Today, Explained - Woke, woke, woke, woke, woke

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

How “woke” went from Marcus Garvey to Childish Gambino to Ron DeSantis. This episode was produced by Siona Peterous, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm and I'm standing outside the White House because a lot of people who are running to live in this house in 2024 are obsessed with the word woke. So I thought I'd come out here and ask people what exactly that word means. Being awake. Yeah, woke means like you wake up. Or maybe somebody wants to be attentive, then you want to convey that message to woke up body. People who are willing to recognize and convey the essential dignity of every human being.

To signify like an awareness of racial issues, especially for black Americans. Someone who can see through the facade of others. It's ironic. The people who are woke are the ones who are actually asleep. You've bought into an agenda that's being pushed by liberal extreme leftism.

It's all bullshit. It's all bullshit. Coming up on today explained what woke means to just about everybody. The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications.

Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs? And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. Explained. 2024 Explained. When we want to talk to someone about the outsized presence the word woke has in the 2024 Republican primary,

we thought of Ested Herndon. He's the host of the Run-Up podcast at the New York Times. So you've surely noticed that instead of running against Joe Biden, it seems like a lot of Republicans are running against the word woke and the idea of wokeness. Absolutely. I mean, ever since Biden came into office, they've been trying to find a thing to stick to him. You know, he's not a figure that was as personally enraging as, you know, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, the villains they had in the past. And the Republican kind of ideological core has been to really find a way to invalidate the other side in that kind of villainous manner.

And so I think you have Republicans searching for what that's going to be in the Joe Biden Democratic Party. And wokeness has become the kind of catch-all term to embody some of that. We hear it over and over on the campaign trail. Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down. Beyond all of those failed policies, maybe one of the most troubling developments of the past two years has been the Biden administration's wholehearted embrace of the woke left's all-encompassing assault on culture and values. We are going to leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history where it belongs. It makes it really clear that for the next year and a half, it may not be a campaign against the White House, its policies, or the like, but just the idea that the White House represents a larger progressive ecosystem that is encroaching on the kind of cultural values

of everyday Americans. That's the most generous understanding of what this term has come to mean, but it's basically meant everything Republicans don't like. And I definitely know that Ron DeSantis is like the king of anti-wokeness. He says Florida is where woke goes to die. But it's not just him. It's Nikki Haley. It's Vivek on this show, actually. They're blowing woke smoke to deflect accountability from the questions that they would rather not answer to their customers or to their shareholders or the people who would actually scrutinize those businesses in other ways. I mean, on our podcast, we talked to Nate Cohn, the Times chief polling expert,

who tells us that when you look at the issues across the Republican base, there are very few that cut across each kind of sector. And one of them is this anti-wokeness, the Manhattan finance person who is a conservative and the evangelical in the South who's a conservative are both angry at this same kind of progressive push as they see it. And so I think that we can name this. I think a lot of this came after 2020, where I think there has been a backlash to what was a rising rhetoric of social justice and racial equity. And I think they've really capitalized on that feeling that that push that went too far in quotations. Does it differ amongst the other candidates who are running for the

2024 Republican nomination? Or is it all sort of this DeSantis vein? It definitely differs. There's candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy, who's made a surprising push in the Republican nomination, going from kind of an unknown to maybe one of the lower-tier candidates, mid-tier candidates. He's really pushed himself as a CEO who represents a push back against kind of wokeness in corporate culture. When we were at CPAC, this was the overwhelming topic of discussion. Woke culture attacks our values and faith? We'll stay true. Leaders who are driven by cowardly wokeness. There is a union between big tech, government, big corporate, woke ESG America to silence

dissenting views and they're all together in this regime that has really operated in opposition to the American people. Every diversity, equity, and inclusion program, every ESG rule, every woke initiative in our military must be uprooted and completely defunded. You had people like Nikki Haley there, whose kind of famous moment was taking down the Confederate flag in South Carolina. That would probably be labeled as a semi-woke action today. That shows you where the energy is on the Republican side right now. It's not to really pitch yourself as someone who is some racial uniter or like cultural midpoint of the left and the right. It's really to push yourself as a champion of bringing what they view as American culture back to their side. The interesting

