Definition of Woke

2024-07-23

Category: politics

You will see the word "woke" thrown around quite a bit these days. Political screamers and radical memers seem to be completely in love with the word. If you should ask what it means, though, you are likely to get different answers depending on who you ask. What will you do?

Well, it is not uncommon for words to have multiple meanings depending on context. For example, unionized can mean formed into a group or removing the charge of particles. That's not the case for woke. All sides seem to think they are talking about the same thing. Who are those sides? We have the moderate left, the far left, the moderate right, and the far right. There's a surprise fifth side we will get to in a bit.

To the moderate left, they will tell you that woke means that you are sympathetic to the struggles of people who have various differences. The far left, like the far right, are nuts. To them, woke means that white, heterosexual males are the source of all evil and must be replaced with anything else. This is the part that the far right cries about and claims that the entire left (not just the far left) wants to exterminate anything related to caucasian people. The moderate right isn't really sure what to think, but their habit is to all march in lock step, so they go along with the far right just to be safe.

Before someone comes up with the traditional, "Not everybody on that side thinks…" I will go ahead and say, "Shut up." These are obviously gross generalizations. Nobody could catalog all the variations in all of this. By making sweeping statements of typical definitions, we can classify well enough to show the differences adequately for proper discussion without weighing down the whole thing.

As for the nature of those variations in definitions, the left will tend to vary more than the right. The right, in general, tends to walk hand in hand about everything, even things they should disagree with. For example, the Republican party is filled with Christian Evangelicals, super patriots, and international corporate entities, none of which should really get along. On the other hand, the different groups that make up the Democrats will refuse to go along with policy if they don't get their way on some smaller idea.

There is another...

But I mentioned another group; the group that loses out on all of this. The original group, you know, the ones who started using the word "woke", were Black Americans. That's right, them. You see, there was a movement among Black Americans to focus on making things better through awareness of the problems they face and the sources of those problems. It included the issues with racists and systemic racism (two different but related concepts), both historical and current. They also included self-defeating problems in their communities such as not completing school, single-parent homes, and violence. Think about it; which dialect of English would use "woke" as an adjective?

There are still groups within the Black American community working on these things. They can no longer use their word for such awareness, since it was stolen from them by the moderate left, and then mangled by whackos. My recommendation is to make up a new word, with no meaning to English speakers. Pick something that sounds distinctly African and is difficult to say. Make sure it is not a real word so liberals won't start decorating with it, saying things like, "It means 'peace' in Dyula." The word will eventually be co-opted, you just want to make it take a while.

For everybody else, let the far-whats-it people have the word "woke" and pick something else for your sensitivities. Whichever word you pick, try not to steal it from minorities.