Former President Barack Obama drew quite a crowd recently at the Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago. That’s not news. But his pointed observation of the Left’s “woke” culture is worthy of headlines. Being “woke” seems to mean that your eyes are wide open to everyone else’s political sins. Essentially, “woke” on the Left has become conformity to a political dogma, and may God help you if you are still asleep.
As Obama put it: “This idea of purity and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically ‘woke’ and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly. The world is messy; there are ambiguities.”
Even more pointedly: “Like if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because: ‘Man, did you see how woke I was? I called you out.’”
Corpus analysis indicates that “wake up” and “awake” often involve some kind of self-awareness, not the judgment of others. Obama was asking his audience to do something more along those lines — introspection, questioning the commonly accepted way of doing things.
There has been virtually no media coverage on Obama’s earlier comments in the same gathering: “… so the first stage is just kind of figuring out, all right, what do you really believe? What’s really important to you? Not what you pretend is important to you, but what is really important to you, and what are you willing to risk or sacrifice for it?”
In this sense, Kanye West seems to be truly “woke.” In a recent interview on BigBoy TV, West said, “My father was a Black Panther, my mother got arrested for the sit-ins at age six. They were fighting for us to have the right to our opinion, not the right to vote for whoever the white liberals said black people are supposed to vote for.” He went on, “Everybody think they so woke, but they following the rules of what woke supposed to be.”
West is putting the word back into some of its original context. The first recorded use of “woke” in a political sense was back in 1962. It appeared in The New York Times Magazine glossary of Harlem phrases and words. This was alongside an article by black novelist William Melvin Kelley on African American slang. Then, in 1972, a character in Barry Beckham’s play Garvey Lives! proclaimed that he’ll “stay woke” with the writings of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey. For many years, the term stayed in the African American community and was used there almost exclusively.
Of course, many on the Left have mocked and shunned West merely because he is now a vocal supporter of President Trump. West has been “canceled,” another term that is now in vogue. He joins the ranks of many others, such as journalist Katie Herzog, who published a piece on transgender people who experience second thoughts and stop their sexual transitions.
Let’s be clear. Free societies need people to be “woke” — that is, to think out of the box, to find themselves, to question established paths and directions. This makes for healthy and innovative communities. But people and facts cannot be canceled. Safe spaces and puritanical shaming do not constitute a democracy, nor do they win elections in the long run.
Dr. Guy Redmer is an English professor and author currently teaching in Taipei. He has published numerous books on language, as well as articles on public policy.
