The New Yorker Radio Hour - What Exactly Does “Woke” Mean, and How Did It Become so Powerful?

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

Many on the right blame “wokeness” for all of America’s ills—everything from deadly mass shootings to lower military recruitment. Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, recently signed a so-called Stop WOKE Act into law, and made the issue the center of his midterm victory speech. In Washington, there has been talk in the House of forming an “anti-woke caucus.” “I think ‘woke’ is a very interesting term right now, because I think it’s an unusable word—although it is used all the time—because it doesn’t actually mean anything,” the linguist and lexicographer Tony Thorne, the author of “Dictionary of Contemporary Slang,” tells David Remnick.  Plus, the poet Robin Coste Lewis talks with the staff writer Hilton Als about how suffering a traumatic brian injury led her to a career in poetry. Her most recent book, “To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness,” was published last month. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For years, many on the right have been lamb-baseding a certain kind of progressive sensibility. Think about the ubiquity of political correctness in the 1990s, endless fodder for Rush Limbaugh and Talk Radio. But the fewer over PC was nothing compared to the political battle over woke. You know what woke means? It means. It means you're a loser. Everything woke. Everything woke. It's true. Everything woke turns to shit. Okay? It's true. There's Donald Trump in 2021, and the next year, Ron DeSantis signed into law a controversial Stop Woke Act in the state of Florida. It was absolutely the centerpiece of his recent re-election victory speech.

We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the school. We fight the woke and the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die. In Washington, in the House of Representatives, there's talk of forming an anti-woke caucus. Where do you start on an anti-woke caucus? Most Republicans are now awakened to this fact

that wokeness is weakness. It's a cancer that's eating America from inside out. You look at the recruiting numbers in the United States military, way off of its goals. For conservatives now, wokeness is the root cause of everything negative, from lower military recruitment to deadly mass shootings,

as one senator insisted after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas. But what does woke actually mean? We asked a few people. So my initial thoughts on the word woke were really benign. There were words of warning to be aware of your surroundings. I've always thought it sounded a little silly. I mean, even when it first popped up just the word, you know, it still implies that everybody else is asleep

and everybody else is a problem, but I'm not. I like the woke concept because I feel like more people should be aware of their surroundings and what's going on in their community. And I feel there's a reason why things are the way they are. I couldn't tell you when I first heard it, but the context was always with black people. Black people were the only ones that were using the word woke or making any reference to staying woke. Always black people. And then I had a co-worker who would sing, stay woke.

To be honest, any associations I have with what it meant pre, I don't know, 20-20 have been like, totally supplanted by like the fact that it's a polemic now. So when I hear it, it, I just access like what's been taken and I don't really access like what the source of the word was. It's always with like a sardonic tone. It's always like with air quotes. It's often like people who like people in my milieu who still kind of associate themselves with like progressivism but are using the term like in this weird way that feels like they've also absorbed what like the right in America have co-opted like have co-opted it to be like they now that's their primary frame of reference. Wokeness calls out to people who are skeptics and cynical that yeah everything's

effed up and this is a problem and that's a problem and that person's a problem and you think like that and that's a problem and every white person is racist and we need to cancel all this stuff it gave power to people who, to me, just had a lot of negativity to spew. I have, I currently have a very good friend who is white, who every time I talk to him, complains about how woke his workplace is. He works at the Navy. The United States Navy. Which is to say, you can see what somebody's so upset about because it's like,

what are you complaining? What is the issue? To get a deeper insight on how such an ambiguous term, became so powerful in this country and well beyond, I spoke with Tony Thorne. He's a linguist and a lexicographer based in the UK, and he wrote the dictionary of contemporary slang. Slang is definitely his thing. Technically, this language is quite sophisticated. It uses metaphors, metonymy, synecarchy, rhetoric, sound symbolism.

