If there is one word that drives me nuts, it is the word woke. Whenever I hear someone on the right use this word as a pejorative or insult I feel a sort of anger I don’t normally feel for anything else, it feels as though something has been stolen from me and the thief then chooses to taunt me with it. I am not African American and claim no ownership to the word or phrase it originates from but yet I can’t help feeling the way I do.
The phrase stay woke has been around for many decades, some say even a century, the earliest recorded use being in the 1930s by Lead Belly about the Scottsboro Boys. The Scottsboro Boys were a group of 9 black boys aged 13-20 who were falsely accused of raping 2 white women in Alabama.
You can listen to the song on Spotify as well as hear Lead Belly explain why he wrote the song and his use of the phrase “Stay woke, keep your eyes open”
The next recorded use I could find was this quote from a 1971 play by American playwright Barry Beckham titled “Garvey Lives!”, where he wrote: “I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon’ stay woke. And I’m gon’ help him wake up other black folk.”
I have known about the phrase -or at least the “grammatically correct” version- for almost thirty years. In Spike Lee’s School Daze, Samuel L Jackson’s character goes around the HBCU waking all the students up.
So what does the term “Woke” mean? Woke has always been an alarm system for African Americans, a warning to each other about the dangers that exist in society, a risk alert system so to speak. In the case of African Americans it alerts them to mostly racial risk.Â
Most societies have a version of “stay woke”, whilst most don’t have a racial connotation they still remain alarm calls. For example in Nigeria people would say “Shine your eyes” which means to rub your eyes after waking up, ensuring you stay alert to the risk of being taken advantage of. Here in the UK, if a stranger were to arrive in a council estate or village you might hear people say “Keep your eyes peeled” or as the police would say on the stickers they gave out until the 90s “Stay Alert”.
And how did it become a pejorative?
The hijacking of the word woke wasn’t by accident, just like CRT (Critical Race Theory) and now DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) it was hijacked intentionally to silence the black voice in America, which in my opinion is an impossible task.
There are two groups of people who use the phrase woke as a pejorative or slight. Racists and Ignoramuses. Sometimes the individual is both.
The racists usually know the meaning of the word but use it as a pejorative nonetheless. The ignoramus on the other hand has no clue about the history of the word and phrase but proceeds to use it as a way of offending or categorising things they object to.
It is sad that there wasn’t a great pushback against the use of woke as a pejorative, it is however not too late to do this. This is not the real shame though. The real shame is that it had the support of right leaning black “intellectuals” like John Mcwhorter (who wrote Woke Racism), Coleman Hughes, Thomas Chatterton-Williams.
So Stay woke, shine your eyes and keep em peeled!
