![]() "Some group of young people - usually young people of color - start popularizing a word," Holliday says. No matter how well-intentioned, when Jill Stein and the cast of Will & Grace are name-checking the term, ironically or not, it's no longer anything new. One of the arguments Kelley presented in the piece was that once black words, like "cats" or "dig it," used to define certain aspects of blackness, became adopted by a white mainstream, they were officially done. It's most famously traced to an essay published in the New York Times in 1962 called "If You're Woke You Dig It," by William Melvin Kelley, though some have traced its use as far back as the 1940s. But the word goes further back than that. Woke became shorthand for a mindset and a worldview that values black lives. BLM activists have been striving, for years now, to convince people of all races to value and respect blackness, to take issues like the deaths of black people at the hands of police seriously. Its resurgence in this decade can be most closely linked to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. ![]() ![]() In order to make this argument, it's important to define the word as accurately as possible, because the muddling of the definition of woke is really what killed it.Īccording to Merriam-Webster, woke means, "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)." The last street sweeping at the end of a long parade, that final reminder that the party is really over. The argument I am making is not new, or revolutionary, or profound.
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