Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza

Learn the definition of "woke.”

This past week, Tim Scott has come under criticism for admonishing “woke supremacy,” naming that the liberal movement is “as bad as white supremacy” (The Hill). The rise of the term “woke supremacy” indicates that the word “woke” has strayed far from its original intentions.

Happy Friday and welcome back. I’m taking a slightly different take on today’s newsletter to highlight the history behind the word woke and the harm in pitting calls for accountability against the violence of white supremacy culture. Because of that, the take action section offers a couple of urgent CTAs from communities across the U.S.

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By Nicole Cardoza (she/her)

This past week, Tim Scott has come under criticism for admonishing “woke supremacy,” naming that the liberal movement is “as bad as white supremacy” (The Hill). The rise of the term “woke supremacy” indicates that the word “woke” has strayed far from its original intentions. 

The term is often attributed to author William Melvin Kelley, who used the term in his 1962 New York Times essay about the appropriation of Black vernacular (often referred to as AAVE). But the idea of “staying awake” has been used to support social and political issues for hundreds of years. The term “stay woke” specifically was first used as part of a protest song by Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter called “Scottsboro Boys,” which a group of nine Black teenagers in Scottsboro, Arkansas, accused of raping two white women (Vox).


The word resonated with musician Georgia Anne Muldrow, who used it as her own personal mantra to stay motivated. Her definition of the term is as follows:


“

Woke is definitely a black experience — woke is if someone put a burlap sack on your head, knocked you out, and put you in a new location and then you come to and understand where you are ain’t home and the people around you ain’t your neighbors. They’re not acting in a neighborly fashion, they’re the ones who conked you on your head. You got kidnapped here and then you got punked out of your own language, everything. That’s woke — understanding what your ancestors went through. Just being in touch with the struggle that our people have gone through here and understanding we’ve been fighting since the very day we touched down here. There was no year where the fight wasn’t going down.


Georgia Anne Muldrow, in conversation with Elijah C. Watson for OkayPlayer

Muldrow wrote the word into her song “Master Teacher”, which was re-recorded by Erykah Badu, a Grammy-award-winning singer and songwriter, and released in 2008 (OkayPlayer). That track brought the term “stay woke” to the forefront of modern Black culture. “Stay woke” became a rallying cry for Black lives after the killing of Michael Brown in 2014, a reminder to watch out for police brutality. This specific use of the term defines its relevance to our current culture. Aja Romano wrote a detailed history about the word “woke,” including a comprehensive timeline, if you want to learn more (Vox).

And, as words tend to do in culture, the word “woke” was mainstream by 2016. Everyone – individuals, brands, talk shows, politicians, sports teams – started using the word broadly to align themselves with conscious values and ideas. As Sam Sanders notes in his article for NPR, this is a standard pattern for how words cycle through our culture (NPR). And AAVE is routinely adopted and misconstrued by mainstream communities. But a word that once carried significant cultural significance for the Black community got co-opted to display solidarity without any action attached to it. Woke went from something we did to something we only said.

“Words that begin with a very specific meaning, used by a very specific group of people, over time become shorthand for our politics, and eventually move from shorthand to linguistic weapon. Or in the case of woke, a linguistic eye-roll” (NPR).

As soon as the term found mainstream understanding, it also started to be wielded by conservatives as an attack. Nowadays, it’s more likely you hear about “wokeness,” “woke culture,” "woketopians," or “woke supremacy” condescendingly, usually as a way to dismiss liberal views of equity and inclusion as a “liberal agenda” or a form of “political correctness.” Suddenly, the word woke went from protecting marginalized folk to attacking them for standing up for their rights. This evolution of the term aligns with an incredibly polarized era. It’s no wonder that by October 2018, 80 percent of Americans believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country” (The Atlantic).

But woke supremacy is just a phrase. White supremacy is a culture. The word “woke” wouldn’t even exist if Black people had to stay vigilant to stay alive. Individuals, for example, wouldn’t express outrage over a journalist using the N-word if white supremacy hadn’t fostered a condition where discrimination against Black people hadn’t been normalized for generations. The conversation on racial stereotypes in some of Dr. Seuss’s books can’t happen if those racial depictions haven’t been weaponized against communities of color for decades. 

