February 22, 2023

Defining Wokeness Down

The once meaningful word “woke” has been appropriated from urban blacks by preening white leftists.

The Left wrecks everything it touches. So says conservative author and thinker Dennis Prager, and he’s right. Art, music, journalism, sports, comedy, education, medicine, movies, the military, the Boy Scouts, free speech, social media, voting — everything.

And now, true to form, the Left has gone and wrecked the word “woke.”

“Republicans use ‘wokeism’ to attack left — but struggle to define it,” sneers the Washington Post’s sour-grapes headline, which leads into an article all about the Rascally Right’s weaponization of “woke.”

“Republican politicians and voters alike have differing definitions of wokeism,” the Post’s scriveners tell us, “and some struggle to define it at all. The rallying cry has recently been used to denounce everything from climate change policies and socially responsible investing to transgender rights, critical race theory and the Black Lives Matter movement.”

So the Post thinks the Right, in its failure to define “woke” with Websterian precision all across the board, has forfeited its right to use the term, forfeited its right to deploy it against the Left as a means of derision. To which we say: Good luck with that.

Here, we’re reminded of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous rejoinder when asked during a landmark obscenity case about his definition of hardcore pornography. “I know it when I see it,” he said.

Similarly, we know “woke” when we see it.

“Woke,” we know, is the past participle of “wake.” But it’s much more than that. Just ask Merriam-Webster, which added this version of the term in 2017:

Woke is now defined in this dictionary as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice),” and identified as U.S. slang. It originated in African American English and gained more widespread use beginning in 2014 as part of the Black Lives Matter movement. By the end of that same decade it was also being applied by some as a general pejorative for anyone who is or appears to be politically left-leaning.

We also know that it comes from the black community, perhaps from back in 1938, when blues singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter helped popularize the term in his protest song, “The Scottsboro Boys.” In it, as the Post reports, “He urges Black America to ‘stay woke’ to social and political injustice as well as physical violence.” Or maybe it was New York City novelist William Melvin Kelley, who some credit with putting the term in print in 1962.

But where blacks have long used the term as a rallying cry against racial injustice and discrimination, the Left latched onto it more recently and began using it culturally appropriating it to denote progressive activism in the fight against supposed systemic injustices more broadly. So while we suspect Rosa Parks was “woke” when she refused to get to the back of the bus, and John Lewis was woke when he got his head split open on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, we now have to make room for woke “transgender” activists. Because, you know, a man’s right to relieve himself in a girl’s bathroom is the civil rights struggle of our time.

“Wokeness is a problem” said Democrat strategist James Carville back in 2021, “and we all know it.” Today, Carville doesn’t even use the term — because, he says, it originated with black Americans “and then overeducated white people ruined the word.”

Let that sink in: and then overeducated white people ruined the word.

Indeed, that leftist pretentiousness has fully boomeranged, as it often does, and it’s since given rise to the term “woke joke,” which the Urban Dictionary describes as “a person (or organization) so intent on appearing to be supportive of ‘social justice’ that any semblance of common sense or critical thinking has been abandoned.”

In a way, then, white leftists have done to the word “woke” what they helped do to black communities during the George Floyd riots: they’ve burned it down.

Think about it: Does anyone really believe that the black community that brought us “yo” and “bro” and “dis” and “chill” and “word” and “fresh” and “homeboy” is happy that a decades-old secret handshake of theirs has been appropriated by preening white leftists who think men can get pregnant?

We think not.

Who We Are

The Patriot Post is a highly acclaimed weekday digest of news analysis, policy and opinion written from the heartland — as opposed to the MSM’s ubiquitous Beltway echo chambers — for grassroots leaders nationwide. More

What We Offer

On the Web

We provide solid conservative perspective on the most important issues, including analysis, opinion columns, headline summaries, memes, cartoons and much more.

Via Email

Choose our full-length Digest or our quick-reading Snapshot for a summary of important news. We also offer Cartoons & Memes on Monday and Alexander’s column on Wednesday.

Our Mission

The Patriot Post is steadfast in our mission to extend the endowment of Liberty to the next generation by advocating for individual rights and responsibilities, supporting the restoration of constitutional limits on government and the judiciary, and promoting free enterprise, national defense and traditional American values. We are a rock-solid conservative touchstone for the expanding ranks of grassroots Americans Patriots from all walks of life. Our mission and operation budgets are not financed by any political or special interest groups, and to protect our editorial integrity, we accept no advertising. We are sustained solely by you. Please support The Patriot Fund today!


The Patriot Post and Patriot Foundation Trust, in keeping with our Military Mission of Service to our uniformed service members and veterans, are proud to support and promote the National Medal of Honor Heritage Center, the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, both the Honoring the Sacrifice and Warrior Freedom Service Dogs aiding wounded veterans, the National Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, the Folds of Honor outreach, and Officer Christian Fellowship, the Air University Foundation, and Naval War College Foundation, and the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation. "Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for his friends." (John 15:13)

★ PUBLIUS ★

“Our cause is noble; it is the cause of mankind!” —George Washington

Please join us in prayer for our nation — that righteous leaders would rise and prevail and we would be united as Americans. Pray also for the protection of our Military Patriots, Veterans, First Responders, and their families. Please lift up your Patriot team and our mission to support and defend our Republic's Founding Principle of Liberty, that the fires of freedom would be ignited in the hearts and minds of our countrymen.

The Patriot Post is protected speech, as enumerated in the First Amendment and enforced by the Second Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America, in accordance with the endowed and unalienable Rights of All Mankind.

Copyright © 2024 The Patriot Post. All Rights Reserved.

The Patriot Post does not support Internet Explorer. We recommend installing the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, or Google Chrome.