Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson. Max Becherer/AP
[Part 1 of this article published on July 22, 2023 on this website. It described Republican obsession with “Woke”]
“Woke” had a long history prior to co-opting by GOP
“Woke” was used in Black protest songs dating back to the early 20th century. There is debate about its origins, but as far back as 1938, singer Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, used the phrase in a recording of an afterword of his song, “Scottsboro Boys,” to warn of potential racist violence against Black people in the South.
“I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through Alabama — stay woke, keep their eyes open,” Ledbetter said in what’s believed to be the first audio recording of someone using the phrase “stay woke.”
The Scottsboro Boys were nine Black teenagers who are accused of raping two white girls in what is widely seen today as one of the worst cases of racist legal injustice. It helped spur the civil rights movement and loosely inspired the book and movie To Kill A Mockingbird.
“It comes out of the experience of Black people of knowing that you have to be conscious of the politics of race, class, gender, systemic racism, ways that society is stratified and not equal,” Ohio State’s Literary professor Elaine Richardson said of the expression.
“Woke” became a rallying cry for Activists
The phrase came back into popular use in 2008 after Erykah Badu’s song Master Teacher. Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, used it in his song Redbone in 2016.
At other times, though, the seriousness of the word has been diluted, used facetiously and ironically on social media.
Modern Black activism and the Black Lives Matter movement, though, used it widely as a rallying cry.
“I think that the Black Lives Matter generation really put the word back in popular consciousness, even though it was never really gone, because it’s always in just community parlance,” Elaine Richardson (Ohio State professor) said. “In the Black Lives Matter movement, the word, I think, reached another level of popularity with people saying ‘stay woke.’ That hashtag was really popular.”
But there’s a straight line between the use by Black Lives Matter activists and Republicans using it now. For conservatives, the culture of protests in the streets — and violence, at times — was emblematic of what they don’t want to see in the country.
It’s something that’s been seen many times over the last American century, including and especially during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
Republican usage of Woke “is very dangerous”
“People who are interested in keeping the hierarchy and the social inequality the way that it is and not trying to level the playing field or not trying to have social equality, one way you can do that is through controlling language, through controlling how people think about ideas,” Richardson said. “And it’s actually stripping — it’s trying to strip Black people out of their history, out of our lived experience, our identity.”
She also sees dangers in how Republicans are using the phrase, warning that it could lead to violence, like recent cases in which Black people have been shot knocking on a door, for example.
“It promotes anti-Blackness,” Richardson argued. “It promotes stratification. It promotes fear. And that’s very dangerous.”
Conservatives don’t see it that way — and show no signs of curtailing its use on the campaign trail. Badu was asked about Republicans using the phrase and in particular DeSantis’ quote that “Florida is where woke goes to die.”
“I think they mean Black,” she said on MSNBC earlier this year. “Yeah. It’s another way to say ‘thug’ or something like that. It is what it is. It doesn’t belong to us anymore, and once something goes out into the world, it takes on a life of its own.”