thing here is that actually Donald Trump is probably the candidate that talks about wokeness the least. He even said that he's sick of it and the words getting overused. He doesn't know what it means anymore. And I don't like the term woke because I hear woke, woke, woke. You know, it's like just a term that used half the people can't even define it. They don't know what it is. It's a kind of classic Trump honesty moment when he says the thing out loud. I mean, wokeness is an articulation of Republican grievance that has built up over a long time. But they're using this word as a kind of vague catch-all in this moment.

Donald Trump has no problem naming the grievances that he has. What I think he is doing in terms of acknowledging the kind of vagueness of his opponents is saying that they're tiptoeing around grievances that he's willing to name, that he and his supporters are willing to call out directly. And I think they think that's what's going to win them at the end of the day. It's not to engage in this kind of elite back and forth about the meaning of wokeness, but actually to embody the frustration of the base conservative voter. Is this motivating and activating voters on the right? I mean, it depends on what voters we're talking about. If we're looking for the evidence we have as of now, it's not that this has really helped them win. I mean, Republicans were talking

a whole bunch about wokeness in the last midterms, and that was one that went really poorly for them, at least relative to their expectations. We have seen it become a motivating factor, going back to what Nate told me, among the Republican electorate. So if you're thinking about the primary and the period that we're in now, it makes a lot of sense for them to be talking about this. The problem is there's no evidence that there's really a mass motivating issue in the general election. For as much as they've targeted in the non-presidential level, I'm thinking about states with gerrymandered state legislatures. I'm thinking about Nebraska or Wisconsin or things like that. It's really caused those folks to push anti-trans bills on the state level and really to legislate

anti-wokeness into law. So it's having an impact. But if the question is, is it working on a national level or does it help the Republican nominee win the next presidential election? That is very much unclear. Do you think, like the former president himself, Republican voters might eventually get tired of hearing about wokeness as the boogeyman? Totally. I think they could. Out of all those candidates making this their calling card, they haven't overtaken Donald Trump. You know, like Ron DeSantis might be the king of wokeness, but he's not the king of the primary, at least so far. Although, this can be a kind of an issue that crosses across the Republican electorate.

It's not clear that it makes it rise in priority past what voting for Donald Trump provides them. Donald Trump is not going to be talking about wokeness left and right, but he will be talking about that underlying feeling, that retribution, the anti-deep state, dismantle DOJ and FBI. I don't think these are disconnected things, but I don't think a Donald Trump-led Republican Party is one that is more woke, if we could use that phrasing. For the Republican candidates who are using it, it has yet to show a full political value. But I also think that the whole party has become motivated by grievance. And if Donald Trump is the nominee, that will be felt by public and everyone around, no matter if he's talking about wokeness or not.

But if DeSantis is the nominee, oh, then this is the whole election's about. We're running wokeness into, like, 2032. Everything will be about wokeness. It will be a referendum on wokeness. I imagine. I imagine. If he's the nominee, that's what this is going to be about. I imagine.

Quack, quack, quack, quack, quack, quack. I imagine. If he's the nominee, that's what this is going to be about. I imagine. Ested Herndon hosts the run-up podcast for the New York Times. If you can't get enough 2024 coverage, even though it's still like two July 4th and like two Halloweens away, this is definitely the show for you. More Woke Mind Virus on Today Explained when we're back. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures

is a great way to keep up with family. And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it. You can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself.

