History of the Word WOKE

[Sixties Fan]

News flash. At least for now I have the right to choose who I will do business with and what products I will buy. And if a business is in my face with what I consider an attack on my values and principles, I will choose not to do business there or buy those products.

I could care less if a business wants to carry 'pride apparel' or whatever and I don't care if people buy those products. But when they are in my face with it, and especially when they're specifically targeting kids with it, I will object every single time. You/they can count on it.

In that case, my choice is the only weapon I have to promote what I believe are good, wholesome, necessary values to a strong, free and prosperous America.

Do as you wish. It is a free country.

This is a thread about the History of the word WOKE.


NOT about boycotting one product or another.

 

[Oddball]

Do as you wish. It is a free country.

This is a thread about the History of the word WOKE.


NOT about boycotting one product or another.

"History" being written by political hacks, trying desperately to distance themselves from the word that they embraced just a few short years ago, because it has become toxic.

 

[Foxfyre]

Do as you wish. It is a free country.

This is a thread about the History of the word WOKE.


NOT about boycotting one product or another.

Really? Then why did you devote most of your OP making it political and how people have hijacked the original definition?

 

[Sixties Fan]

Really? Then why did you devote most of your OP making it political and how people have hijacked the original definition?

I posted it on the History forums. Because I was interested in the History of the word and what changes occurred with time.

 

[Foxfyre]

I posted it on the History forums. Because I was interested in the History of the word and what changes occurred with time.

But your OP made it quite political and partisan. So if I took that and ran with it to point out that 'woke' is one of many many words that are now used differently than their historical definitions I believe I was staying completely on topic.

 

[Sixties Fan]

But your OP made it quite political and partisan. So if I took that and ran with it to point out that 'woke' is one of many many words that are now used differently than their historical definitions I believe I was staying completely on topic.

The articles I posted say exactly that.

 

[Foxfyre]

Part 9

What’s telling is that the exhaustion seems to come from moderates and leftists themselves as often as from conservatives — as if there’s a shared agreement that embodying wokeness is a kind of trap, no matter what side of the aisle you’re on.



Many people across the ideological spectrum seem wary of the performative semantics associated with “wokeness,” and the way that performance can undermine the sincerity of arguments being made in support of equality. “I always saw it as a tad performative,” Valdary told me, decrying what she described as “the unwieldy jargon of self-identifying as ‘woke.’”

“I think it’s mostly performative, and at best, tells me nothing about a person’s ideas re: racial justice,” she said. “It feels like a status-seeking label as opposed to a mode of being [that is] seeking positive change.”

Prior told me she likewise was leery of the ostentatious behavior associated with “woke” — but was more distressed by the increasing tendency of conservatives to use “woke” as an insult. “I have had private conversations with pastors who have used it as a term of insult,” she said, “because it’s hard — it is hurtful to use a term that is so meaningful to people and to use it in an entirely different way, it’s just simply wrong.”

“On the one hand,” miles-hercules said, the term “has been commodified in marketing to connote a host of associations to things like diversity, inclusion, and so on, in order to turn a profit by appealing to progressive sensibilities. Additionally, it has been plundered into conservative and right-wing discourse as a means of mocking and satirizing the politics of those on the other side of the proverbial aisle.”


Yet across a broad range of political beliefs, one recurring theme is that “wokeness” has demonstrable social, even quasi-religious, power. The writer James Lindsay has argued exhaustively that “wokeness” is essentially a religion where faith in social justice ideology stands in for belief in a deity, and that regular attendance at social justice protests has replaced the role of religious rituals for many progressives.

Valdary likewise spoke of being “woke” in a figurative sense — as an awakening akin to the Enlightenment.

“My sense is that by ‘woke,’ what people mean is a new form of being ‘enlightened,’ repackaged for our modern era,” she said. “The Enlightenment was meant to be an era of new progressive ideas, and folks fancied themselves awakened by new ideas and knowledge.” Similarly, “people today who identify as woke also see themselves as having been awakened to a new set of ideas, value systems, and knowledge. The mode and the values are different, but the sensibility — the idea that previously you were blind, and now you can see — is the same.”




(vide tweets and videos online)

How being "woke" lost its meaning

Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war.

www.vox.com

Anybody will cause conflict when they demand that they be able to co-opt a word to mean what they say it must mean apart from its historical roots. But inevitably it will happen as people become more and more incapable of inventing new words to designate evolving social phenomena.

I resented and still resent the gay community demanding to use the word 'marriage' for their unions and absolutely refusing to consider any other term that would have been socially acceptable to anybody. "Marriage" defined as a spiritual/legal union between a man and a woman has historical roots going back many millenia. Far longer than the word 'woke'. But co-opted it was.

I would have objected to Patriots/the right co-opting the word 'woke' and changing its meaning. But it wasn't them but the left who insisted on using 'woke' for their own purposes apart from its historical roots and thereby made it a household term and fair game for anybody.

That the right now associates it with an ideology that most on the right consider absurd or misguided at best and destructive and dangerous at worst is not their fault. To put it in school yard terms: the left started it.

This is not intended to be confrontational but only a practical observation of the dynamics at play. At best overuse of the word will likely render it as meaningless as is each side calling the other "Nazis"

 

[Lastamender]

[ Too many people keep using the word WOKE without actually knowing what it means and where it comes from. The word has been totally changed for political reasons in the last few years. It has been used and abused. I would like to introduce its history. May its original meaning be restored with time ]

Someday when the cultural moment that many have called “The Great Awokening” is finally, mercifully, over, Americans of all races should fight to give African Americans their word back.

Less than 10 years ago, “woke” was a word so deeply layered with history and meaning it could evoke years of pain suffered by descendants of slaves coming of age in Jim Crow America.

You don’t have to be African American, however, to feel its history. The word woke is seminal to our larger culture in ways most of us have never understood.

It’s one of the great words in American English and it should be preserved in its purest form.

At the moment it is being hijacked by politics – first by white liberals, then by white conservatives.

A battle over 'woke' in the Republican Party primary​

This week the word “woke” is igniting a family spat within the 2024 Republican primary for president, pitting Donald Trump against his former apprentice, Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis, the Florida governor, uses the word frequently to describe an ideology steeped in identity politics that has taken over our universities, media, large corporations, medicine, arts, entertainment and sports.

Trump argues he doesn’t use the word. “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”

There’s a good chance none of us would know the word today had the Library of Congress not set out in the 1930s to preserve American folk music in the South.

That project took library archivists to Louisiana where they discovered a little-known African American blues singer named Huddie William Ledbetter or “Lead Belly.”

The archivists recorded on aluminum discs Lead Belly and his 12-string guitar, preserving what would become some of the great Blues standards such as “Cotton Fields,” “Goodnight, Irene” and “Rock Island Line.”

​

Before you fight over the word 'woke,' learn its surprising, musical history

'Woke' has been hijacked by white people left and right. It's a great American word that should be restored to its original meaning.

www.azcentral.com

 

[Foxfyre]

Saw this meme today and it sort of sums everything up:

 

[dudmuck]

Do as you wish. It is a free country.

This is a thread about the History of the word WOKE.


NOT about boycotting one product or another.

 

[John Edgar Slow Horses]