The word “woke” in the context of social/political commentary has a long history dating back to the early 1900s, but the term was popularized in 2014 during the Ferguson riots in the aftermath of the officer-involved shooting death of Michael Brown.
Author Joanna Williams explained how the word became a mainstay in the activist left circles in a book she wrote about how “woke” had allegedly “won”:
In 2014, protests broke out in Ferguson, Missouri following the police killing of Michael Brown. Activists rallied around the slogan Black Lives Matter. The phrase ‘stay woke’, popularised by Badu, quickly became associated with the Black Lives Matter movement through the sharing of the hashtag #StayWoke online. This was a call back to the 1930s warning to black people to stay alert to the threat of racist police brutality, but it rapidly expanded to encompass the broader sense of being aware of all forms of social injustice.
On Wednesday, another book author, conservative commentator Bethany Mandel, went on The Hill’s “Rising” program to talk about the recently released book “Stolen Youth” that she co-authored with fellow conservative commentator Karol Markowicz.
During the interview, Mandel used the term “woke’ and was then asked by “Rising” co-host Briahna Joy Gray how she defined it. Mandel struggled for a moment before she gave her short definition in a clip that has, as she predicted, gone viral:
“Would you mind defining woke?” Gray asked. “It’s come up a couple of times. I just want to make sure we’re on the same page.””So, I mean, woke is sort of the idea that… I – this is going to be one of those moments that goes viral,” Mandel said, as she paused and looked for the right words.”I mean, woke is something that’s very hard to define, and we’ve spent an entire chapter defining it. It is sort of the understanding that we need to totally reimagine and redo society in order to create hierarchies of oppression… Sorry, it’s hard to explain in a 15-second sound bite,” she said.
Reading it, her answer sounded fine. But because she paused a few times while thinking of what to say and looked uncomfortable after she answered it, self-styled progressives had a field day.
Watch:
Predictably, the Washington Post declared that the moment “reinforces the hollowness of ‘woke’ as an attack.”
In fairness, outside of that moment, Mandel did well throughout most of the back-and-forth with the hosts, as seen in the full video below:
In response to the leftist pile on of Mandel, which included one of the Queens of Woke, Jemele Hill, conservatives and other independent-minded people weighed in with their thoughts on what woke means, with others correctly pointing out how the left loves to play word games with their own words and slogans and then declares the same words off limits for conservatives to use when their games start to backfire:
But even if one can’t explicitly define “woke,” it’s something you definitely know when you see it, as Professor Jacobson noted:
[Video courtesy Andrew Marcus]
“Because you’re a f*cking white man, aren’t you quite aware by holding that video camera on me that you are surrounded by your privilege, right? Take your privilege somewhere else please because your privilege is not welcome here. So unless you are here to dismantle your privilege, please find somewhere else to go!”
The face of “woke,” ladies and gents. A privileged white leftist using her iPhone to film a white man and accuse him of having privilege becuase he’s filming her berating him (during a Trump protest in Chicago in 2016). Never forget it.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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