For a word that has gotten so much currency from the right, you'd think the term "woke"—an AAVE shorthand term for societal awareness, now routinely wielded as a pejorative by conservatives railing against Democratic and progressive policies—would be easy for them to define. It's now become the go-to buzzword for Republicans and their media propaganda outlets, used to justify everything from firing teachers to threatening corporate board members, though there seems to have been remarkably little effort to spell out exactly what it means.
The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), held this week In Washington, D.C., and featuring many of the stalwarts of the conservative movement, was no exception. Speaker after speaker excoriated the “woke” politics of the left.
But as reported by Eric Garcia for Business Insider, even the most virulent attendees at CPAC inexplicably resort to unintelligible gibberish when they're asked to provide a simple definition of the word.
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Garcia tried so hard to get a definition from them. He really did.
Marleen Laska, a conservative activist from Pennsylvania who attended the conference, has a broad definition of what “woke” meant.
“That’s a loaded question,” she said. “It covers so many things. It incorporated all the stupidity that is going on with the country.”
But asking what someone means by a word they routinely use is not really a “loaded” question. As for “stupidity”? It may just be the case that these deep thinkers—such as 2023 CPAC attendees Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz—are so intimately familiar with the word’s contextual meaning that actually defining it seems to be a superfluous gesture. It may even be a simple case of "knowing it when they see it," as the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart described "obscenity." Still, since "woke" seems to be the linchpin of the grievances motivating all Republican behavior these days, they at least owe the rest of the country some semblance of explanation of what the hell they’re talking about.
One would hope they could do better than these half-assed word salad concoctions, taken from CPAC 2023 attendees and cited by Garcia in his article:
“To me the word ‘woke’ is the antithesis of everything that America was founded on,” Marie Rogerson, an executive director of program development at Moms for Liberty based in Florida, told The Independent. “It’s anything for me that’s anti-American, anti-common sense, anti-really in the sense of education, what education was meant to do.”
[...]
Angelo Veltri, northeast regional director for Young Americans for Liberty, had a similarly vague description for what the word meant.
“‘Woke’ to me means that you are basing your reality off of fiction and your feelings rather than actual facts,” he told The Independent. “‘Woke’ is more of the sense of like, if you feel a certain way, then you must be true, and they typically adhere to their truths rather than the truth as a whole. And it’s leading toward this woke postmodernism in a sense. Woke communism, where they’re trying to take over based on people’s feelings rather than actual factual evidence.”
Sorry, but I’m still not getting it. Admittedly, words can be hard. It seems clear, as Garcia points out, that conservatives are not employing the original meaning of the word, as originally expressed in African American vernacular English (AAVE), when it was understood to “literally mean becoming woken up or sensitized to issues of justice.” Not at all, in fact.
Kate Ng, writing for The Independent, helps a bit to clarify exactly what “woke” in its modern context, spewed out of the mouths of Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson, and others, actually means. She interviewed linguist Tony Thorne of London’s King’s College, who explained that as of right now, the word “woke” is:
[W]eaponised by those on the right as a “sneering, jeering dismissive term” to denigrate those who did not agree with their beliefs, said Mr Thorne.
Like phrases before it - such as “politically correct”, “social justice warrior” and “cancel culture” - “woke” has become a toxicised term used by alt-right and politically conservative groups to insult people on the left.
But with all due respect to Professor Thorn, it goes a bit deeper than that. I suggest Republicans may need a more direct explanation for what is coming out of their mouths. Because it appears they need a bit of assistance, even for such a little word. So, for all those Republicans continually yammering out a word they cannot or will not define for the rest of us, let me just take a humble stab at what they are saying when they say “woke.”
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In my opinion, when Republicans call something “woke,” what they’re really saying is that it’s something they don’t have the intelligence, experience, or (most likely) the inclination to understand. It’s something, in other words, that they don’t have the capacity or interest in dealing with. Because dealing with it—actually understanding it—would take effort and, importantly, powers of critical thinking and a sense of empathy that they either simply don’t possess, or don’t want to test—because they very well might find themselves wanting.
And by this token, it evidences a sense of jealousy and envy, because they do get one thing: The people that they criticize as “woke” demonstrate a basic human decency that outstrips their own, simply because “those people”—progressives, liberals, Democrats, whatever you want to call them—have taken the time to try to understand and account for how their behavior can impact others, including, most notably, across race, sexual orientation, ability, and gender.
And conservatives absolutely hate that, because consideration for others conflicts directly with their worldview. Their “consideration” of anyone else’s situation—except for a few chosen members of their “tribe”—typically stops at the end of their own noses. They can’t fathom how anyone could see social relationships differently, and not as a zero-sum game. It bothers them that the rest of the world disagrees with their outlook, because it suggests that they—and the bigotry that informs their worldview—are in fact behind the curve for decent human society.
Again, this really comes down to effort, specifically an effort they don’t want to make, because it’s easier (and more palatable with their voters) if they don’t. It’s much easier to mock something than try to understand it, because (God forbid) if you try to understand something, you may discover that you are wrong. And so many people in the GOP simply don’t have the decency of character to admit it when they’re wrong.
So, they mock away: “woke” this and “woke” that, ad nauseum. For Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who held a talk titled ”Sacking the Woke Playbook” on the first day of CPAC, it’s “1619,” which he’s obviously never read, or “CRT,” which he has no understanding of whatsoever. But he, like most Republicans, has heard somewhere that these “woke” things actually reveal the reality and omnipresence of racism in this country, so that’s reason enough to oppose them.
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And the newest “woke” target? It’s corporate ESG disclosures, which have been in place for years. Apparently being good stewards of the environment is now fair game for mockery, which suggests that all of these “woke” accusations are really just another vehicle to satisfy Republican donors who are seeing a way to demonize any efforts that may impact their profits.
Put simply, the right uses “woke” as shorthand for something they simply can’t cope with, because it conflicts directly with the racism and other selfish, bigoted attitudes that sustain their political outlook. It’s convenient, it’s easy, and it’s effective, certainly. But it’s also a reflection of the kind of people they are.
And they can’t—or won’t—define what they mean by this word they’ve let define them, because doing so would reveal something very ugly about themselves.