Why They Hate "WOKE."

Most of them can't even accurately say what it means.

I was born in 1968, but I'm a child of the 80s.

Some of you might hear your parents or grandparents brag about how we would leave the house at 8 o'clock in the morning to go play, and we wouldn't come back upstairs until our shadows were long and the streetlights came on.

There were no helicopter parents, ensuring that we were bubble wrap protected from the harshness and dangers life had to offer; no, we were fully exposed.

And that means, long before the years when "Wokeness" was a thing, we were exposed to a lot of the nasty shit our society had to offer, things that would look and feel very wrong to today's youth.

When I was a kid, Black people were still mostly portrayed in movies and TV shows as drug dealers, gangsters, and servants before we were depicted as scientists, doctors, teachers, and even Presidents.

When I was a kid, they didn't call it "the n word" yet. They JUST SAID THE WORD. And yeah, it was jarring alright. You could almost feel the electricity in the air change, because it was usually just before a fight broke out after the word was spat.

There is so much pain and suffering embedded in the cache of that word, centuries of slavery, subjugation, and segregation accompanied the use of that word, discharged as readily and harshly as a slave master's whip.

Technically, I am "allowed" to use the word being of Black heritage, but I choose not to, because I have always been revulsed by its vulgarity.

If you did not have explicit permission from the Black community to use that word, you were about to get your ass beat. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for some of the other slurs people threw around at the more vulnerable LGBTQ community, or differently-abled folks. In fact, it wasn't even yet referred to as "the LGBTQ" community, there were just ugly slurs hurled that kept many people "in the closet."

And as our society began to pull its head out of its ass and learn to stop being collectively so shitty to our fellow Americans, a movement of "political correctness" began to right the wrongs of how people were being treated in society.

So, in the decades that followed, the term "African American" was adopted to describe Black people, disabled and then differently-abled would replace "handicapped" and other less sensitive words. And with this, the arrival of the politically-correct "Woke" era was upon us.

Ask a MAGA what "Woke" means, and they'll give you a blank stare before attempting to sputter something about pronouns and women's sports.

But the phrase "stay woke" was coined by Blues singer Lead Belly in his song "Scottsboro Boys" about an infamous case in which 9 Black teens were accused of raping 2 White women. And he meant it to say "be aware. Keep your eyes open and your head on a swivel during these times," basically a warning.

But in a contemporary "social justice" sense, the phrase actually means to be “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)”.

People who were sick and tired of constant disrespect, of having hurtful pejoratives hurled at them, hailed this era of acceptance and enlightenment. Cultural representation shifted drastically, with more diverse representation on TV and in the movies.

"Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and "Will and Grace" became enormously popular TV shows, helping to normalize gay couples and families as less of a curiosity or thing to be feared, while Black people were being cast less frequently as criminals and drug dealers, and more often as doctors, lawyers, and even Presidents. We even elected one.

And then, predictably, there was a harsh and pervasive backlash to this movement. People like Donald Trump rose to national prominence railing against "political correctness" and stoking people's resentments and fears. As President Barack Obama took office, right wing movements began to declare that they needed to "Take Our Country Back" while spitting on Black lawmakers upon their arrival at Congress.

As soon as I heard that "Take Our Country Back" refrain, I knew EXACTLY what it meant, and who it was meant for. Suddenly, they needed to take the country back? From WHOM??? Did China secretly invade America and take it over?

No, this was a cultural war cry in response to the audacity of hope that permitted a Black man to rise to the highest office in America. How DARE those liberals put a Black man in the White House? Why do they think it's called the White House.

Trump heard this resentment loud and clear, and tweaked the "Take Our Country Back" complaint ever so slightly and transformed it into the "Make America Great Again" movement, initially declaring Mexicans as the people making America less great.

But if you were to ask a MAGA follower exactly when was this period of greatness that Trump wanted to bring America back to, you would never get a straight answer. Was it during slavery years? Was it when women couldn't vote? The years BEFORE Civil Rights? No answers, just seething hatred.

While all this was happening, the "woke" movement didn't stop, it continued to progress. The use of pronouns became more widespread as society learned that the concept of gender is more complex than just "male and female."

It was one thing for us "radical liberals" to force people to accept that LGBTQ people did not have to live their lives silently in the closet of shame; it was another thing for us to move the goalposts away from what they KNEW to the grey area of what nobody knew except for these gender scientists.

It was a lot for them to take in, in a very short period of time. And then, suddenly, trans people became a target of vitriol on the right, labeling their existence as "a mental disorder" and sounding a war cry declaring that "men should not be allowed to play in women's sports," despite the fact that right wing interest in women's sports had seldom been lower.

Government and corporations began to move decisively in the direction of officially leveling the playing field for groups that would have been marginalized with initiatives referred to as "diversity, equity, and inclusion," which basically turned "Woke" into the law of the land.

Right wingers have weaponized the word woke to encompass everything they don't like -- those damn libs forcing us to use pronouns and letting men use the women's bathrooms. That is literally how they interpret being "woke," as opposed to "just don't be shitty to your neighbor.” If your neighbor is gay, he'd probably prefer you don't refer to him as a "f*ggot." If she is disabled, maybe don't call her "r*traded."

But Wokeness gets credit for many of the gains we've seen in social justice throughout history.

Ending SLAVERY? Woke people fought for that.

Women's voting rights? Woke people fought for that.

Civil rights? Woke people fought for that.

Same sex marriage? Woke people fought for that.

AND SO ON.

People like Governor Ron DeSantis decided to use the weaponization against Woke for political purposes, making it a priority to remove references to slavery from school curriculum, lest it hurt the tender feelings of White students. In fact, DeSantis mostly overlooked serious problems of rising insurance costs in lieu of his charade of a crusade against "the woke."

For the most part, these social restrictions don't cost them extra money -- they don't get charged an additional 10 percent for failure to use pronouns. No, it just costs them an extra 10 seconds to treat people with the common courtesy and respect they're entitled to.

But for many on the right, that 10 seconds is a bridge too far, they just want a shortcut to be shitty. Let's go back to that time, when America was great, that I could call people whatever the hell I wanted because America, freedom of speech.

If you really want to trigger a MAGA, just point out that being kind to your neighbors, compassionate, and calling out the systems of injustice and oppression is what Jesus spent much of His life preaching about.

They hate Woke because it represents a changing of the guard, a shift in the power dynamic of the country that is beyond their control. Thankfully, things are no longer the way they were when I was a kid, and they will continue to change and improve as long as people like US give enough of a shit to fight for change.

Now, with that said, are there OTHER conversations we need to have, amongst ourselves, to "dial it back" and give folks the time and space they need to catch up with a cultural world that feels like it's left them behind?

It wasn't that long ago for me -- maybe in the past 10-15 years -- that I learned that gender is a spectrum, and that non-binary was a thing. Maybe we don't attack folks who fail to use correct pronouns.

There are going to be ongoing "growing pains" and if we're going to move forward as a society together, we need to be a little patient with some folks, and probably not expect everyone to "do the right thing" if the right thing is still heavily debated.

We WILL have to debate it, repeatedly, until the most vulnerable among us enjoys the same respect from people who really WANT to say t he "n" word, but don't because they don't want to be canceled or get their asses kicked.

STAY WOKE.