Being woke is in vogue. Earlier this year, MTV pronounced woke as the “new slang” of 2016. On Twitter, a casual scroll through the trending #StayWoke unearths tweets about a raccoon, Chipotle and Scooby Doo. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed recently lauded cis, white, hetero male actor Matt McGorry of “How to Get Away with Murder” and “Orange is the New Black” for his astute acknowledgement that privilege and injustice exist—in other words his “wokeness.”
So, what exactly does being woke, staying woke and wokeness mean?
Coined by Erykah Badu, the term rose in prominence following the emergence of the #BlackLivesMatter movement as a reminder for Black people to stay conscious of and actively dismantle the systemic nature of violence against their communities.
In this sense, wokeness necessitates physical, emotional and mental labor. Hyperconsciousness of the trauma experienced by Black communities arises from one’s lived experiences as a Black person and often at the expense of one’s own mental and emotional health. Blavity contributor Jesse Bernard describes how feeling the pain and anguish of other Black people globally has caused him mental distress, to the extent that he attempted suicide. “It’s hard being woke when you want to sleep,” he concludes.
“For years, the idea of being ‘woke’ was a hallmark of socially-minded, black social media,” writes Fusion columnist Charles Pulliam-Moore. “But it’s recently crossed over onto the broader, whiter internet.”
Wokeness has been stripped of its power and roots in Black organizing against institutional violence. The appropriation of woke, however, points also to how virtual and physical spaces for Black people are regularly co-opted by non-Black people.
#StayWoke has been subverted to trivialize its underlying significance as a cry against systemic injustice, just as #BlackLivesMatter was co-opted by the racist #AllLivesMatter to purposefully disregard the injustices experienced by Black people. Wokeness has been reduced to a pop culture fad that propagates anti-Black violence in its own right by consuming the space for Black social analysis.
Much like the terms “radical” and “activist,” woke has also been co-opted by those who are far more concerned with projecting their intellectualism than engaging in critical intellectual thought about social conditions. In doing so, supposed “radicals,” “activists” and “woke” people are co-opting not only labels, but also the intellectual labor of marginalized people. As Black Girl Dangerous’ Mia McKenzie says, “White people and really all privileged people have a tendency to take what they’ve learned from oppressed people and go around talking about it like they came up with it on their own.”
The appropriation of woke renders Black intellectual, physical and emotional labor — and by extension Black lives — as fungible. By claiming wokeness, we risk undermining the Black consciousness that gave rise to wokeness in the first place.