It's technically quite sophisticated. Even if it's non-standard language that many people see as deficient or incorrect slang, it's an important part of society, whether you like it or not. Tony, when did you start hearing or becoming aware of the word that is now ubiquitous, woke? I came across woke, I think, around at the time of Black Lives Matter, when that movement and that phenomenon started to trend. So probably around 2014. The word, of course, had been around for much longer,

but that's when it started trending on social media and in discussions of politics and culture. My understanding of the word is that it's been around for a very long time, particularly in the black community, particularly in the United States. It actually probably goes right back to the, the 19th century because woke is, it's a non-standard, therefore not really correct form of the verb to wake or awaken.

And it's a non-standard past participle. So instead of saying, I was woken up or I was awakened, not just black people or people of color, but also I think southern white speakers in the southern states, to the US would have said this, I got woke. I was woke. So it's a dialect. It's a kind of informal dialect term, but it was very much part of African-American vernacular English. And when does it take on its political sense of awareness? I think in conversation, it probably happened in the 60s. But the earliest record we can find of it. I think I'm right.

was in 1971, there was a play produced in the US by someone called Barry Beckham called Garvey Lives, talking about Marcus Garvey, the sort of Black Liberationist. And in this play, they repeated the phrase, Mr. Garvey says, I must stay woke. I must be woke. So that was 1971. The word still didn't become common. It wasn't used by many people publicly, I think. until 2008 when a singer called Erica Badu produced a song called Master Teacher

and she also, it's part of that song, a kind of chorus, used the word stay woke. I must stay woke or you must stay woke. I stay woke. Why if there was the only master teachers now, I stay woke. To support you, baby. So it was 2008 that it kind of transferred into popular culture, I think. In the US, not in the UK. We didn't hear about it until Black Lives Matter popularized.

The references to Woke before 2016, 17, 18 were kind of sort of straightforward. It means socially aware. It means empathetic. Afterwards, the definitions change to it means self-righteous, it means pretending to be socially aware. So the term has already become twisted, if you like, and become difficult to use. Then the right, the conservative rights, seizes hold of this word in order to jeer at what they see as the self-righteous left. Okay, one-house lawmaker taking on a new battle to combat, Whokeness across the country, which he calls the greatest domestic threat facing America.

I think he's right. Now when I pick up the right-wing press, I see Fox News, I see the Daily Mail in Britain. Oh, yes. Woke is the center of the right-wing platform, not any particular fiscal policy. It's when I hear Ron DeSantis, it's all about we are the center of the anti-Woke movement. That's what the rhetoric of the campaign is because it seems to connect more easily than complicated policy prescriptions about foreign policy or domestic policy. Am I right? I think you're absolutely right.

Linguistically, I think woke is a very interesting term right now because I think that it's an unusable word, although it is used all the time because it doesn't actually mean anything, rather like I think in a year. U.S. Antifa has come, but perhaps it did mean something, perhaps it did describe an actual grouping. But it's come to be a sort of shorthand for everybody we disagree with. And I think woke has become a lazy slur. Are we fighting about language more than we did before? Yes. What has happened to public language, public discourse, the language used in the media, at least, and on social media, which is the new phenomenon. What I think has happened in the last decades is this. If you want even perhaps your opponents in the media to reproduce your message,

you need to cultivate them and you need to join in with them in the messaging procedure. And Bill Clinton then emulated by Tony Blair picked up spin. and the notion of the spin doctors. But then what happened is this same process evolved and became more and more, if you like, divisive so that then you have Steve Bannon advising Donald Trump. And shortly afterwards, the same thing happened. Bannon's playbook was picked up enthusiastically by Dominic Cummings, who played the same role for Boris Johnson.

