Kenya Hunt - GIRL

On the more sober end of the spectrum ‘racism’ was sugar-coated to read ‘unconscious bias’ and ‘white supremacy’ became ‘white nationalism’. On the Internet, no person, place or thing is exempt from rebranding. And in the process, the meaning evolves, twists and turns, and at times, gets lost. One of the biggest examples of this is the very old idea wrapped in thoroughly modern packaging called ‘woke’.

As I write this, I’m staring at a fashion magazine with the coverline ‘woke bespoke’. Next to it, a newspaper supplement featuring a dating diary on the search for ‘Mr Woke’. On my desktop, a guide to a ‘woke Christmas’, and in the adjacent tab, an Internet rant in response to said guide demanding people and publishers leave all writing about wokeness to Black writers. In another tab, an article bemoaning the Great Awokening of American politics. Meanwhile, on British television, a debate rages between royal correspondents and pundits about whether the royal family’s most polarising members, Meghan and Harry, have in fact become too woke for their own good.

But what is woke? Most online dictionaries define it as an awareness of inequality and other forms of injustice that are normally racial in nature — as in, Nelson Mandela or Malcolm X. A few describe the term as merely being ‘with it’ — as in every cool kid you knew at uni. And increasingly, these days, many use it as a pejorative term to describe someone who is a slave to identity politics. How can all three possibly be the same? It’s a sensibility, a quality, a state of being, a feeling backed up by a set of actions, sometimes all those things at once.

I can’t think of a word that reflects the era as well as ‘woke’ does. There’s its relative newness (woke was born and grew up alongside social media), its popularity as a hashtag and its political implications and activist leanings. And then there are its many definitions — the word’s nature changes with each rotation of the news cycle. There’s also its journey crossing over from Black culture to the Internet and mainstream news. Appropriation! All qualities that are extremely particular to this moment in time.

Confession: I’m allergic to the word. (An affliction I first developed in 2016, when MTV declared the term the new ‘on fleek’.) Ironic, considering I am textbook woke. I identify with what it was. But cringe at what it’s become. And bristle at the way the word is now weaponised. The disparity compels me to interrogate the term and its evolution. As Susan Sontag said in Notes on Camp , which inspired this very study, ‘no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyse it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. To name a sensibility, to draw its contours and to recount its history, requires a deep sympathy modified by revulsion.’ So let’s consider what woke is, and what it isn’t.

1 Woke extends to conversations around art, politics, economic and social class, gender inequality, trans rights and environmentalism. But woke in its original incarnation rests on activism and Blackness.

2 The essence of woke is awareness. What you are newly aware of (a pay gap, systemic racism, unchecked privilege, etc) and what to do with that newfound knowledge is the question. And the answer keeps changing depending on who you talk to. But regardless, you’ve answered the wake-up call, pushed your way out of bed, and are now listening.

3 To be woke, in the original sense, is to understand James Baldwin’s declaration that ‘to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.’ It’s to understand the unique kind of exhaustion that comes from being perpetually attuned to discrimination. It’s to be weary and wary. To be woke is to long for a day when one doesn’t have to stay woke.

4 Woke blurs the lines between politics and pop culture. You can’t have one without the other; the latter is how woke culture entered the public consciousness and is the thing that sustains its relevancy, for better and for worse.

5 Most date woke’s origins back to the American singer songwriter Erykah Badu’s anthemic political medley, ‘Master Teacher’ from her album New Amerykah , a work she released in 2008, two years after the birth of Twitter and eight months after Apple released a thing called the iPhone, two facts that are pertinent here because woke is a term that owes its popularity to both. Badu sings over a psychedelic collage of samples about a quest for what sounds like a new plane of enlightenment:‘I am known to stay awake(A beautiful world I’m trying to find)’She then imagines a world in which there are ‘no niggas, only master teachers’ and reminds the listener, repeatedly, that she stays woke.This is woke at its most pure: unapologetically Black and cryptic (only the woke recognise the woke). A word conceived by Black people for Black people. A word reminiscent of Spike Lee’s famous cry to ‘Wake uuuuuuuuup!’ in his seminal film School Daze , as his character, a student at a fictitious historically Black university, demands his light-skin-worshipping, good-hair-seeking, sex-addicted peers wake up from self-hatred and materialism and become aware of the injustices in their community and, ideally, do something about it.

6 You can find a pocket guide to the essence of woke in the chorus of Childish Gambino’s single, ‘Redbone’, a Funkadelic-esque R&B song released in 2016 that warns, ‘you better believe in something’. Equal parts lustful slow jam and cautionary social commentary, the lyrics implore listeners to resist the comfort of complacency and ignorance or pay the consequences:‘Now don’t you close your eyes’The last line best conveys the high-stakes urgency of wokeness. The sense that something terrifying lurks in the shadows.It’s an idea Jordan Peele expanded on in his horror film, Get Out , which famously uses the song in its opening scene. Because as the movie made clear — its protagonist slowly becoming aware of an elaborate plot to co-opt his body and trap his mind in an abyss called the sunken place — the consequences of sleeping are indeed horrific.These examples in tandem solidified woke as the mood of a new era, rising in the aftermath of the modern-day horror story that was the EU referendum and election of Donald Trump, a time when our freedoms can very much feel like they are on the line and in peril. Stay woke. Don’t get caught. Don’t get hypnotised. Don’t close your eyes.

7 Despite what the likes of MTV and Twitter would have you believe, it’s impossible to depoliticise woke. Woke, by its very nature, is engaged.

8 The goal is to wake up and then stay that way. As in, be aware and on guard, ready to recognise, call out and actively resist the biases, fake news and inequalities as they come, like the countless members of the Black Lives Matter movement do on Twitter and Facebook, posting smartphone footage of unjust killings, assaults and arrests, sometimes with the hashtag #StayWoke, and campaigning for legislative change. Woke is righteous indignation, backed up by a set of actions as resistance. Woke is serious business. Often said aloud with a raised closed fist reminiscent of Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos’s famous Black Power Salute at the 1968 Mexico City Games.

9 Despite its changeable nature and twistable journey, woke is inextricably linked with the rise of Black consciousness, which has never ever really gone away but rather has had surges and swells. This latest wave is most defined by its relationship with social media — specifically, and thrillingly, how Black people have used Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like to amplify Black pride and call out systemic oppression. In short, being woke was originally tied to the experience of being Black. But can you be woke and not Black?