But at the same time we're quick to evolve and adapt because we need to in order to survive.' 'It's sad to say but we're used to being taken advantage of and to have things stolen from us. 'We made jazz, we made rap, we made all these different things,' Watson said. He compares the co-opting of woke to the way music steeped in black tradition moves through mainstream culture. ' was something that we were taking seriously and then it kind of transformed into something ironic and then it became a meme and then it became a trademark,' Watson says.Īfter writing a definitive history of the word for OKPlayer, Watson says he no longer uses the word woke. 'She was saying 'I'd,' like I would stay woke,' Watson says, 'but it sounds like it's a declarative 'I stay woke.' 'Ī word meant to imply a constant state of striving, course-correcting and growth has been heard now, for almost a decade, as a static and performative state of being. But, in a recent interview with OKPlayer, songwriter Georgia Anne Muldrow told Elijah Watson, news and culture editor for the site, that we all heard it wrong. In that song, Badu and others repeat the refrain, 'I stay woke,' over and over again. You are going to think about how the words impact an audience that is maybe, maybe not the audience that you first imagined when you are saying something or creating something.' 'At its most sincere,' Brewster says, ' is a kind of caretaking of the people around you. Emily Brewster, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster sees parallels with the phrase 'politically correct,' which is defined as 'conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated,' but at this point usually means something pretty different.

Of course, this way in which words cycle through the culture is nothing new. By then, Holliday argues, that word is done. Their parents hear it, and before you know it, a buzzword ends up in a corporate board meeting. 'They interact with other young people and people a little older than them.'Īnd then, Holliday says, people in their 20s grab hold of it, as do white liberals, and so on and so forth. 'Some group of young people - usually young people of color - start popularizing a word,' Holliday says. No matter how well-intentioned, when Jill Stein and the cast of Will & Grace are name-checking the term, ironically or not, it's no longer anything new. One of the arguments Kelley presented in the piece was that once black words, like 'cats' or 'dig it,' used to define certain aspects of blackness, became adopted by a white mainstream, they were officially done. It's most famously traced to an essay published in the New York Times in 1962 called 'If You're Woke You Dig It,' by William Melvin Kelley, though some have traced its use as far back as the 1940s. But the word goes further back than that. Woke became shorthand for a mindset and a worldview that values black lives. BLM activists have been striving, for years now, to convince people of all races to value and respect blackness, to take issues like the deaths of black people at the hands of police seriously. Its resurgence in this decade can be most closely linked to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. In order to make this argument, it's important to define the word as accurately as possible, because the muddling of the definition of woke is really what killed it.Īccording to Merriam-Webster, woke means, 'aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).'

The last street sweeping at the end of a long parade, that final reminder that the party is really over.

The argument I am making is not new, or revolutionary, or profound.

Liberas are immoral