How “Woke” Became a 4 Letter Word

It first appeared, politically speaking, in the early ’60s but gained much notoriety after the Michael Brown shooting in 2014 and subsequent attempts from the Black Lives Matter movement to “wake” America to alleged police abuse on a systemic level. Today, “woke” has evolved to represent ideas associated with identity, race, white privilege, reparations, issues related to the trans/queer community, and, in general, liberal politics.

As such, conservative America doesn’t like it, claiming that our country is being overthrown by a political correctness pandemic, that “wokeness” poses a threat to American values and, ultimately, freedom. According to a USA Today poll, the definition of “woke” to more than half of conserviative America is “to be overly politically correct and police others’ words.” And so phrases like “war on woke” and “woketopians” are commonly used among GOP politicians and influencers.

It’s a war, and pro-woke folk are living in a fairy tale.

To be fair, you have to be careful what you say these days. People are sensitive. Some are too sensitive. It seems like everyone has adopted their own list of forbidden words. You can’t say anything, it seems, and the wrong words can get you in trouble, fired even. A few years ago, a woman lost her job because she socially posted a picture of Michelle Obama without makeup and likened her to a gorilla.

Should somebody lose their job over that? Of course they should. This isn’t a time to articulate racist views on a platform that can viewed by the ENTIRE WORLD. And why does something like that need to be posted? But some believed that it wasn’t a racist perpetration, and that it certainly shouldn’t have gotten anyone fired. To that crowd, it’s just one more example of how the world has gotten too sensitive, lost in political correctness.

But every cultural expression that’s ever existed has had it’s forbidden words: “political correctness” is nothing new to humanity, especially contemporary conservative humanity, especially Christian humanity. I served for 20 years in pastoral ministry and held every church job from janitor to pastor. There are simply things that cannot be said in that world, issues that will not be discussed.

If you’re a conservative Christian, especially one who attends a suburban church in southeast America, I highly recommend that you never go to a Bible study and critique the church, or challenge mainstream interpretations of the Bible, or imply that Donald Trump wasn’t a good president, or talk about how much you love your queer friends, or suggest that churches spend too much money on buildings, or that mostly white churches are mostly white for a reason.

Don’t you dare affirm things like CRT, social justice, Black Lives Matter, or gay wedding cakes. None of that will go well. The farther South you get, and/or the farther away you get from urban spaces, the more trouble you’ll get yourself into.

And when your tribe wants to cancel something, you’d better not put up a fuss, and keep it to yourself that Christianity was doing cancel culture long before anyone else.

I don’t know of a cross-section of Americana that’s free from its sensitive places; topics that must be trodden upon lightly or avoided altogether. The anti-woke movement is no exception. The problem today is that the sensitivities of non-white, non-straight America are coming to the fore – like the world has never seen – and that’s not cool, not because we think they’re illegitimate complaints, but because they’re not the sensitivities of white, straight America.

Funny how someone else’s sensitivities only bother us when they’re not part of our tribe. And when a great big bunch of people start talking about them like they’re legitimate, it frightens us. The concerns of people who don’t think like we do feel evil, so we don’t investigate or consider the idea that they might have some merit.

As such, I don’t have any anti-woke friends who can articulate why I believe that things like Critical Race Theory or the concerns of the Black Lives Matter Movement are legitimate. The mountain of data that converted my thinking on these issues goes largely unconsidered by Americans who see “woke” as the representation of all things evil.

To further complicate things, the woke movement is not free of its shortcomings; it gets overdone at times, as in any movement. And if you want to heavily audit leaders and influencers that are pushing it forward, you’ll find a few bad players. Audit any movement and you’ll find the same, especially if that’s what you’re looking for.

Funny how we always find what we’re looking for.

While nobody should characterize an entire movement by it’s weaknesses, that’s exactly what’s happened with the anti-woke crowd. And if there’s a media outlet who’s majority following is suspicious of wokeness, there’s money to be made, emotions to exploit. Blood in the water. All it has to do is find one bad player, or a misguided perpetration or two, and the entire movement is easily condemned. Serve it up with some less-than-contextual gravy, a bit of ominous music, and a few politicians virtue-signalling for personal gain – like that doesn’t happen on both sides – and boom, it’s truth; further evidence that these people are evil: nobody should listen to them, much less sit and hear their side of the story.

Currently, 56% of America believes that “woke” means “to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.” I’ll wager that, as these injustices become more difficult to ignore, more Americans will adopt a similar definition. But, as in all of America’s formative social justice movements, there will be a cross-section of us that simply won’t be able to get there.

Many will be Christian, refusing to believe that God might be working behind these movements, doing his part to move our country in the direction it needs to go.

To the Christian anti-woke crowd, the idea that God is pro-woke is anathema.