Wednesday is the first Republican presidential primary debate. And I want you to keep your ears tuned for one single word: Woke. You’ve heard it before, and I’m betting you’ll hear it a lot more tonight. Or at least enough to rankle your nerves. Or maybe mine.
See, before it was co-opted by right-wing conservatives, before it became a charged, political, catch-all phrase meaning everything and nothing at once, before it was considered a pejorative, and long before many of you probably ever heard the word, “woke” was part of the Black American lexicon, rooted in the fight for equality and justice.
But America’s political theater has erased and overshadowed this necessary context. “Woke” in the mouths of some conservative Republicans, the MAGA set and their acolytes, has become a battering ram and a battle cry against liberal policies like bodily autonomy, affirmative action and the teaching of America’s true and unvarnished history in classrooms. An anti-woke agenda has swept the country — or at least the parts of the country where such political shenanigans overpower good faith political arguments. Conservative activists and right-wing politicians, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have promised to destroy so-called wokeness wherever they find it.
“We can never, ever surrender to the woke mob,” said DeSantis, who is vying for the GOP’s presidential nomination, said at a campaign stop in May. “Our mission is to leave woke in the dust bin of history where it belongs.”
It’s giving McCarthyism, if Joe McCarthy read a dictionary of African American Vernacular English slang and randomly slapped his finger down on w-o-k-e on the book’s final page.
Last year, the war against woke made it to policy with DeSantis’ Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which prohibits instruction that could make students feel uncomfortable about U.S. racial history. (It has since been blocked by a judicial order, but Florida is fighting the injunction.) Across the state, books have been banned. A.P. African American history curriculums have been white-washed or scrapped all together. Teachers have been jammed between a rock and a ridiculous place, with new standards even for teaching children that slavery was a good thing for Black people. So much for shielding (Black) kids from discomfort.
For many, “woke” has become a slur.
“It’s almost another way of saying ‘Black.’ It’s another way of saying the N-word,” Ishena Robinson, the editorial director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told me.
But what’s the real definition?
Robinson, who’s been tracking the political evolution of the word, says to be “woke” is “to be awake to what’s happening around you, particularly when it comes to systemic injustice. And it specifically came from Black people.”
“It’s being aware to what’s being done to you and your people,” she said. “And being aware about how your people have been demonized or discriminated against or oppressed or framed in a way that takes away your humanity.”
The word also can’t be fully understood without also understanding its history.
“Woke” has become a cannon ball in the latest culture wars.
Post-emancipation, white supremacist violence was a constant threat. Lynching was common. From 1877 to 1950, some 4,075 Black people were lynched across the South, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. So Black folks had to keep their eyes open, literally and figuratively, to white danger. They had to stay woke.
It was “half warning, half reminder,” said Michael Harriot, the author of the forthcoming book, “Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America.”
From there, the word emerged as a common theme in African American vernacular and culture. In the 1930s, blues man Huddie Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly, wrote a protest song, “Scottsboro Boys,” in honor of a group of Black teens falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. In a coda at the end of the song, Lead Belly warns, “I advise everybody when they go down there, stay woke, keep their eyes open.”
Since then, from the blues to hip-hop to the protest line, Black people have used “woke” and “stay woke” as a Bat Signal: Stay keen. Stay vigilant. White society can be vicious, physically and politically. By the late 1980s, woke was showing up in Black art, like in Spike Lee’s classic film “School Daze,” where the actor Lawrence Fishburne is seen running into frame, staring dead into the camera, yelling, “Wake up!” Decades later, in the post-Trayvon Martin and post-Michael Brown era, “woke” was given new electricity by neo-soul artist Erykah Badu in her song, “Master Teacher.” Badu sings soulfully: “I am known to stay awake/A beautiful world I’m trying to find.” Then, in 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, “woke” crossed over from Black culture to the mainstream. “No one was talking about woke as much as we have in the last two years,” Robinson said. “I think there was a lot of terror in seeing what was happening in 2020, seeing the multiracial multiethnic coalitions.” Robinson said the GOP seemed to send out a Bat Signal of their own: “Wokeness is what we’re targeting.” With the 2024 presidential election quickly approaching, “woke” has become a cannon ball in the latest culture wars. Harriot says the weaponization of “woke” follows a familiar pattern, as foes of racial and social progress in this country have always attempted to hijack and co-opt the narratives that define progressive movements. “They weaponized the Civil Rights Movement and said it was a communist movement,” Harriot said. “I like to compare it using a metaphor as a knife. You can use a knife to butter bread to feed yourself, but someone else can take it from you and use it as a weapon to hurt you. And that’s kind of what’s been done with ‘woke.’” “That word has been co-opted to mean what they’re afraid of,” he continued. “The things that they’re afraid of really is progress, equality, the things that will dismantle the systems that historically and currently benefit them.” There was a time when “woke” was a warning against white supremacist danger. But now it’s being used as a political weapon against the very community that coined the phrase. And that’s dangerous in a brand-new way. If your eyes aren’t open to that, it might be time to wake up.
Trymaine Lee
Trymaine Lee is an NBC News correspondent. 
