WOKE: Divide and Rule?

WOKE is confused. Or confusing. I read articles, primarily in liberals New York Times and Rolling Stone, that categorically charge that woke or wokeness is a Conservative pitch. A self-righteous Political Right espousal. Yet I also read on Facebook many Left-minded friends self-praise a woke mindset. 

       “Woke" evolved from the Afro American vernacular for alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination. The Left expanded it to other current pop/politics and cultural measures. In all, I think it is simply a ploy to widen the divide. Divide and rule. We can say and pursue goodness with no new one word to describe them. But if we toss the word woke with it, the discourse turns Left or Right. 🥱😴😮

WOKE is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination." Yet political partisanship divides in America got intense and fiery, the eerie implosion slides into an explosion of hate out there, “woke” also assumes a diversity of shapes. It came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice. The notion of “white privilege” and “slavery reparations” for African Americans shatter what remains of little good commonalities between friends, family, and communities. 🥱😴😮

WOKE dates back to the 1930s, historians aver. You may find lyrics by Lead Belly and Erykah Badu that used the word. And then the term reemerged in 2010s, but its meaning was expanded beyond racial consciousness to gender issues and discriminated identities, but largely in the context of American culture or U.S. sociopolitical discourse.

       The 2014 Ferguson protests and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement hugely popularized the word. Then the confusion ensued. Some have criticized the “woke” as cultural appropriation, for example, and so on and so forth. Left and Right or liberals/progressives and conservatives got their own respective takes. And since the internet-savvy millennial and Gen Z generations grab the word as their shirt slogan, “woke” spread internationally. And so, the term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017. Uh huh. 🥱😴😮

SO where are we now? Wiki: “Opponents of progressive social movements were often using the term mockingly or sarcastically, implying that `wokeness’ was an insincere form of performative activism.” British journalist Steven Poole comments that the term is used to mock "overrighteous liberalism” or “following an intolerant and moralizing ideology.” 

       Per my Facebook Homepage, I read American conservatives sling the word as an insult, exasperation, or a joke. Liberal peeps mostly anchor their musings about a less dark universe by espousing “wokeness.” I may be wrong, right? Essentially, I have no problem with “woke” as a sociocultural standard. It may fall into what I call as ideological overreach in favor of advocacy for more gut-level exigencies that majority of people face.

But the way “woke” is tossed into a joust is dividing us more than ushering us into an open-minded plaza of views towards negotiated unity. As I said, “wokeness” has evolved into a brilliant pitch to fire up “divide and rule,” and we know who hugely benefits. 🥱😴😮