"Woke" and American Urban Policy, Present and Past: Part Two - The Urban Lens Newsletter

Based on our considerations of these, we tentatively recommended that the term should be expunged from serious policy discussions or decisions about urban America.

Conservative politicians, most notably many prominent members of the Republican party, have recently used this broad and imprecise term to turn woke into a perceived threat which, they assert, endangers the fabric of American life.  They and the intellectuals from whom they get their ideas, having obliquely associated the ambiguous concept of wokeness with a range of perceived ills in American culture, have made a complex and multifaceted case against it.

Different critics emphasize different aspects of their concerns associated with the concept.  Some claim that wokeness promotes identity politics, asserting that excessive focus on group identities, such as race or gender, can undermine individuality, perpetuate stereotypes, and hinder constructive dialogue by emphasizing differences rather than common ground.  Some associate wokeness with cancel culture and intolerance, contending that it contributes to a culture of "canceling" or ostracizing individuals who hold differing viewpoints or make mistakes, thus effectively creating an environment of fear, stifling free speech, and inhibiting open and honest discussions. 

Others claim that wokeness promotes a rigid ideological framework with little room for nuance or dissent, discourages critical thinking, discourages dialogue, and fosters an environment where any deviation from approved beliefs is met with hostility or accusations of bigotry.  Still others say that wokeness perpetuates a victimhood culture, where individuals compete for victimhood status or seek to be perceived as oppressed, thus absolving themselves of any sort of personal responsibility for their own circumstances.

Politicians and pundits are now expanding the vague and ever-changing associations between such concerns and the concept of wokeness to bolster a political agenda.  According to this agenda, wokeness variously threatens the prosperity of free-enterprise capitalism, the stability of American military strength, the sanctity of parental rights to control what their children read, the patriotism of American public-school curricula, and the free expression of political ideas on college campuses.

Yet wokeness has a history, with origins found in Black American slang.  The editor, writer, and producer Kathleen Newman-Bremang wrote an excellent review of this history.^[i]  Vox has another.^[ii] These and other sources make clear that current political usage alone not only fails to fully capture its richness and meaning in American culture, but largely misappropriates it.  So this week we consider whether the history of the term can in some ways redeem its value in contemporary political rhetoric.

At a very basic level, to be woke is the opposite of being asleep.  Woke means you are actively aware of your surroundings because your surroundings may be more complex and potentially threatening than they appear on the surface.  A woke person understands that every setting comprises many layers of systems that function simultaneously.  Those layers may contain opportunities for positive experiences, but they may contain threats as well.

One rule of thumb when it comes to uncovering the dynamics of urban social systems is to ask those who suffer discrimination within the system to explain “the rules.”  People who are privileged by a social system don’t need to know the rules.  Privileged people can live their lives blithely unaware of their privileged status.  But the rules are always there, sometimes in plain sight, and other times just slightly below the surface regarding acceptable day-to-day patterns of social interactions within the system.

Woke emerged initially as slang among Black Americans during the era of Jim Crow social repression and the Great Migration from the rural south to northern cities.  Black American parents, ministers, teachers, musicians, business leaders, politicians, writers, and poets have used the term for more than a century to convey the need to be starkly aware of one’s social settings.  Being woke warns Black Americans to be aware of the fluid and often deadly rules governing social interactions when interacting with different varieties of America’s historically dominant white culture. 

Use of the term periodically spread beyond Black American slang and into general use during periods of reform in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the civil rights movement.  But it did not enter with anything like its current force until the aftermath of the police shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. 

Since Ferguson, the term has become a rallying call to urge all Americans to appreciate the complex, systematic nature of institutionalized, racially discriminatory, outcomes that are produced by many of the social institutions that comprise American life.  The Black Lives Matter movement further propelled the term into general use.  BLM, however, pushed the meaning of woke beyond awareness and defensive caution.  Woke became a rallying call for people to become actively anti-racist.

This is the historical context in which many conservative politicians and political pundits have recently appropriated the term and now use dramatic political rhetoric to define wokeness as a threat.  It’s origins in Black American culture, however, ensures that anti-woke rhetoric will never be able to shake its racial overtones. 

The American conservative political tradition includes many people who disagree with specific reform movements on principles that have nothing to do with racism.  Yet by using the obvious, historical, racial overtones of this ambiguous term to lump together opposition to a wide range of contemporary reform efforts, leading conservative politicians and pundits seem to be trying to broaden their appeal by creating new rhetoric that allows racists in American culture to engage in mainstream politics without need to use overtly racist rhetoric.

Reform efforts that are being lumped together as woke threats include efforts to defend women’s freedom of reproductive choice, the freedom of all people to marry whomever they love, the freedom of people to express gender in their own ways, efforts to expand the freedom of (and from) multiple religions, the freedom of thought in public schools, the expansion of affordable housing in America’s suburbs, the movement to seek limits on weapons of war that pose no threat to the 2^nd Amendment, the movement to raise the minimum wage, and efforts to expand the freedom of migrants to enter the U.S. in search of their own American dream. 

All things considered, the current usages of woke among conservative politicians and pundits comprise a strategy to turn it into a rallying call to ignore the complexity of American life and to ignore “the important facts and issues” that provide ample evidence of how our complex social institutions perpetuate not only the many wonderful aspects of this great nation, but also perpetuate many social injustices, especially racial injustices.

Consequently, while we cannot help but acknowledge the term’s ambiguity regarding its use in analytical urban policy discussions, we think it would be a mistake for the anti-racist movement in American culture to abandon it to those who are using it to create a new type of rhetorical dog whistle.

The rich cultural meaning of this Black American slang term can be recaptured, embraced, and leveraged to keep attention on racial and other forms of injustice in the 21^st century.  Being woke should be a badge of honor indicating that citizens, regardless of race, understand the complexity of how American social institutions perpetuate not only solutions but also deep problems. 

Wokeness was born by the need for Black Americans to be sophisticated thinkers within America’s complex and fluid social dynamics.  Consequently, woke has always represented a form of systems thinking.  Wokeness in the 21^stcentury can build on that history by becoming a higher form of systems thinking because it can be used to translate systems knowledge into reform actions that can move forward the historical process of expanding the regime values upon which the American nation is predicated.  Woke can be one rallying call for the next step in making the U.S. a more perfect union.

Bob Gleeson

Bill Bowen

^[i] Newman-Bremang link here https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2023/02/11253627/woke-meaning-co-opted-politics

^[ii] Vox link here https://www.vox.com/culture/21437879/stay-woke-wokeness-history-origin-evolution-controversy