History of the Word WOKE

[Sixties Fan]

[ 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

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

'Woke' emerges with a song about race and suffering​

In Lead Belly's song "The Scottsboro Boys," the nine African-American young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama, he admonishes his listeners to, “Best stay woke!”

It’s believed to be the first recorded instance of the word.

As Huddie Ledbetter used “woke,” it meant that when you’re a Black person travelling through a deeply racist state such as Alabama, you need to know what you’re dealing with – a highly refined form of evil.

Ledbetter would know. He travelled the byways of Louisiana, Alabama and Texas singing his songs and confronting white bigotry and its violence against Black people.

In a way that history has of surprising us, Lead Belly would become essential to white culture in America and Great Britain. All white people reading this and learning the name Huddie Ledbetter for the first time, should know that they have likely felt his influence, far more than they could have imagined.

The driving rhythms of Lead Belly’s version of “Rock Island Line,” would in the 1950s inspire an early British pop singer named Lonnie Donegan, who adopted the song’s musical style called skiffle, a mash of American folk, blues and jazz.

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

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

Lead Belly influences Rock 'n Roll's greatest band​

Donovan became “the king” of the U.K. “skiffle craze” and eventually inspired new skiffle groups across England, such as Liverpool’s The Quarrymen, then led by an aspiring singer-songwriter named John Lennon.

By 1960, the group would evolve into The Beatles, and its lead guitarist, George Harrison, would one day tell an interviewer, “If there was no Lead Belly, there would have been no Lonnie Donegan; no Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles. Therefore, no Lead Belly, no Beatles,” as recounted by Smithsonian Magazine.

Lead Belly was inspiring many musical forms of that day. Those same early recordings that preserved his music and the word “woke,” found their way into the imagination of another young artist of some note.

"Somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Lead Belly record with the song ‘Cottonfields’ on it,” recalled Bob Dylan in his 2017 lecture to the Noble (Prize) Foundation. "That record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known.

"It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.”

The biggest names in many genres sing his songs​

By the end of the century, Led Belly’s influence on American popular music was its own constellation of stars. Artists covering his songs included Gene Autry, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Tom Jones, Harry Belafonte, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, The Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aerosmith, Lead Zeppelin, Tom Petty, The Grateful Dead.

When Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs wrote, “These new rock ‘n roll kids should just throw away their guitars and listen to something with real soul, like Lead Belly,” a young musician in Seattle named Kurt Cobain took up his challenge.

Years later, he recalled on an MTV stage: “I’d never heard about Lead Belly before so I bought a couple of records, and now he turns out to be my absolute favorite of all time in music. I absolutely love it more than any rock’n’roll I ever heard.”

After he said it, his band Nirvana began to play Huddie William Ledbetter’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”

Our chattering classes, and I include myself among them, have been poor caretakers of the word “woke.”

When this battle over wokeness is finally over, it would do us well to give the word back.

And while we're at it, maybe we could make the name Huddie Ledbetter, one of America's most important songwriters, as easily recognizable as say, Ringo Starr.

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

 

[1srelluc]

 

[Sixties Fan]

The 85-year evolution of a now ubiquitous term tells us much about how language can become loaded​

When did the word ‘woke’ turn into a nasty joke?

‘Woke”. What do you think when you hear this word, see it, or perhaps even use it? Do you think of Sir Gavin Williamson condemning the decision by students at M

www.thetimes.co.uk

 

[johngaltshrugged]

Woke- an extreme leftist agenda to elevate racism & queer dogma by legitimizing attacking & stigmatizing traditional values

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 1

Before 2014, the call to “stay woke” was, for many people, unheard of. The idea behind it was common within Black communities at that point — the notion that staying “woke” and alert to the deceptions of other people was a basic survival tactic. But in 2014, following the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, “stay woke” suddenly became the cautionary watchword of Black Lives Matter activists on the streets, used in a chilling and specific context: keeping watch for police brutality and unjust police tactics.

In the six years since Brown’s death, “woke” has evolved into a single-word summation of leftist political ideology, centered on social justice politics and critical race theory. This framing of “woke” is bipartisan: It’s used as a shorthand for political progressiveness by the left, and as a denigration of leftist culture by the right.

On the left, to be “woke” means to identify as a staunch social justice advocate who’s abreast of contemporary political concerns — or to be perceived that way, whether or not you ever claimed to be “woke” yourself. At times, the defensiveness surrounding wokeness invites ironic blowback. Consider the 2020 Hulu comedy series Woke, which attempted to deconstruct the identity politics behind ideas like “wokeness,” only to garner criticism for having an outdated and too-centrist political viewpoint — that is, for not being woke enough.

