Woke

Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we’ll stay woke up longer.

If You’re Woke You Dig It [title]

I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. And I’m gon help him wake up other black folk.

What if there was no niccas / Only master teachers? / I stay woke (dreams dreams)

[…] stay woke[,] people of color, / let us occupy this dissent

But the cultural conflict between these two post-revolutionary styles — between frat guys and feminist bluestockings, Gamergaters and the diversity police, alt-right provocateurs and “woke” dudebros, the mouthbreathers who poured hate on the all-female “Ghostbusters” and the tastemakers who pretended it was good — is likely here to stay.

Like, if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, cause, "Man, you see how woke I was, I called you out." That’s not activism. That’s not bringing about change.

If this were actually true, you would expect real traction for the wokest candidates in the Democratic presidential race. But it’s been just the opposite. The woke candidates have been the weakest, electorally speaking, and the defining attribute of the Democratic primary has been a preoccupation with the voters that put Trump in the White House.

[Kevin Smith is] also baffled by some of the accusations that he tried to make the franchise “woke” by focusing on Teela.

Rightwing Tory MPs should stop portraying concerns over the climate and nature as “woke”, and understand that voters are deeply concerned about the crisis, the Conservative minister Zac Goldsmith has warned.

Mr. Prevost, who described himself to Mr. Morgan as a “MAGA type,” said the new pope was “much more liberal” than he was — although, when asked, he said that he would not necessarily call his brother “woke.”

The famous author of Harry Potter, J K Rowling, found herself at the centre of a woke storm after liking a tweet by Maya Forstater, who lost her job in 2019 after tweeting that “male people are not women”. The reaction was immediate, with some accusing Forstater of “killing trans people with her hate” for simply expressing an opinion.

Many on the ‘woke right’ who for some time have spoken against cancel culture, have chosen to embrace a version of their own, boycotting companies that support progressive causes, for example. The overwhelming support for DeSantis’ fight against Disney in Florida is one such illustration. The boycott of Bud Light over the company’s paid promotional social media posts using trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney is another.

The woke right and woke left demand that we internalize our status as victim. Progressives want women and people of color and the poor and LGBTQ people to feel like they are besieged, like they constantly face a barrage of marginalization and disdain. How different is the woke right? Even a brief perusal of the sources I quoted above shows that they very much want straight White men not only to recognize that they are victims, strangers in their own country, but to internalize this identity.

Not to beat a dead horse, but it would appear that the wokes are in an abusive relationship with the speech policemen, given that some of their favored terms are being abruptly disallowed (like trigger warning or “preferred” pronouns).

Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University in London, said the war on woke kicked off as a counter to the “silent revolution” of liberal and progressive attitudes during the economic boom of the decades up to 2008.

The woke is the new religion of the left.

Millennials, such as Styles (and the other Harry, HRH, for that matter), were able to popularise and profit from woke.

For I’m afraid the demise of woke won’t be like the end of toothbrush moustaches, indie folk music or any other temporary behaviour supercharged by the whims of the young and the hip, then dropped without consequence.

[…] have woke out of dreams, mayhap in which the beloved was smiling on you, whispering love-words-oh! how sweet and fondly remembered!

It has its tempers and its gentle moods. Yesterday it slept as we did, and now it has woke after a quiet night.

What time did you wake up, and what woke you so flamin' early on a Sunday morning? Something must have woke you. The alarm clock?