Reclaiming the Meaning of Woke
This morning, while reading the New York Times, I came across an article titled “Democrats Have Power Now. They Shouldn’t Waste It on Woke.” Naturally, the word caught my attention. The article raised questions about the direction Democrats should take and whether they should move away from what has come to be called woke politics. It got me thinking about how we arrived at a point where a word that once represented an important form of social awareness has become a political insult. Isn’t that an interesting turn of events? A word that essentially asks us to open our eyes has become something people use to roll theirs. I find that troubling, particularly when we consider where the word came from and why it was used in the first place.
Its roots are in African American language and history. In 1938, the blues musician Lead Belly recorded Scottsboro Boys, a song about nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. At the end of the recording, he warned Black Americans traveling through the South to be careful and to “stay woke, keep their eyes open.” Think about that for a moment. This wasn’t a fashionable expression or a political slogan. It was a warning about the dangers of racial injustice, and a reminder that remaining alert could be a matter of survival.
I think we sometimes lose sight of how much history can live inside a word. To be woke meant to be awake to the circumstances in which people were living, particularly those subjected to racial discrimination and injustice. That meaning deserves to be understood and respected, regardless of how many political arguments have since attached themselves to it. A word doesn’t lose its history simply because someone decides they don’t like what it represents.
In recent years, particularly during the Trump era, the word has increasingly been used by Republican politicians and commentators as a way of discrediting progressive social concerns. It has become a convenient label for all sorts of ideas, policies, and people, often without much consideration for what those ideas actually represent. I don’t believe political misuse should be allowed to erase the meaning or discredit the ethical principle behind the word. We can disagree with someone’s politics without pretending that awareness of injustice is somehow a character flaw.
That doesn’t mean Democrats have always used it well, either. There have been times when the language of social awareness has been used to advance political agendas, and when symbolic gestures have received more attention than the circumstances they were supposedly intended to improve. I think that’s part of the problem. We spend so much time arguing about what it means to be woke that the actual purpose of the word gets lost. Somewhere along the way, the conversation about doing something has turned into a conversation about what to call it. Meanwhile, social injustice, economic inequality, and the difficulties facing working families haven’t exactly gone away.
I would like to see the word reclaimed, and I believe it belongs to everyone, regardless of political affiliation or cultural background. Being aware of injustice shouldn’t be a political identity. It should be part of our responsibility to one another. That includes recognizing racial discrimination, but it also means looking beyond skin color and considering the economic circumstances that affect people’s lives. There is something fundamentally wrong with a society in which enormous wealth can accumulate in the hands of so few while working families struggle to afford the things they need. Surely we can manage to keep our eyes open to more than one problem at a time.
I also think we need to be careful not to confuse cultural awareness with separation. Learning about our different histories and traditions is valuable, and there’s nothing wrong with taking pride in where we come from. But we are living in a country where people from different backgrounds have come together, formed families, shared experiences, and contributed to a common society. That’s part of what makes America what it is. We don’t have to give up our individual histories to find common ground. The difficulty begins when our differences become more important than the things we share.
Perhaps the most important thing is to stop treating woke as though it were something that needs to be defended or condemned according to political affiliation. We can disagree about policies, criticize the way social movements operate, and question the decisions of political parties without dismissing the importance of being aware of injustice. Those are separate matters, and I think we would do well to remember that.
I don’t think we need another political argument about the word. We’ve had quite enough of those. We need to remember why it mattered, understand the history behind it, and put its meaning into practice. Being awake to the world around us, recognizing when something is wrong, and caring enough to do something about it shouldn’t be controversial. It seems to me that this is the least we should expect of one another. After all, being awake is a rather basic requirement for seeing what’s going on.
Marni Fraser
1112|2026
Public domain | Russell Lee, July 1939