On the right, “woke” — like its cousin “canceled” — bespeaks “political correctness” gone awry, and the term itself is usually used sarcastically. At the Republican National Convention in August, right-wing Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) scolded “woketopians,” grouping them together with socialists and Biden supporters, as though the definition of a “woketopian” was self-evident.

But as use of the word spreads, what people actually mean by “woke” seems less clear than ever.

After all, none of these recent political concepts has anything to do with the idea of demanding that people “stay woke” against police brutality. Despite renewed activism against police brutality in 2020, the way that terms like “woke” and “wokeness” are used outside of the Black Lives Matter community seems to bear little connection to their original context, on either the right and the left.

Shifting a Black Lives Matter slogan away from its original meaning is arguably the least woke thing ever — yet that seems to be just what happened with, of all things, “woke” itself.

To understand how “woke” came to stand in for an entire political ideology, it’s helpful to trace how the term traveled so far and wide within the American mainstream — and what that journey reveals about a polarized society.

How being "woke" lost its meaning

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

www.vox.com

 

[TNHarley]

Too many people keep using the word WOKE without actually knowing what it means and where it comes from

Kinda like how regressive statists throw around the term liberal like it means some sort of big govt collective? Like you do?
Yeah...

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 2

“Stay woke” began as a watchword for Black Americans​

The first time many people heard “woke” in its current context was likely during the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, Black citizens took to the streets nightly to protest the police shooting death of Michael Brown. As they did so, they urged each other to “stay woke” against police actions and other threats.

But “woke” and the phrase “stay woke” had already been a part of Black communities for years, long before Black Lives Matter gained prominence. “While renewed (inter)national outcry over anti-Black police violence certainly fueled widespread and mainstream usage of the word in the present, it has a much longer history,” deandre miles-hercules, a doctoral linguistics researcher at the University of California Santa Barbara, told me.

The earliest known examples of wokeness as a concept revolve around the idea of Black consciousness “waking up” to a new reality or activist framework and dates back to the early 20th century. In 1923, a collection of aphorisms and ideas by the Jamaican philosopher and social activist Marcus Garvey included the summons “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” as a call to global Black citizens to become more socially and politically conscious. A few years later, the phrase “stay woke” turned up as part of a spoken afterword in the 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys,” a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, a.k.a. Lead Belly. The song describes the 1931 saga of a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, who were accused of raping two white women.



Lead Belly says at the end of an archival recording of the song that he’d met with the Scottsboro defendants’ lawyer, who introduced him to the men themselves. “I made this little song about down there,” Lead Belly says. “So I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there — best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

How being "woke" lost its meaning

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

www.vox.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 3

Lead Belly uses “stay woke” in explicit association with Black Americans’ need to be aware of racially motivated threats and the potential dangers of white America. Lead Belly’s usage has largely stayed the common, consistent one ever since, including during one notable brush with the mainstream in 1962, via the New York Times.

That year, a young Black novelist named William Melvin Kelley wrote a first-person piece for the Times called “If You’re Woke You Dig It; No mickey mouse can be expected to follow today’s Negro idiom without a hip assist.” In the piece, Kelley points out that the origins of the language of then-fashionable beatnik culture — words like “cool” and “dig” — lay not within white America but with Black Americans, predominantly among Black jazz musicians.

Kelly’s piece doesn’t explain what “woke” might mean. But his argument implies that to be “woke” is to be a socially conscious Black American, someone aware of the ephemeral nature of Black vernacular, who might actively be shifting that vernacular away from white people who would exploit it or change its meaning:

The Negro’s pride in this idiom is that of a man who watches someone else do ineptly what he can do well. The Negro laughs at white people who try to use his language. He experiences the same glee when he witnesses a white audience at a jazz concert clapping on the first and third beat. [...]
The American Negro feels he can, on the spur of the moment, create the most exciting language that exists in any English-speaking country today. I asked someone what they felt about white people trying to us “hip” language. He said: “Man, they blew the gig just by being gray.”

“Kelley’s description suggests that to be woke is to have a native relationship to Black language, culture, and knowledge of social issues that arise in our lived experiences,” miles-hercules told me, singling out Kelley’s piece as an example of the connection “woke” had even in the ’60s to its current political connotations.

Given that this oldest-known introduction of “woke” to the mainstream comes in a 1962 opinion piece about how white Americans are always appropriating the Black vernacular, it’s almost as though the word predicts its own fate.

How being "woke" lost its meaning

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

www.vox.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 4

Kelley argued that because Black Americans know their language is constantly being appropriated, the language itself is constantly changing. “By the time these terms get into the mainstream,” he observed, “new ones have already appeared. [...] A few Negroes guard the idiom so fervently they will consciously invent a new term as soon as they hear the existing one coming from a white’s lips.”