Although some individuals have faced personal discomfort after being called out publicly for inappropriate actions, this so-called “woke supremacy” doesn’t have the capacity to create systemic harm. Don Lemon stated it far more plainly on CNN. “I’ve never seen a woke supremacist lynching anybody. Never saw a woke supremacist denying anybody access to housing or a job or education or voting rights. Never saw any woke supremacists enslaving anybody. Never saw any woke supremacists trying to keep people from marrying amongst different races. Where are the woke supremacists attacking police? Where are the woke supremacists hunting police officers in the halls of the Capitol and beating them with Blue Lives Matter signs” (Huffington Post)?

Ironically, centering “woke supremacy” alongside “white supremacy” only emphasizes the real issue. Some people are so focused on protecting white supremacy that they’re willing to manifest a new enemy to exercise its power against. As a result, there are coordinated attacks against “wokeness” that are actually more forceful applications of white supremacy culture. Schools are passing bills to ban the 1619 Project and conversations on racism and sexism from the curriculum and poll public university employees about their political identity. In FiveThirtyEight, Perry Bacon Jr. notes that this isn’t new; the right has leveled the same attacks against “‘outside agitators’” (civil rights activists in 1960s), the ‘politically correct’ (liberal college students in the 1980s and ’90s) and ‘activist judges’ (liberal judges in the 2000s).”

So, what do we do about it? First, we recognize that the argument is inherently flawed. We focus our attention back on systemic harm rather than political noise. In essence, we draw our attention back to the root of the word itself: the social and racial issues that threaten the safety of Black people and other marginalized groups. And instead of preparing for battle in a fictional war, we stay committed to the work. After all, actions are louder than words.

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Nicole Cardoza Nicole Cardoza

Study Hall! Ebonics, capitalizations and cultural appropriation.

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Happy Saturday!

Here's a roundup of questions and insights from the past week. I'm calling these Study Hall now! We introduced some new topics this week in our newsletter series to act as a foundation for more nuanced, thoughtful conversations moving forward. Excited to continue to dive into this work with more perspectives as we grow.

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We're also posting sharing assets on Instagram @antiracismdaily.

Nicole

ps – many of send a note skeptical that we will receive it. But we do! We recently implemented something on our Mailchimp account called Conversations, which sends your responses to an inbox on Mailchimp instead of my personal email inbox. It makes it easier for our growing team to organize responses, and for contributors to log in and respond to you directly. It might look like you're sending your response to a random string of text, but we are receiving them. So don't worry!

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TAKE ACTION

1. Reflect on the questions prompted by our users and by our team in the responses below.

2. Ask yourself two questions about one of the topics we discussed this week. Discuss these questions with a friend or colleague.

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ICYMI: Last week's Newsletters

Friday July 17, 2020: Analyze representation in media.

Thursday, July 16, 2020: Respect AAVE.

Wednesday, July 15, 2020: End racial bias in school discipline.

Tuesday, July 14, 2020: Embrace your race privilege.

Monday, July 13, 2020: Respect the roots of Black hair. 

Sunday, July 12, 2020: Learn how air pollution exacerbates COVID-19.

Questions from the Community

What about the term Ebonics? How is that similar / different to AAVE?
In response to Respect AAVE from Thursday, July 16.

The word Ebonics and AAVE are essentially referring to the same language. Ebonics, a blend of "ebony" and "phonics" was coined in the 1970s and popularized by African American psychologist Robert L. Williams (Hamilton College). Although the term itself isn't a slur, the word Ebonics is often used that way. I noticed that AAVE was used more frequently in the resources I gathered, so stuck with one term in the newsletter for the sake of clarity.

Aren't there other forms of English that we discriminate against, like "country twang" or "Southern accents"? Why are we only making a big deal about AAVE?
In response to Respect AAVE from Thursday, July 16.

Yes! There are other accents and dialects that people discriminate against all the time! And it's equally unfair that we do that. When we talk about AAVE specifically, we focus on the discrimination that contributes towards a larger, comprehensive system of racism against Black people. But this insight isn't intended to detract from harm that may happen when we judge how anyone speaks, only illuminate one specific instance. 

This type of questioning can be an honest, thoughtful reflection. But often, this type of criticism is a common argument against anti-racism conversations. And, to the reader that submitted this, I know you were challenged like this when you shared this newsletter with your friend. I group these into the "all lives matter" arguments – the argument that if everyone is somehow impacted, then there can't be a specific issue on one group of people. Trump recently said this himself about police shootings (LA Times).  

If all people can be harmed by discriminatory practices, or harmful systems, shouldn't we all be trying to change them? Yes, many people can be judged unfairly because of how they speak. And it's a major barrier for Black people. So how do we adopt practices that prevent that from happening to anyone? Yes, white people get killed by cops, too. And Black men are 2.5x more likely to be than white people. So what policies can we implement to ensure all people don't lose their lives?

