Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis speaks during a news conference in West Columbia, SC on July 18. Sean Rayford/AP hide caption
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Sean Rayford/AP
Florida Governor and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis speaks during a news conference in West Columbia, SC on July 18.
Sean Rayford/AP
There’s one word in the Republican presidential campaign that’s hard to avoid: “woke.”
Republicans on the campaign trail are using it as a kind of ploy to criticize anything on the progressive side of the political spectrum that they don’t like, whether it’s teaching about racism in schools or gender transition policies or even books in the libraries they consider. inappropriate
But the term did not originate with the Republicans, or with this round of culture wars.
“It’s from black culture,” explained Elaine Richardson, a professor of literacy studies at Ohio State University. Richardson co-authored a academic work examining the use of the word in the Black Lives Matter movement.
“In simple terms, it just means being politically conscious and aware,” he said. “How to stay awake.”
How it is being used
A supporter of President Donald Trump wears a ‘Woke’ hat before a campaign rally at Lancaster Airport on Oct. 26, 2020, in Lititz, Penn. Jacqueline Larma/AP hide caption
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Jacqueline Larma/AP
A supporter of President Donald Trump wears a ‘Woke’ hat before a campaign rally at Lancaster Airport on Oct. 26, 2020, in Lititz, Penn.
Jacqueline Larma/AP
Despite this, Republicans have co-opted the phrase and it has become the buzzword of the Republican primaries.
“We’ve made Florida the state where awakening goes to die,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a recent event in Virginia. “The virus of the awakened mind represents a war on merit. It represents a war on achievement.”
He has also repeated it almost verbatim elsewhere.
No other candidate has made the anti-“woke” more central to his candidacy than DeSantis. He has repeated the word over and over and over at nearly every campaign stop.
As governor, he implemented conservative policies that he has described as anti-awakening. After winning re-election last fall, he made it central to his message, foreshadowing the central thesis of his presidential bid.
“We’ve embraced freedom. We’ve maintained law and order. We’ve protected parents’ rights. We’ve respected our taxpayers and we reject woke ideology,” DeSantis said during his victory speech after his re-election, hinting his own definition of what he awakened is and is not. “We fight the woke in the legislature. We fight the woke in the schools. We fight the woke in the corporations. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob. Florida is where the woke go to die.”
He has often repeated the second half of this quote during the campaign. And its use has forced it into the lexicon of the primaries with other candidates who also use it.
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally, July 7 in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Charlie Riedel/AP hide caption
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Charlie Riedel/AP
Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally, July 7 in Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Charlie Riedel/AP
Former President Donald Trump has said he doesn’t like the term, but has used it repeatedly himself.
“I don’t like the term woke up because I feel wake up, wake up, wake up, you know, that’s like a term that they use,” Trump said. “Half the people can’t even define it. They don’t know what it is.”
But within hours of making that statement, he used it several times in a Fox News town hall.
“There’s a lot going on with our military, with the awakening and all that nonsense,” he said. “They’re not learning how to fight and protect us from some very bad people. They want to wake up. They want to wake up.”
There are other candidates who also don’t like the mandate approach.
“I think the president of the United States needs to define a set of things that they’re supposed to work on, and it’s not all culture war issues,” North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum told Meet the Press on the NBC
He is not alone, but he is also in the minority in his party and has minimal support.
Former tech CEO Vivek Ramaswamy has written two books on this, particularly against companies’ diversity-based hiring practices and socially conscious investment.
“I think it’s inherently divisive to tell us that we’re nothing more than the characteristics we inherit the day we’re born,” he argued. CNN. “This divides us by race, gender and sexual orientation.”
The word has been co-opted and has a long history
“Woke” was used in black protest songs dating back to the early 20th century. There is debate about its originsbut as early as 1938, the singer Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, used the phrase in a recording of an epilogue of his song, “Scottsboro Boys,” to warn of possible racist violence against blacks in the South.
“I advise everybody to be a little bit careful when they’re going through Alabama — stay awake, keep your eyes open,” Ledbetter said in what is believed to be the first audio recording of someone using the phrase “stay awake “.
The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers, accused of raping two white girls in what is now considered one of the worst cases of racist legal injustice. It helped spur the civil rights movement and inspired the book and movie “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
“It comes out of black people’s experience of knowing that you have to be aware of the politics of race, class, gender, systemic racism, ways in which society is stratified and unequal,” said Richardson of the state Ohio on expression.
The phrase became popular again in 2008 after that Erykah Badu’s song Master Teacher. Donald Glover aka Childish Gambino used it in his song Redbone in 2016.
On other occasions, however, the gravity of the word has been diluted, it is used in a fun and ironic way in social networks.
Modern black activism and the Black Lives Matter movement, however, used it widely as a rallying cry.
“I think the Black Lives Matter generation really brought the word back into popular consciousness, even though it never went away, because it’s always in the community parlance,” Richardson said. “In the Black Lives Matter movement, the word, I think, reached another level of popularity with people saying ‘stay awake.’ That hashtag was very popular.”
In this July 10, 2016, file photo, Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson speaks to the media after being released from the Baton Rouge Jail in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, wearing a ‘Stay Woke’ T-shirt “. Max Becherer/AP hide caption
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Max Becherer/AP
In this July 10, 2016, file photo, Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson speaks to the media after being released from the Baton Rouge Jail in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, wearing a ‘Stay Woke’ T-shirt “.
Max Becherer/AP
But there’s a straight line between Black Lives Matter activists using it and Republicans using it now. For conservatives, the culture of street protests – and sometimes violence – was emblematic of what they do not want to see in the country.
It is something that has been seen many times throughout the last American century, including and especially during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
“People who are interested in keeping hierarchy and social inequality as it is and not trying to level the playing field or not trying to have social inequality, one way to do that is by controlling language, controlling how people think. about ideas,” Richardson said. “And it’s actually stripping, it’s trying to strip black people of their history, of our lived experience, of our identity.”
He also sees dangers in how Republicans use the phrase, warning that it could lead to violence, such as the recent shootings of black people knocking on doors, for example.
“It promotes anti-blackness,” Richardson argued. “It promotes stratification. It promotes fear. And that is very dangerous.”
Conservatives don’t see it that way, and show no signs of restricting its use on the campaign trail. Badu was asked about Republicans using the phrase and, in particular, DeSantis’ quote that “Florida is where the awakening is going to die.”
“I think they mean black,” she said MSNBC earlier this year. “Yeah. It’s another way of saying ‘thug’ or something. It is what it is. It doesn’t belong to us anymore, and once something goes out into the world, it takes on a life of its own.”