So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody. You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.comcom promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners

and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a

feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk. An authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. The definition of woke according to Merriam-Webster. Woke. Aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social justice. Woke, politically liberal, as in matters of racial and social justice,

especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme. Today Explained is back. Woke clearly means a lot of things to a lot of people. To bring some clarity on the etymology of this word, though, we reached out to Kathleen Newman Bramang, who wrote about WOKE for Refinery29. Most historians trace it back to Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey. I, Marcus Messiah Garvey, am the founder and first president general of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, an organization determined to unite all the Black people of the world into one great body to establish a country and government absolutely their own. And his work in 1923, when he told his followers to wake up Ethiopia, wake up Africa,

it was a sentiment aimed to inspire political consciousness and social activism in the wake of colonialism. It went all the way back to Marcus Garvey. Yes. Amazing. Yeah. And then it takes us to 1938 and a protest song by Huddy Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly, which included the actual phrase, stay woke. And it's in a spoken word component to the song, Scottsboro Boys. And it references the story of nine Black boys and men who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. I advise everybody to be a little careful when they go along through that, but stay woke, keep their eyes open. What is said to be the first official printed definition was published by the New York Times in 1962 by William Melville Kelly. And he mentions the word in this piece

called, if you're woke, you dig it. And in the piece, he's going through the slang terms that the Negro community, as he calls it, uses in Harlem, for example. And the essay talks about Black slang and its evolution and its appropriation by white people, fittingly. By 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. essentially gave a speech on wokeness at Oberlin College. In the speech, he said, the great challenge facing every individual graduating today is to remain awake through this social revolution. We must all learn to live together as brothers, or we will all perish together as fools. We must see this, believe this, and live by it. If we are to remain awake through a great revolution.

How do we go from this historic use of awake to this sort of contemporary use of woke. When exactly does that evolution happen? It kind of goes away. It exists in academia. But outside of that, it starts to become more prevalent in pop culture in 2008 when Erykah Badu releases her song Master Teacher, which includes the refrain, I stay woke.

And that term was included in the song by Georgia Ann Muldrow, who co-wrote the song. And in an interview to OK Player, she describes what she told Erykah Badu about the word woke. And I really think this kind of encapsulates what the original meaning is and how it kind of is used in culture by Black folks. So she said, woke is if someone put a burlap sack on your head, knocked you out and put you in a new location. And then you come to and understand where you are ain't home and the people around you ain't your neighbors. They're not acting in a neighborly fashion. They're the ones who conked you on your head.

You got kidnapped here and then you got punked out of your own language, everything. That's woke, understanding what your ancestors went through. Wow. Wow. Why isn't that in Merriam-Webster? Merriam-Webster, take note. That is a definition. Right? So that song, you know, really struck a chord.

And then we started to see woke pop up more in music and TV. Childish Gambino releases Redbone. The TV series Woke comes out on Hulu about a Black cartoonist having an awakening after experiencing police violence. What's in the bag? He's got a weapon. No, no, no, just a staple. No, no, no, because you got the wrong guy. And I think, you know, around the 2010s leading to 2020, it's used to capture an idea of questioning power and of radical politics. But also, it's being taken less seriously, I would say, in black vernacular. It's also used as a joke. So wait, so Erykah Badu and potentially Childish Gambino and this

series on Hulu, they are sincerely using this term woke. But you're saying in black vernacular, it's a bit of a joke? I mean, it's a bit of both. So Childish Gambino is referencing like staying woke as far as getting cheated on in that song. And that I think is something in Black vernacular people were saying, like, whoa, whoa, stay woke, stay woke, in reference to, like, making sure your eyes are wide open in your relationship. Yeah. In the Hulu show, Woke, they do kind of use it in a comedic sense at times to make fun of people who are always eager to point out all the issues within our society, who are kind of pretentious with their knowledge of social issues. And there is a critique, I think, to be made of that kind of performative caricature of a woke person.

I first got woke when I seen Terminator, and I realized it wasn't just a movie, it was prophecy, first identified by the 3.5%ers, but that's another conversation. I'm Dr. Hadassah Olayinka Ali-Yobin, pre-PhD. Say good morning, children. Good morning. Good morning.

Who's in mourning? See, see, see, the white man will have you speaking death into the top of your day, trying to kill your dreams just like they killed you, P.N. But overall, I think it had a positive connotation and it was something to strive for. You know, the term woke bae was a way that you would describe men in Hollywood or in your life who were politically aware. And it was seen as a positive thing in a partner. We're going to celebrate a famous dude for being super hot, super smart, and affecting positive change in the world.