Only now it's different. It's not spin anymore. It's something far more aggressive. Bannon himself used terms like fire hosing, like flooding the zone. What he meant by that was overwhelming your opponents with a barrage of messages using very strong language, not simply to counter their arguments. It wasn't about just putting your own spin, your own. your own bias on some piece of news. It was about destroying their credibility, denigrating them, and overwhelming them, so that your opponents become unable to express themselves or even to unable to understand the public discourse. So if you see what I'm getting at, it's a process, which when we look back is perhaps a coherent evolution of public language, political language, contentious language, but it has now reached the stage of divisiveness,

what I call toxic terminology and weaponized words, which is far, far, far more aggressive and difficult to negotiate than it was 20 years ago. So you fully expect that woke will be the dominant term on the right as we head toward elections in 2024? It seems that the right, I mean, if I look at it from their point of you, why should they let go of it? Why should they abandon it just because it's meaningless? Because it works. This is exactly Steve Bannon's and Dominic Cummings. Dominic Cummings won Brexit

with this tactic, with this playbook. Don't argue with them. Don't counter their arguments. Don't present facts. Just demolish them with whatever words you can find that work. And that's what woke is still working because for people in the UK, I think if you go into a bar or you're talking to your neighbor across the garden fence, you'll hear a lot of ordinary people who may not be bigots or may be bigots, but who've picked this term up and use it quite cheerfully. And the left can't do anything about it. The left can't stop them using it. Finally, are there any new words that you're hearing that we're not maybe as aware of that are joining woke as toxic terminology. There's a comical term that is used in the UK, which I don't think is ever used in the US,

which is gammon. G-A-A-D-M-O-N. It's gammon is a kind of boiled ham that was a kind of proletariat meal that not very sophisticated people eat. And a gammon means a red-faced, angry, white, old bigot. The image they're trying to evoke is the boiling hot rage and the bright orange-red complexion of this furious right-wing guy with no hair and a huge beer belly. And it again, like woke, It's very useful shorthand because we don't have another word in the English language, in slang even, that covers all those connotations, white, angry, bigoted, right-wing, middle-aged or old,

all of those features of that word. So we had to invent one, and the left invented gammon, sometimes elaborated into gamanista. So the left does it too. Tony Thorne, thank you so much. That was wonderful. It was a pleasure. I apologize if I became heated. Tony Thorne is the author of the Dictionary of Contemporary Slag. And by the way, we published a profile last year of Rhonda Santis, which touched on his anti-woke crusade and a great deal more.

That profile was by Dexter Filkins, and you can find it at New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Hilton Al's is a longtime staff writer for the magazine and one of the best cultural critics working today. Recently, Hilton wrote about a new book called To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness. It's by the poet Robin Cost Lewis, and it was inspired by a collection of family photographs. It's a book Hilton says about how the dead do not stay dead. Robin Cost Lewis joined Hilton Laws on our program in 2016 after a book. the release of her last poetry collection, her debut.

Voyage of the Sable Venus won the National Book Award for Poetry. Oh my God, this book is one of the high points of my life. I begged, I begged to review it. Thank you. And I said she's going to win this award. Yeah, I'm glad everybody knew I didn't know. Voyage of the Sable Venus took its name from an 18th century engraving. Because there's a gorgeous black woman on a clamshell like Botticelli's Venus,

and she's attended by all these classical figures. And it is until you really look at that you realize it's a pro-slavery image because Triton or Neptune is carrying instead of a Triton, he's carrying a flat of the Union Jack. That got her interested in images of Black women in Western art, a research project that got much bigger than she ever anticipated. It just spurred me on. And it was like, well, wait a minute, damn it. If this title is so complicated and so rich, what are other titles doing? And it just led me on this whole path.

And I really thought at the time it was going to be a few pages long. And then every time I would do research, it would just get darker and deeper and longer and more horrid. It just didn't stop. It didn't let up. The Western Art Project, as beautiful as it is, it also has such an ugly underside. Yes. For so many kinds of people. Well, it had to hack. away at other things in order to stand on something, right?

Right, right. So, you know, like for me, if I would go into a museum and see some kind of grand historical painting about some emperor doing something fabulous, conquering some land, there might not have been a black woman in that painting, but the frame might have had black female bodies carved throughout it. Yes. In some kind of subservient position. Yes.

