By Gavin St Pier
LANGUAGE evolves. Words come and go or their meaning changes. Take ‘sick’ for example. Anyone over the age of 30 might reasonably think being sick is a bad thing. While anyone under the age of 30 might well use it with a polar opposite meaning that something is really, really good.
‘Woke’ is another word whose trajectory of use and understanding I’ve been watching with interest. A couple of years ago, someone described me as being ‘too woke’. I really didn’t know what that meant and I’m not sure they did either, other than by the context of its delivery it was clearly intended pejoratively. We would not, apparently, have been alone. An interesting 2021 YouGov poll in the UK found that 59% of Britons didn’t know what ‘woke’ meant, half of whom (30%) had never heard the term being used in the first place. So only 41% who said they had heard ‘woke’ being used believed they knew what it meant.
Any internet search of the term ‘woke’ will quickly take you to dictionary definitions that helpfully define it as the past participle of the verb ‘to wake’, albeit abbreviated from the more familiar ‘woken’. You will also learn that its origin is, it is said, African-American vernacular, emerging at some point in the 20th century with, it is claimed, its first use in print in 1962. But it was not until the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the mid-2010s (after yet another shooting of black men by white police officers) that its use took off more broadly, inside at first, then outside, the US. In 2017, it was added to the US dictionary, Merriam-Webster meaning ‘aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)’. The Oxford English Dictionary added it in the same year, defining it as ‘originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’. On those definitions, it’s hard to see how anybody could be ‘too woke’. Sociopaths excepted, who else would want to be described as: ill-informed, not up-to-date and unaware or inattentive to issues of race or social injustice?
However the dictionaries define woke, it’s clear that most of us are not using or understanding the term with dictionary definitions. When you go back to the 2021 YouGov poll, you find of those (the 41%) who said they knew what woke was, only three in ten (29%) considered themselves to be woke, while more than half (56%) did not, presumably unaware that this meant they were unaware. One in four considered being woke to be a good thing (26%), while slightly more than a third (37%) thought it a bad thing. Another third (33%) say wokeness is neither good nor bad.
Interestingly, when YouGov re-polled a year or so later in 2022, 57% (up from 41%) now claimed they knew what it meant. Having said that, few (23%) use the term and if they do, 73% use it in a disapproving way while only 11% used it positively. So the dictionary definitions clearly need updating for the few who do use the word.
If it’s a term that is not being used by Joe or – perhaps being woke – Joanne Public, who is using it? It seems that politicians and, using another pejorative term, the commentariat are the ones most likely to bandy it around. (I guess that’s my prompt to declare an interest in being both a member of the former group and, with this column, a member of the latter too.) Broadly, it seems those on the right such as the Republicans in the US – think Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis – and the Conservatives in the UK – think of Suella Braverman’s recent broadside on ‘Guardian reading, tofu-eating wokerati’ – are using the term to attack those on the left. It seems to be used as a lazy, dog-whistle term to play to the base of those politicians. Take DeSantis’ so-called ‘don’t say gay’ law in Florida. Its self-declared objective is to prohibit ‘classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity’. Not unexpectedly, many in the LGBTQ+ community have seen that as an attack on their community but any attempt to represent their concerns are simply dismissed as ‘woke ideology’. On the other side of the Atlantic, those who (topically) might have reasonable concerns for the human rights of individuals in small boats seeking refuge or asylum, however well or ill founded their claims may be, are lumped into the class of ‘le wokisme’ (as the French say) if they express any concern at the idea of immediate deportation to a one-party state in the heart of Africa.
Woke appears to have become an ideological slur, wielded as a weapon in the so-called ‘culture wars’ of ‘identity politics’ centred around with which groups individuals identify. I have a nagging concern that in the US, because the word originated from within the African-American community and is associated with those fighting racial discrimination and social injustice (which disproportionately impacts black communities), ironically its use now has become a politically correct term that avoids deploying explicitly racist terms.
Whilst woke is another American export to the world, it does not, thank goodness, appear to have found much use so far in Channel Island political discourse. Personally, while I am happy if others regard me as a politician who is well informed, up-to-date and aware of social issues, it will be a sad day if ‘woke’ is slapped as a derogatory term on local politicians by those seeking to curry favour with the local electorate. I hope before that day comes, our language will have further evolved consigning the word to lexicographical history, along with others such as the 16th century’s ‘ipsedixitism’ which, being the assertion that something is ‘fact’ because someone else said so, arguably has far more current application to local politics than ‘woke’.
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Gavin St Pier is a Guernsey politician. He previously served as the President of the island’s Policy and Resources Committee.
