Poilievre are essentially arguing that the quest for a just and equitable society is somehow dangerous, and that acknowledging the existence of privilege and systemic harm is a threat to social cohesion.[5]