“[Kelley]’s use of ‘woke’ is linked closely to contemporary definitions of the word as he is writing about Black people’s awareness of the racial dynamics at play in the process of linguistic appropriation,” miles-hercules said. “As a linguist and anthropologist, I highlight this piece specifically because it demonstrates both how language, culture, and power are always connected and, crucially, that this is not news to Black people. We been knew ... we stay woke.”

“I HAVE LONGED TO STAY AWAKE” —ERYKAH BADU

Indeed, even in a piece largely focused on linguistics, Kelley directly connects “woke” Black culture back to an awareness of systematized white violence against Black people. Writing about the ephemeral nature of this shifting Black vernacular, he noted that many popular idioms among Black Americans have been loaded with coded precautions since the era of slavery — like the use of “ofay,” pig Latin for “foe,” to stand in for a white man. “[T]he language was used primarily for secrecy, exclusion, and protection,” Kelley wrote. “If your master did not know what you were talking about, he could not punish you, and you could maintain your ignorance and innocence.”

This linguistic subterfuge seems to be how “woke” — the concept and the word itself — flew under the mainstream cultural radar for what seems to have been decades. Not until the late aughts, with the rise of social media and a few prominent assists, did wokeness begin its steady, proper push into the broader American consciousness.

How being "woke" lost its meaning

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

www.vox.com

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 5

From 2008 on, “woke” began to go mainstream — with its original meaning largely intact​

Although “woke” as a watchword was the term’s earliest known usage, it took on three primary contexts within Black communities during the 20th century: 1) slang for being literally awake; 2) slang for being suspicious of a cheating romantic partner; and 3) the original, politically charged usage of always being on the lookout for systemic injustice. In a 2017 interview with OkayPlayer, funk singer Georgia Anne Muldrow describes first hearing the term used by ’60s jazz musicians in its most literal context — as in, slang for not falling asleep.

Muldrow carried “stay woke” forward in a crucial way: She wrote and recorded an unreleased version of a song called “Master Teacher” with the refrain “I’d stay woke,” in reference to the ’60s jazz musicians of yore. Muldrow’s usage inadvertently contributed to the term’s political meaning getting a boost when, in 2008, R&B artist Erykah Badu released an updated version of “Master Teacher” on her politically themed album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War).



Badu’s version of the song simplified Muldrow’s “I’d stay woke” to “I stay woke,” used in all three of the aforementioned contexts at once:

Even if yo baby ain’t got no money
To support ya baby, I stay woke
Even when the preacher tell you some lies
And cheatin’ on ya mama, you stay woke
Even though you go through struggle and strife
To keep a healthy life, I stay woke ...
I have longed to stay awake
A beautiful world I’m trying to find

After the release of Badu’s song, “I stay woke” gained increasing use among Black social media users commenting on current events, often harking back to its original political meaning.

How being "woke" lost its meaning

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

www.vox.com

 

[Flash]

[ 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

Who gives a shit?

If you are woke then you are an asshole.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 6

Despite its increasing popularity as a call for sociopolitical awareness, the use of “woke” on social media rarely drew much notice, and throughout the 2000s and early 2010s typically remained within less polarized context.

First, as vernacular for literally staying awake:

(vide tweets online)

And second, as a term for being suspicious of a cheating partner. (This meaning did bear a cursory connection to the word’s political sense, in that it still carried the original meaning of being alert to suspicious or threatening behavior.)

All of this seemed to change during the 2014 Ferguson protests. Protesters began to popularize the phrase online through the #StayWoke hashtag as well as through street signs and related merchandise.

Ferguson was a true social awakening for many activists and progressives — and as part of this moment, the idea of staying aware of or “woke” to the inequities of the American justice system was a heady one. While the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag served as a locus of information and organization during the Ferguson protests, the #StayWoke hashtag arguably served an equally important emotional and spiritual purpose: It allowed Black citizens to unite around a shared perception and experience of reality — and to galvanize themselves and each other for a very long fight for change.

The link between “woke” and the Ferguson protests began to gain attention in mainstream media, including in a 2016 documentary, Stay Woke: The Black Lives Matter Movement.

After Ferguson, “stay woke” increasingly took on the meaning of heightened awareness and alertness and began to carry an overtly political context.




(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

 

[Oddball]

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

And there it is....It's the left's word, and they're now trying to distance themselves from it because its toxicity has become evident.....Much like they stole the word "liberal" in the '20s, when people figured out that "progressive" was a repackaging of slow burn Marxism.