What people often forget is that when we center those most vulnerable, or most marginalized, in policies and practices, we tend to create more equitable spaces that positively impact the lives of everyone.

Shouldn't we all agree on one common language that's taught at schools and used in workplaces? Is it not acceptable to expect coworkers to use SAE in a professional setting? What’s the appropriate way to make space for AAVE being the mother tongue of Black coworkers while having SAE be the default language at work?
In response to Respect AAVE from Thursday, July 16.

Personally, I challenge the idea that there has to be one common language that we embrace, and would prefer to see our schools teach several types of English. What notions have we been taught about dominant culture that define the idea that there's only one "professional" language appropriate for schools and the workplace? How could embracing multiple forms of language improve workplace culture? Encourage students to feel more comfortable learning?

What's the reason against using an uppercase W when referring to white?
In response to Embrace your race privilege from Tuesday, July 14.

A couple people this week asked about capitalizations, which we covered in an earlier newsletter on June 25 (read Capitalize the B in Black and I in Indigenous here). The newsletter offers various opinions on the subject, and most major publications are using the lowercase w for white, likely because of the points in this paragraph (an excerpt from the newsletter):

The need to add respect and understanding to the Black community is also in response to whiteness. I mentioned above that acknowledging Black and Indigenous as a community helps to "articulate the common challenges," and these challenges are an effect of being marginalized and exploited by dominant culture (more on that here). Some use this point to argue against white being capitalized, because white people already have enough power and don't need further acknowledgement. In these cases, some writers also note that white supremacists often capitalize white to demonstrate that they should remain in power. I paraphrased a detailed perspective you can read here >

We follow this approach in our editorial guidelines.

Where is the line with cultural appropriation? Can I wear Dutch braids, that might look similar to other forms of braids worn by Black people but are actually from my European ancestors? Can I wear a kimono to a Japanese celebration where the attire is appropriate? Can POC wear lederhosen to Ocktoberfest? What about the Native American earrings I bought in New Mexico to support local businesses?
In response to Respect the roots of Black hair from Monday, July 13

The voices here at Anti-Racism Daily cannot possibly speak on behalf of everybody on the appropriate way to culturally appreciate all cultures, backgrounds, and heritages. I encourage us to think beyond the binary when it comes to anti-racism work. There are certainly clear and deliberate actions we can take against more blatant forms of racism. But the more nuanced and subtle ways that we perpetuate systemic oppression have more nuanced and subtle responses, too.

Instead of seeking a stamp of approval*, ask yourself these questions instead. Reflect on how your participation in culture is appreciating it, or appropriating it. To which extent are you minimizing the voice and perspective of other people in your participation? Are you mocking it or degrading it? Are you using the culture of someone else to make yourself seem cooler, edgier, more "exotic"? How did you come across the items you're wearing? Who profited off of what you bought? Why did you buy these items, and how do you plan to act while you're wearing them? 

Harm happens when we don't think about the impact of our actions and only focus on the intent. So sit deeply with these questions. And know that we ultimately can't control how anyone feels about anything that we do.

*I'm not insinuating that you all emailed with these questions for a stamp! I'm simply emphasizing that this type of reward-based behavior isn't the right approach.

CLARIFICATIONS

Learn how air pollution exacerbates COVID-19, Monday, July 13
Tommy sent a note that scientists now believe COVID-19 is a vascular disease (which still affects the respiratory system), not a respiratory disease as this email initially stated. Learn more on The Daily podcast from NYTimes. This will be updated in the archives.

Analyze representation in media, Friday, July 17
Helen, and a couple others, noted that Black soldiers are mentioned in Hamilton in the song Yorktown in the lyrics "Black and white soldiers wonder alike if this really means freedom" and in Your Shot with the lyrics "But we'll never be truly free / Until those in bondage have the same rights as you and me / You and I / Do or die / Wait 'til I sally in on a stallion / With the first black battalion". Although I believe Ebony meant to emphasize a mention beyond lyrics (as in dialogue between characters, plot points, etc), the email as written is factually untrue. This will be clarified in the archives.

PLEDGE YOUR SUPPORT

Thank you for all your financial contributions! If you haven't already, consider making a monthly donation to this work. These funds will help me operationalize this work for greatest impact.

Subscribe on Patreon | Give one-time on PayPal | Venmo @nicoleacardoza

Read More