Loving and hating the word 'woke'

**Brian Lehrer** (0:05)
From WNYC, I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my Daily Politics Podcast. It's Tuesday, August 11th.
So on yesterday's show, we talked with New Yorker writer John Alsop about a word we're hearing a lot these days in the midterm election campaigns used in various ways, the word moderate. John's article was called, What does it even mean to be a moderate? Today we'll talk about another word being used a lot in politics, mostly as an accusation by Republicans these days or a pejorative. That word is woke. The news hook here is AOC distancing herself from a period of time she calls woke one. We'll replay that clip shortly. But also the news and opinion site, The Bulwark, has a new article tracing the history of the word that's become such a weapon for the right. And joining us now is Jasmine Green, the writer of that article, which is called What Woke Got Wrong and Right. Jasmine writes that because of its many meanings, people often talk past one another when it comes to woke. She explains the evolution of the word and says she's interested in working toward a theory for what a new improved wokeness would look like. She does think Democrats should re-embrace it, but in a certain kind of way.
Jasmine M. Green is an editorial and audience associate at The Bulwark. The Bulwark, for those who don't know, calls itself a pro-democracy site. Some of you know it was founded originally by some anti-Trump Republicans like Charlie Sykes, Bill Kristol and Sarah Longwell. It has expanded from there. Jasmine, thanks for coming on. Congrats on your first article for The Bulwark and welcome to WNYC.

**Jasmine Green** (1:50)
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:52)
Let's do the etymology, the linguistic history of the word from before it came what you call an all-purpose pejorative. Your article reminds us that it started around 2014 as one half of a phrase used by some in the black community like in the Black Lives Matter movement. What was that two-word phrase and what did it mean to the people who used it originally?

**Jasmine Green** (2:17)
Right. So the two-word phrase was stay woke. This essentially was a phrase used within the black community as a warning to others to just be aware of what's happening around you, to be aware of social injustice, to be aware of the police and the ways that the police can abuse their power and harm members of the black community. So it was really an inter-community term that was adopted by people outside of the black community, and then just took on many more meanings from there.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:52)
Meaning basically being aware of social injustice, right?

**Jasmine Green** (2:56)
Yes.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:58)
You write that progressives then adopted it more broadly, and by 2017, it was in such regular use that it got added to the Oxford English Dictionary. I looked that up by the way, after seeing it in your article. Interestingly, the Oxford says by the 1960s, people were using woke to mean being aware in general, meaning, as they put it, alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice, they say, and it was popularized some more by the Erika Bedou song, Master Teacher in the year 2008 So why not? Here's that.
I stay woke. A beautiful world, dreams, dreams, Erika Bedou, 2008 But then you're right, woke went off the rails and careened into unpopularity for a swath of Americans. You say a swath of Americans by 2020 Off the rails, how?

**Jasmine Green** (4:02)
So in 2020, particularly in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, woke really blew up, especially on social media, particularly on TikTok. At least that's where I, in 2020, I was a teenager. That's where I encountered it a lot. It became more than just a word that meant to be aware of social injustice, but you had to perform it. Particularly, white people had to perform it more than anyone else. By perform it, I mean, if you can recall back to posting black squares on Instagram to show that you were in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and other videos that showed that you cared about what was going on, which in itself was not a bad thing, but it became more performative than it was actually about creating actual change and being an activist.
It became something that existed almost entirely online and did not have real world, did not have real people, right, implications.

**Brian Lehrer** (5:06)
But you also suggest in the piece that it wasn't simply the meaning of being awake to injustice, even if it was performative, but people objected to a kind of insistence on agreement on certain issues, yes?