OPINION:
Dear Dr. E: One of the things we hear a lot about today is “wokeness” or going “woke.” It seems like it is everywhere. We hear about it in politics and our schools. We hear about it in our corporation and even in our churches. However, with all the talk about “wokeness,” it seems like very few people understand what it is. Can you tell me what the definition of “woke” is? — CURIOUS LEARNER FROM LANSING, MICHIGAN
Dear Curious Learner: You are right in saying that the entire concept of “wokeness” is confusing. Donald Trump pointed the same thing out at a campaign event this past fall when he was asked to comment on the woke wars. “I don’t like the term woke because I hear woke, woke, woke,” he said. “Half the people can’t even define it. They don’t know what it is.”
So, with all the confusion swirling around the word “woke,” what does it mean? In answering this question, let’s first go back to the word’s origin as best we understand it. What happened to make a simple past tense reference to staying awake such a politically charged term?
Conor Murray wrote a good article on the issue in the June 2023 edition of Forbes Magazine. In his essay, Murray states that the early use of the word “woke” dates back to 1923 and a Jamaican black liberation activist named Marcus Garvey. Mr. Murray then goes on to add that the word was later introduced into the broader culture in a 1938 song titled “Scottsboro Boys” by a blues singer named Lead Belly, who urged his listeners to “stay woke” — in other words, to keep their eyes open — to the dangers of racial violence in Alabama and the deep south.
More recently, a 2008 song by Erykah Badu included the refrain “I stay woke,” and then the idea of being “woke” became common vernacular within the Black Lives Matter movement and their concurrent neo-Marxist call for the oppressed to overthrow the oppressor through the redistribution of power.
Much more could be said about the etymology and development of “woke” throughout the 1900s and early 2000s, but we need to understand that the entire concept of “going woke” is much older than any of this. In fact, it’s as old as the Bible itself.
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In her excellent book, “Awake Not Woke,” Noelle Mering contends that the origin of “woke” goes all the way back to the book of Genesis and the story of the Tower of Babel. In other words, the history of the “woke” movement is the history of the confusion of language.
“When our shared language becomes compromised,” says Ms. Mering, “we lose not only the utility of it, which enables us to convey basic facts about the practicalities of life, but also any common and universal meaning toward which our daily lives might point.”
She goes on: “It does not take much convincing to see that our society as it currently stands is experiencing this crisis of meaning… about ends and purposes – our understanding of everything else… [Today] we cannot build any tower, even were it not a doomed hubristic enterprise, because we are arguing over the building blocks. Consider how drastically we have altered the meaning and usage of simple words like love, hate, man, woman, and marriage. Consider the new vocabulary that we have introduced [in their place]: Words such as white privilege, intersectionality, cisgender, heternormativity, and positionality.”
“But it is not just the building blocks that are corrupted; the purpose of the project is obscured,” says Ms. Mering. She then concludes: “Far from a peevish culture war, this is an attempt to revolutionize the way we see the world… Once we cease to see words as having the power to reveal reality, they are reduced to reflections not of reality but of ourselves. Rather than a bridge of communication, we are left with a staircase to nowhere as words become unintelligible altogether.”
At its heart, the “woke” revolution is the intentional elevation of the subjective over the objective, feelings over facts, and emotions over reason. When we do this, the casualty of it all is the concept of truth itself.
Wokeness, according to Ms. Mering, is ultimately the sad tale of man’s battle against God’s right to define what our words mean: “It is a war of words against the Word. It is a revolution that elevates will over reason, the group over the person, and human power over higher authority. What is rejected – reason, the person, and authority – are the three characteristics of the Logos himself. The Logos is the mind of God, communicated in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the author and authority over all. Whether explicitly or not, God is the target of the woke revolution.”
If you are seeking guidance in today’s changing world, Higher Ground is there for you. Everett Piper, a Ph.D. and a former university president and radio host, takes your questions in his weekly ’Ask Dr. E’ column. If you have moral or ethical questions for which you’d like an answer, please email askeverett@washingtontimes.com and he may include it in a future column.
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