Do you know? And we're not supposed to notice that frame. and we're not supposed to think about it, but it's there. And that's what was so fascinating to me is that there are so many black women in exhibitions all over the world in every time period and every country, every continent. It's everywhere. But you wouldn't think of it because who would think to look at the carving of a comb closely? Yes. Or the face of a button for emperor.

Why would someone need to carve a black female body onto the button of an emperor? Why? Yes. You know, and then when you start looking just for that, that's when it begins to kind of emerge. Yes. And so I wouldn't have, I don't think I would have done, I don't think, I don't know that I would have seen that had my brain not slowed me down and made me look more slowly. Yes. I know that you began writing poetry because of something that happened.

Yeah. Do you talk, would you mind talking about it? Not at all, not at all. I was in what they call a catastrophic accident. I fell through an open stairwell and I... What does that mean? There were no stairs? There was no rail.

There was no rail. That I didn't know and it was a dark room and I was going to get my coat in a restaurant and they failed to tell me there was a hole in the middle of the floor and I walked into air. Where was this? In San Francisco. Mm-hmm. I was at a conference and I was just having dinner with a friend and I got cold and I asked for my coat. And they led me back to this room and said it's over there and I could see my coat hanging on a wall, but I couldn't see the hole in the floor.

Oh, my gosh. So I fell through. And for the last, I guess it's 16 years now, 16 years, I've been doing a lot of rehab and recovery. And somewhere... What was the effect of the following? Well, oh, thank you. So I was diagnosed with permanent mild to moderate brain down. so a traumatic brain injury.

Oh my God. And then I had all kinds of injuries all over my body. I still have so many surgeries to have that I'll be going into soon. But the most kind of devastating part of it was the brain injury. Yes. And at some point, I couldn't read or write, and I was very, they call it exquisite hypersensitivity. Everything triggered some kind of symptom, talking, walking, walk, seeing, hearing, smelling, you name it,

anything that had to do with the senses would send me into a spiral where I would end up sleeping for days upon days. My memory, I fought really hard for a year to teach myself the alphabet again. It took a year just to do that because the language center of my brain was badly damaged.

But, you know, I hate to be that person that is always looking for the green side of something. But it turned out to be, in many ways, a blessing in disguise. I calm brain damage the gift that keeps on taking. You know? And I don't think that I know, I joke with my friends that this book is actually about brain damage. I know I would not have written this book had I not had that accident. So partly because if I'm going to die, I can write whatever the hell I want.

Exactly. You're free. I'm so free. Yes. And there's no one to care about. much in terms of pleasing. But also, the doctors told me I can only write one line a day and I could only read one one line a day. And that, of course, spiraled me into an incredible depression for several months.

And then at some point, you know how that grace, that voice of grace just comes into your mind and this voice just said to me, okay, then, it's going to be the best damn line I can think of. And so every single day I would spend in bed thinking of the best line. And I couldn't write because my hands were all in different casts and all kinds of splints. Were you a mother when you had this accident? No, no, no, no. They also told me I couldn't have a kid.

They told me I could never write again, teach again, read again, and not become a mother. And you've done all those things. I was annoyed. I was enraged. Yes. There's nothing like being annoyed to get the juices going. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Tell me about your son, and how did that miracle?

occur to you. Oh my God. What do you mean? Well, I know how it happens. But the decision There's a bird and there's a bee. Yes, exactly. There's a stork in the diaper. Exactly. But how did you decide to become a mother? This is such a great question. I have been haunted with being a mother all my life. Really? Yeah, I'm one of those crazy women who just always wanted to be a mother. And when they told me I couldn't have kids, I really had to think about it and I thought about it for like a decade, you know, what does it mean to be a disabled woman and to have a child and don't be selfish and mess with this kid's life if you can't really raise him or her well. And then one day I was walking down the street in Boston. I was doing major rehabilitation at the time. I was in occupational therapy, speech, language

therapy, just, you know, going outside would hurt. And one day I had gone to do something, and there was a woman, gorgeous woman in a power wheelchair. Wheeling down the street, it felt like to me 60 miles per hour with two of her kids in her lap. Wow. She was like, high-telling it, and they were having such a good time. And I was like, you idiot. If this woman can raise her kids, you can have a kid.

