By The FirstA columnist for the Washington Post confused thousands of readers this week when he claimed the term ‘Woke’ is now a “dog-whistle” to promote racism against African Americans.
The term rose to prominence in 2014 and was popularized by the Black Lives Matter movement in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
It was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017.
From the Washington Post:
There’s “urban” of course. And urban’s cousin “inner-city.”
And then there’s “at-risk,” “underserved” and “fatherless” if talking about our children. “Marginalized,”“low-income” and “welfare-dependent” if talking about the parents of those children.
We live in “Democratic strongholds” like “Chicago,” but we’re also “socialists” and “low-information voters” taught “critical race theory” by “Marxists” so we can be “anti-American.” Our neighborhoods are “sketchy” and “depressed” “ghettos” filled with “thugs” and “transient” “Section 8” “renters” employable only through “affirmative action” “diversity” “quotas.” If we choose to play a sport, we are “naturally gifted,” “ungrateful,” “intimidating” and somehow both “aggressive” and “lazy.”
Then there’s “woke” — a word I’d argue has undergone more shifts in connotation than any other word in the 21st century. When I was in college, in the late ’90s and early aughts, it was used exclusively by Black people to describe the Black people so socially conscious that it bordered on parody.Unfortunately, one of us left the gate open and said it in mixed company, and it eventually entered the mainstream as a synonym for political correctness. As I wrote four years ago in a New York Times essay about it, “You were woke if you recycled, or maybe just retweeted an infographic on the virtues of recycling.”
Read the full story here.
