Trump uses the same 'woke' tactics the right rails against |
“Woke” used to mean something.
Like many facets of American culture, “woke” was derived from African American Vernacular English, meaning to “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination.” The term has been central to Black political consciousness from its adoption in the 1930s, to its use in both iterations of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2014 and 2020, to its appropriation by non-Black people to discuss matters of gender and queerness, to its addition to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.
Since 2020, woke has taken on a new meaning entirely divorced from its original context, serving more as a dual-sided straw man. Breathless Republicans have turned woke into a pejorative for anyone and anything they don’t like. And the progressives they cudgel with the term don’t even ascribe to it. On the left, woke is used almost ironically to gesture toward more progressive politics or poke fun at right-wingers who misappropriate it.
The recent, tedious retracing of "Woke 1.0" history seems less like a much-needed course correction and more like an attempt to woo all those undecided voters who definitely exist and capitulate to Republicans who were bound to grind their anti-progressive axes regardless.
The lack of specificity in defining the woes of woke suggests that its perceived failure isn’t a result of the ideologies it propagated, but a reflection of a culture where paradigms and mores are ever-changing. Sure, whatever these people are........