And she was such my inspiration. And so then I was hell-bent, and I tried and tried for many, many years. And then it finally happened. It finally happened. And the deep irony for me is that my father was the first person to tell me way before my accident, I think you really should have a baby, Robin. You want to be a mother.

You should just do it. My father was incredible. He was funny, too. I love him already. Oh, he was so good. Yes. And the deep irony is I found out after years of trying to get pregnant, I found out I was pregnant four days after my father's funeral.

Oh, wow. Which felt so magical to me because I always told him, you know, You know, when you die, you better take me with you. Yes. There's no reason I'm staying without you. Yes. And so the fact that when I found it I was pregnant, it felt like he stayed with me in some way. How does the accident impact you today?

Well, I mean, I've grown comfortable with being brain damaged. Yes. It's become familiar. You know, that saying that human beings can get used to anything. Yeah. I got used to it. You work around it. I work around it.

I've learned how to take care of myself. Mm-hmm. I know when sometimes I was just at a party on Friday in Miami at the Book Fest, and I was starting to get symptomatic, and I was like, you should just go. You have a reading tomorrow, and if you don't go and go to sleep, you know, by the morning, your face will be numb, your left arm will be numb. You won't be able to remember how to spell your name or that even where you are. So just go to bed.

Okay. In those ways. But then also in lovely ways, you know, I still, I don't know. I know. I still very much appreciate that my brain has become an odd little bedfellow with me. Like, we love each other. I'm like, you're a freak brain. And that's kind of sexy to me. Yeah. I like that you see these things that other people aren't seeing. Yes. But keep it to yourself and we'll try to turn it into art at some point. Yes. Yes. It changed your perspective profoundly. Absolutely. And I...

Does it help you parent in a different way, do you think? Absolutely. It helps me put it in fifth gear every day from the gate. And, you know, I'm... You wake up with him and it's like, look, we're here. Absolutely. And also, I mean, this is the macaw part. Like, supposedly my brain won't last as long as most people's brains will last.

I know that. And I think that's also why I push myself so hard to write. There's a certain urgency. Like, I feel like I'm fighting the clock until my brain starts to rot. And so I try to have a lot of fun. I try to parent him for the future. Like, I've already, like, I have a whole library for him once I'm gone. I have friends sign books to him for the future because I know there's going to come a time where I won't be able to be present in the same way that I am now.

Do you talk to me about that? I do. I mean, I had to because my disability is invisible. Yes. And so the way I described it to him when he was younger, I said it's like mommy's brain is in a wheelchair. You know, and sometimes, you know, it's hard because, you know, he's a gregarious, precocious, fabulous child. And, you know, he's about eight now.

He's seven. And I have to tell him sometimes to be quiet. That's a drag. Yeah. It's just a drag. Or I can't, you know, I'm sad that he doesn't know the person before my accident because I was a huge audiophile. I mean, like, a music collection that's brilliant.

And I can't listen to music and have people talking at the same time in a room. Yeah. Unless it's a lot of people talking. So things like that. Like I'm constantly, I'm constantly repressing his little spirit in ways in order to stay. In order to stay asymptomatic and, like, take care of him or make him dinner. So in those ways. But it's also okay because I feel like, you know, he's getting to learn about the ways in which bodies are different.

And also the ways in which life curtails us. Absolutely. Poet Robin Cost Lewis. She spoke with the New Yorkers Hilton Owls in 2016, her new book. is to the realization of perfect helplessness. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I want to thank you for joining us today. See you next time.

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