What Is Woke?

Part one of a series

Unless you’ve been asleep for the past several years, you’ve been seeing a certain harmless-looking word turn up with growing frequency in discussions related to politics and a host of other things: woke.

A sample from some recent headlines:

“Florida prohibits DEI in public colleges amid 'Stop WOKE' legal battles”

“MLK was a ‘woke’ critical race theorist who fought for diversity, equity and inclusion”

“America’s safety at risk as FAA’s latest diversity push puts the woke mob at the controls”

For some people, woke is a term of praise, for others, of derision. For many, it seems, it doesn’t have a very precise definition. Yet it is associated with a pretty recognizable set of phenomena, including:

A heightened focus on race: Even since the unrest in Ferguson in 2014, the race conversation in the U.S. has moved to the center of public attention, peaking in 2020 with the death of George Floyd and the riots that followed that summer. Ibram Kendi’s How to Be Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility became bestsellers, arguing for new ways of thinking about the problem of racism. 

The rise of DEI: Standing for diversity, equity, and inclusion, use of this acronym exploded overnight, with practically every organization from Fortune 500 companies to colleges suddenly adopting DEI policies and initiatives while hiring new staff to oversee them.   

An assertive transgender movement: We began hearing a lot more about transgender individuals and transgender rights, from early skirmishes about the use of public bathrooms to more recent legal battles over transgender surgeries for minors. Among the youngest demographic, the number of people identifying as trans has risen rapidly.  

Campus culture: Early in the past decade, college campuses became known for things like shouting down speakers and cancel culture, emphasizing the creation of “safe spaces,” and the policing of language for “microaggressions.” As Andrew Sullivan noted, writing in 2018, these tendencies were increasingly evident beyond the boundaries of campus as graduates made their way into the workplace, bringing this culture with them. 

So what exactly is woke and what does it have to do with these phenomena?

Old Term, New Meaning

Woke shows up in the 1930’s, among blacks interested in issues related to civil rights, to indicate a state of being alert to racial discrimination. That was its primary context for decades, often in the form “stay woke.” 

The term gained a much wider exposure in the aftermath in Ferguson and elsewhere after the shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, being prominently used by the group Black Lives Matter. 

Around the same time, a broader sense of its meaning was taking over, relating not just to racism but to various groups perceived as marginalized. To be woke came to mean not simply being aware of discrimination, but also being aware of deeper truths about the structure of society, the nature of language, and various other matters. At this point, someone who was “woke” was not simply alert to racism, but had adopted an entire ideology (or at least key parts of it) and an activist mindset intent on remaking society in the light of it. 

By the time of the pandemic, woke started to be used also as a pejorative term by opponents of those who thought of themselves as enlightened in the way just described — hence the “woke mob” in the headline above. 

So there is a descriptive and a negative sense of the term, and Merriam-Webster takes a solid stab and capturing both:

1. Aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)

2. Politically liberal or progressive (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme

The first definition here leaves out something important, in my view. Those who started to take upon themselves the label woke weren’t simply concerned about issues of racial and social justice. There have been plenty of such people around for decades but woke has emerged as a term trying to label a movement that feels new. There is something about how some are now thinking about and responding to issues of racial and social justice that is distinct. 

And that’s the question I’m interested in exploring here. What is this theoretical framework that has given a new direction to the way matters like race and justice are understood in our culture? If woke involves a theoretical framework, what is it? How do the phenomena noted above hang together and connect to this framework?

Making Sense of the Upheaval

This is surely an important question. Something has happened to the culture in the United States (and elsewhere) in the last decade. We have been witnesses to what feels like a great disruption that has brought with it important shifts in how we think about the world and relate to each other. 

Many have tried to make sense of what is going on, identifying the threads that are weaving a disconcerting new tapestry.

N.S. Lyons

, for instance, launched his Substack

The Upheaval

for this very reason. In his initial post, from the spring of 2021, he writes:

“We are living through an era of epochal change. At few times in history have so many currents of civilizational transformation coalesced and crashed into us at once, and at such speed. To say that we are being unmoored by massive technological, economic, environmental, geopolitical, and socio-cultural shifts would be to insufficiently limit our description of what is occurring. 

Vast new ideational, epistemological, and arguably even theological frameworks for how to understand and interact with reality have emerged and are now spreading across the world..in our bones many of us can feel the rumbling of the earthquake, and intuit the terrible truth: we are experiencing a tectonic upheaval, a rending, uprooting, cataclysmic shift from one era of history to another.” 

Lyons, among others, recognizes there are many things going on at once. 

We are experiencing the rapid adoption of new technologies, for instance social media, that are having a massive, measurable impact on our mental and social lives. The political status quo has been upended by Trump’s presidency. High-profile events have heightened attention on the dynamics of race. And, of course, there was the pandemic. 

What seems most important to me, however, are changes in the realm of ideas — what Lyons describes as the spread of “vast new ideational, epistemological, and arguably even theological frameworks.”  

Another author,

Wesley Yang

, who started his Substack

Year Zero

just after Lyons, focuses his attention on this domain in particular:

“This Substack will describe the ideological fever that overtook the governing and chattering classes in America during the Trump years. Its subject is the bourgeois moral revolution, many decades in the making, that flowered at the midpoint of the decade, composed in equal measure of new political propositions, new moral premises, and new psychological underpinnings, in pursuit of what it declares to be "social justice".”

Social Justice. It’s a term one hears frequently these days and I could perhaps just as easily have titled this post, “What Is Social Justice?” Yet woke has perhaps more salience as a term emerging within and being associated with our present time of upheaval.

Over the next several posts, I will try to set out as clearly and concisely as possible what seem to be the core ideas that together constitute the woke perspective. 

I will also be offering a critique of these ideas. I should say up front that I don’t think those who have adopted a woke perspective have nothing valid to say. Moreover, there are plenty of people advancing this point of view whose hearts are in the right place.

Nevertheless, I believe the ideas central to woke thinking are mistaken and associated proposals for action often misguided. Their influence is ultimately destructive and it is important to understand why.