Definition of Woke

 

Woke: 1. v. past tense of wake. 2. adj. (inf., AAVE) alert, aware, vigilant. 3. n. disbelief in the effectiveness of ideals of neutrality in political activism. 4. n. the legal theories that derive from this disbelief.

Here is as brief a definition for that third definition of "woke" as I can muster: woke is disbelief in the effectiveness of ideals of neutrality in political activism.  That would include (but not be limited to) disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination.

I can understand why people find this confusing - for one thing, it contains a double-negative: disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination.  (And by the way, yes, double-negatives exist in English, and a double-negative doesn't always equal a positive.)  This is one more example of a double-negative that is not equivalent to a positive (so, disbelief in the ideal of non-discrimination is not the same as belief in the ideal of discrimination).

Wokeness can therefore be seen as a kind of disillusionment.  Woke people might be seen as more skeptical, perhaps more cynical, or even more pessimistic than some of their civil rights forebears.

This raises an obvious question: why?  Why have people lost their belief in the ideals of neutrality?  There's no one single answer.  Different people have different reasons for coming to woke, and they draw different lessons from it, in different political contexts.  (For instance, one could see Rawlsian justice on both sides of this - as one of the things that woke people have woken up from, or as the motivation to awaken.)  For some, neutrality may seem impossible.  For others, it may seem possible, yet undesirable.  And then there are many - probably the largest group - who see neutrality as both possible and desirable, at least theoretically, perhaps in the distant future, but so unrealistic as to be effectively useless, at least in the short term.

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