Time to wake up about 'Woke': Color Us Connected

This column appears every other week in Foster’s Daily Democrat and the Tuskegee News. This week, Guy Trammell, Jr., an African American man from Tuskegee, Ala., and Amy Miller, a white woman from South Berwick, Maine, write about the use of the term “woke.”

By Amy Miller

Disney is suing the governor of Florida. The corporation is doing this in response to the punishments Gov. DeSantis is doling out to what he has called “Woke Disney” for opposing his 2022 legislation banning instruction in elementary grades about sexual orientation and gender.

“Woke” is a word that has been used for a century as an aspiration, but almost overnight it became a pejorative. Like the term “politically correct,” calling someone “woke” became a way to slam the values of those we disagree with. In short, calling someone “woke” has become a way to say, “I am not on that team and that team is full of people I resent or hate or, in truth, fear.”

This use of “woke” as a shorthand slur engraves the national divisions of “us” and “them” into the conversation without exploring what beliefs we oppose or defending the beliefs we hold dear.

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term began in the Black community a century ago and “generally meant being informed, educated and conscious of social injustice and racial inequality.”

According to Wikipedia, it is “an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English meaning ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.’”

Imagine replacing the slur that a person is “woke” with the allegation that someone is “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” Doesn’t pack much of a punch.

The term began to gain traction in the larger (white) community in recent years as more (white) people woke up to the relentless realities of being Black in America. But it has come to represent a compendium of beliefs, not just a racial justice awakening. Imagine replacing an insult about a “woke” politician to a statement that a politician wants homeless people to be treated with respect, or trans people or immigrants.

The meaning and use of the term “woke” have been co-opted. The problem with this cooptation may not be the loss or misuse of the word, but that through simplistic name-calling we avoid facing and discussing challenges in our country, whether or not we agree on the nature of these challenges or their solutions.

Gov. DeSantis and Disney may disagree on what students should be taught in school. They may disagree on how progressively Disney corporation deals with its amusement park. But using the word “woke” as an insult does nothing to further the discourse, while digging deep , carving out national divisions.

By Guy Trammell Jr.

Wake up, Sister Cities! South Berwick! Tuskegee! Welcome to the Morning Program on Color Us Connected Network! Here’s the news from while you were sleeping:

Barbara Cooper, appointed secretary of the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education in 2020, has resigned because Gov. Kay Ivey disagreed with her “woke” curriculum. This pre-K educator's resource book had “content not in line with what Alabama stands for or believes.” After Cooper was asked to disavow the book, she resigned.

Some use "woke" as code for Black, but "woke" is just “aware of what is happening.” The resource book reads: there are “larger systematic forces that perpetuate systems of White privilege” and “the United States is built on systematic and structural racism.” OK, so let’s see if this is true.

Law and order, without justice, caused Alabama’s prison inmates to be 54% Black, costing $14,780 annually per person versus $12,269 for a college education. (No structural racism here!)

In 1958, Sen. Lister Hill and Rep. Carl Elliott, both Alabamians, sponsored the National Defense Education Act that provided massive funding of American schools, particularly university science programs, to catch up technologically with Russia after Sputnik circled the Earth. In supporting the “Southern Manifesto” that rejected integration, they struck a deal with President Eisenhower to neglect federal enforcement of school desegregation. Blacks were kicked off the bus. (But that’s NOT systemic racism!)

The National Medical Association, American Tennis Association, and Tuskegee Institute’s golf course were each established because Blacks were rejected by the American Medical Association, U.S. Tennis Association and Robert Trent Jones golf courses. (No White privilege here!)

The following "non-woke" history is from the July 1986 United Daughters of Confederacy magazine where Mrs. L.C. Buzzell wrote about Joel Chandler Harris, creator of the fictional Uncle Remus character. “No one called him racist for he told what he had seen and heard with sympathy, understanding and dignity. He took the weakest animal, B’rer Rabbit, and made him the swiftest and the most tricky animal of all. Uncle Remus was a wise, black Aesop, and ‘Free Joe’ was every man’s slave. His allegorical interpretation of Afro-American folklore transcends their origins.”

That is exactly right! Black forced laborers on cotton plantations smiled, singing happy songs, because their life was just delightful! (Oh my, did I just write that? Just go back to sleep!)

Teddy Pendergrass sings: “Wake up everybody, no more sleeping in bed, no more backwards thinking, time for thinking ahead!..."

Amy and Guy can be reached at colorusconnected@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Time to wake up about 'Woke': Color Us Connected