"1984" hit you leftist clods right in the bullseye.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 7


Childish Gambino’s popular 2016 single “Redbone” was built around the refrain “stay woke.”
Gambino, a.k.a. Donald Glover, warned the listener to stay woke about a cheating partner. But the song also contained an element of anxiety that resonated with the phrase’s wary sociopolitical usage. Gambino’s song might have fueled the continued slightly different meanings of “woke” in common usage. But then 2017 brought the release of Jordan Peele’s landmark horror film Get Out, which opens with a prominent use of “Redbone” and its “stay woke” refrain. The film, about a Black man who must literally stay awake and alert to horrible racism in white suburbia, essentially reframes Glover’s song to map fully onto the phrase’s political definition.
In a 2018 interview, Peele told Hip Hop DX that he had chosen the song as the film’s opener specifically because of the “stay woke” hook. “I wanted to make sure that this movie satisfied the Black horror movie audience’s need for characters to be smart and do things that intelligent and observant people would do,” he said. “‘Stay woke’ — that’s what this movie is about.”

By the time Get Out arrived in theaters in February 2017, the idea of being “woke” was taking off within the broader American mainstream — and it had already begun to show up in other political contexts, like at the 2017 Women’s March.

From there, as awareness of its political usage spread, the term simultaneously began todraw backlash from critics who argued the idea was superficially performative. In May 2017, for example, Boston Globe columnist Alex Beams snarkily condemned the performative progressive nature of the term. “Do you use the word ‘intersectionality’ a lot, even if you aren’t exactly sure what it means?” he wrote. “If yes, you are progressing well along your journey to wokefulness.”

“The real purpose of ‘woke’ is to divide the world into hyper-socially aware, self-appointed gatekeepers of language and behavior, and the rest of humanity,” Beams added.

That same year, “woke” got the Saturday Night Live treatment, parodying the modern progressive movement as being label-driven and superficial.

By 2018, the cultural reception of “woke” had turned chilly: An NPR commentator begged leftists to retire the term, and the connotation of “woke” as a phony show of progressive activism had taken hold on the right.

“In my conservative Southern Baptist community, the term has become an insult that is used against anyone who is concerned about justice and racism,” Karen Swallow Prior, a professor of English and Christianity and culture at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, told me in a phone interview. “They use the word like a weapon.”

That’s where things get really complicated — and where white culture’s appropriation of “woke” begins to dominate the conversation.
(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

 

[Dadoalex]

Who gives a shit?

If you are woke then you are an asshole.

Well then as one asshole to another, you're full of shit. Perhaps giving a little might relieve that stress.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Part 8

“Wokeness” may be a religion, a cause for weary exhaustion, or both​

Despite critics’ attempts to turn “woke” into a laughable or problematic concept, many people continue to use “woke” unironically. Chloé S. Valdary, founder of the “compassionate anti-racism” program Theory of Enchantment, told me she still sees Black communities primarily using the phrase to mean staying alert to systemic injustice “all the time, especially on Instagram.”

“In some posts they’ve used it to mean staying alert against police brutality,” she said. “In others, they use it as a catchall term to signal their objection to ‘whiteness,’ broadly defined.”

“I associate it with much more than Black Lives Matter and police injustice,” Prior told me. Like many people, she said, her earliest awareness of the term coincided with the activism surrounding the Ferguson protests. But she added that she now sees “stay woke” as a cry against systemic racism in general.

“PEOPLE TODAY WHO IDENTIFY AS WOKE SEE THEMSELVES AS HAVING BEEN AWAKENED TO A NEW SET OF IDEAS, VALUE SYSTEMS, AND KNOWLEDGE”

Both Valdary and Prior also acknowledged that across the political spectrum in 2020, “woke” seems to represent a consciously progressive mindset — but that concept is loaded with irony and cynicism. Even on the left, the idea of being “woke” can be a double-edged sword, often used to suggest an aggressive, performative take on progressive politics that only makes things worse.

For instance, consider how the phrase “woke discourse” gets used on social media: The “discourse” can be about a zillion different things, but attaching “woke” to it usually denotes a perception of embittered exhaustion at progressive semantics and arguments.



(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

 

[martybegan]

And there it is....It's the left's word, and they're now trying to distance themselves from it because its toxicity has become evident.....Much like they stole the word "liberal" in the '20s, when people figured out that "progressive" was a repackaging of slow burn Marxism.

"1984" hit you leftist clods right in the bullseye.

Exactly. There is nothing "liberal" about the current hard left these days. Even progressive isn't applicable anymore, because they want us to regress, not progress.

 

[Dogmaphobe]

Evidently, the word "woke" means "I have never had an original thought in my life so must express myself through endless cut and pastes of other people's opinions".