His name, Oak Bay. It was a trait that you wanted to look for, like somebody who was woke. And then what happens between it being used in Black vernacular as something of a joke and it becoming a political cudgel. In 2020, after George Floyd's murder, where there was this open conversation about race in a way that I hadn't seen in my lifetime. And I think that the white discomfort that came from that summer is when the word woke was twisted into a political tool and became the buzzword of the push against progressiveness

that we see now. That summer, white people were finally talking out loud about the ways in which structural racism shows up in our everyday lives. I take responsibility for every unchecked moment, for every time it was easier to ignore than to call it out for what it was. Every not-so-funny joke. Every unfair stereotype. Every blatant injustice, no matter how big or small. They were talking about privilege and unconscious bias and microaggressions and things that are real, but frankly make white people very uncomfortable,

certain white people. And I think that that shift in culture and the fact that real change looked like it was slowly and incrementally on the way, I think that scared conservatives. Taking the word woke, which signals progress, and demonizing it was a way of shutting down any progress and any attempts to push social activism and racial equality forward. And so you started hearing politicians refer to the woke mob. The elite media, the woke mob, they don't like these people. And they want the rest of America to dislike them too.

I think that the backlash to the Me Too movement comes into play here as well, because all of a sudden the worst thing you could possibly do was to get canceled. Another word that comes from Black vernacular that has been twisted and co-opted. And then the people doing the canceling, according to the right, was the woke mob. We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where woke goes to die. There's polls that back this up, that people do not know what the word woke means. I think this

was a USA Today and Ipsos poll, and it was 56% of Americans said when they could define it, they defined it in the positive sense. So when people can define it, which I don't think is often, they are not using it in the same, you know, really divisive way that I think it has been used now as a political tool to divide and to weaponize this, like, cultural fear of progress. I also think when you hear the term in regards to there being a Black actress playing the Little Mermaid. The Ariel that my girls and daughters grew up with is now gone because of these woke people over at their entertainment industry. I just hope that Disney collapses and burns. What a woke, horrible company. And you hear people saying, oh, I don't like that there are woke bandages now. This was a tweet that went viral from a woman who was at her local drugstore, and there were different colors of Band-Aids, one of them being brown, and she called them

woke bandages. When you hear that, like, it's really hard to understand what they actually mean when they say the word woke. Because in that case, I think it's just a stand-in for Black people or a stand-in for anything that's not white. In that case, I think it, honestly, it's bent into a slur. Do you think this is the final chapter of this word, or do you think it finds a way to have significant meaning again after this particular experience as the thing that everyone hates? I mean, it's hard because I think as soon as you see a white politician say any sort

of slang word, we've lost it. Kiara M. Bridges, she's a professor of law at UC Berkeley, called it a double violation. She said slang amongst Black people is a love language and that it's frustrating when that slang becomes appropriated and the meaning morphs into something else. And then what we do, though, is we always create and Black folks always find new language to describe our specific plight and what we're going through. So I think that, you know, when it comes to whether I'm going to use it anymore, I think the only way I use woke is in this context, Sean. Like it's in this context of being mad at how it's changed and talking about the frustration over how it's been co-opted. But in my everyday life and in conversation, I don't really use it anymore. And when I hear it, it's used in a

context that is someone from the far right screaming at me for being too woke in my DMs or in my email. And in that case, I take it as a compliment. Kathleen Newman Bramang is the Deputy Director Global at Refinery29 Unbothered. You can find her piece on Woke at Refinery29.com. Thanks as well to Dr. Kelly Wright and Dr. Tracy Weldon, two linguists who helped us better understand this word. Our show today was produced by Siona Petros. We were edited by Amina Alsadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard,

and mixed by Patrick Boyd, who, in his spare time, sings about being woke. Stay with me now Your pink shirt is You want cheese with that That's Socks and sandals Now that's you