“I thought he was more woke than that,” I said. It was during the aftermath of George Floyd’s death when a liberal public figure said something that surprised me. That was the first time I had used woke in that sense. Previously I would have said something like, “I can’t believe he said that; I thought he was more sensitive.”
Once largely confined to the past tense of “wake,” the word “woke” has undergone a semantic and cultural transformation. Its slang meaning has become so prevalent that it is now included in dictionaries; Merriam-Webster defines it as “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” More recently, the word has acquired negative connotations in phrasings like “the woke mob,” which implies some form of criminality.
For a historical perspective on the word, I talked to Alvin Hall, the author of Driving the Greenbook: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance, who points out that the contemporary meaning of “woke” as being informed of and attuned to societal inequalities has been around since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. For Black people, it meant you were aware of where you were in a world with both visible and invisible racial dynamics. There is also evidence that “woke” goes back as far as the 1930s. It was in 1936 when a postal worker named Victor Hugo Green created The Negro Motorist Green Book, a safety resource informing Black travelers of safe places to eat and lodge. Using Hugo’s Green Book as their guide, Alvin Hall and a friend traveled to many of these places while researching Driving the Greenbook.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement embraced the word. And so did others who were convinced that to be woke is a bad thing. Some even blamed wokeness for the recent bank failures, a claim disproven by The New York Times. When the paper fact-checked the claims, they found that experts broadly agreed that the collapse was due to a bank run precipitated by a decline in startup funding, rising interest rates, and the firm’s sale of government bonds at a huge loss to raise capital. Silicon Valley Bank’s commitment to improving diversity among its leadership was also typical in the industry. The 30 largest US banks all have a stated commitment to more inclusive career advancement.
“Let’s call it for what it was,” says Hall, also a financial educator. “It was bad regulations.”
As for the ongoing struggle around “woke,” Hall believes the word should be taken back. “Words have a life, and when they are heard in a negative context, oftentimes, they stay there,” he says. One way to counteract that effect is to educate when someone misuses it. Hall advises, “State what it means, and if necessary, repeat that meaning and then ask, ‘What is wrong with being sensitive to other people?’”
The listens I'm recommending aren't written around the word "woke,” nor should they be considered comprehensive in terms of societal inequalities affecting many different groups and identities in this country. Written mostly about the Black American experience in which the word “woke” was born, these listens provide history, solid facts, and information that can better inform and explain why there's nothing wrong with "wokeness."
