![]() ![]() They were often angry at words, especially new words, most particularly words that disturbed their rest – awakened them, you could say – and Woke was such a word. Like other vernacular words in the English language, Woke’s youth was among young Black people but its illness and decline came after it was kidnapped by old white conservatives. Once upon a time, the past tense of “wake” left its life as a verb and became an adjective of sorts, a term for describing the quality of having awakened, especially to injustice and racism. Rebecca Solnit: ‘Woke was kidnapped and has died’ Her new book, Love in the Time of Contagion: A Diagnosis, will be out in February Note the punitive rigidity underpinning the “good works”, the authoritarian streak, the self-congratulatory religiosity. ![]() “We had to make sins out of what they thought were natural actions,” says she, his equal in uprightness. Mr Davidson says things like: “If the tree is rotten it shall be cut down and cast in to the flames,” referring to the South Sea Islanders he and his wife mean to convert. I believe it’s more useful as applied to political style than political substance, however: I can agree with the woke on politics – I’m for social justice too! – though I may be warier about righteous vanguards and missionary zeal. “Woke” is a one-word hermeneutics of suspicion, shorthand for the sort of characterology Maugham was performing, dissecting a fulminator’s self-relation and self-delusions. The instinct is that something’s going on with you, the rebuker, that you can’t see in yourself all this hectoring and exhorting is compensatory in some way. But I think Maugham was animated by similar instincts as mine when I deploy “wokeness” against contemporaries who I find too full of their own rectitude. The term “woke” wasn’t around in 1921, when Somerset Maugham wrote his short story Rain about the downfall of a professional rebuker – the Christian missionary, Mr Davidson, whose public fulminations against sin masked less-than-upstanding private impulses. Laura Kipnis: ‘Wokeness is about style, not substance’ Malaika Jabali is the senior news and politics editor at Essence Magazine And others will continue to co-opt and distort. And just as “woke” evolved into a call to action to keep fighting, Black Americans will continue to birth terms that define what we do. There is no authoritative body of people who get to determine what terms get used and why. Amid police killings in that “post-racial” society, these myths became untenable. ![]() Woke was another way to say “conscious”: having awareness of our conditions and history in an America that lulls us with myths of a post-racial, colorblind, meritocratic society. Just as ‘woke’ evolved into a call to action, Black Americans will continue to birth terms that define what we do ![]()
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