What is woke, really?
A more useful and originalist definition.
Over the last ten years, the word ‘woke’ has embarked on a roller coaster of definition morphing as a result of its arrival into political discourse. There is a lot of history behind the word that can be summed up as it were on Wikipedia with some minor tweaks and notes the site lacks the chutzpah to just say:
It had a meaning that was remarkably consistent from its inception in the 1930s all the way to the early 2010s in being confined to AAVE
It ‘acquiring political connotations in the 1970s’ is a conflation of people beginning politicisation at the time and the etymology of the word (which did not change at all until later)
‘Woke’ originally is a simple vernacular synonym to ‘awareness’ that provides the often-coveted benefit of being more compact and grammatically flexible. Until 2013 or so, this is all it was: a descriptor of a proactive way of thinking.
This blew up after that point in time and I have a better explanation as to why than you’ll find anywhere else. Unfortunately, it’s not a happy accident – people latched onto this word to communicate a kind of political schizo-paranoia that hearkens to the almost-exclusively black usage dating back to the 70s. Since the mid-2010s, staying woke has come to mean remaining vigilant against threats unseen. The problem with threats unseen is that they aren’t always real.
In this light, being woke becomes problematic for an entirely intrinsic reason. It’s not bad because of anything on the issues or the political intentions of the person, but rather because being woke provides a psychological reprieve from suffering under problems, lifting the burden of pressure to solve them in the first place. I often make an example out of George Carlin’s last special, It’s Bad For Ya: over and over his catchphrase in the special is, “it’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for ya.” I’ve noticed that Americans lately love to say only the first half of this, and I have grown to believe their omission of “it’s bad for ya” after every time they say something is “bullshit” is precisely the mental trick undoing them. Then I realised that being woke is more generally distilling the exact same thing. In other words, “If I am clever enough to see that something is bullshit, then it can’t trick me!” Then it turns out there is no ‘trick’ as they expected, and some material corruption passes on totally unencumbered. Criminals don’t need to trick you to actually fuck you over; mostly, they just need you to be morally bankrupt enough to let them get away with it, and that’s exactly what leaving out value judgements like “it’s bad for ya” does.
How did it figure, anyway?
Probably the biggest influence pulling my thinking in a direction that allows me to see something like ‘woke’ so painfully soberly is my immersion in Indonesian society. Now, I’m no Indonesiaboo, and I still don’t have much command of the language, but having been married for going on 8 years to someone who is a bilingual master of the language along with English has, admittedly, greatly altered my thinking. And Indonesia deals quite squarely with this problem, too. Enter the gak napak tanah:
Now, if you simply punch this phrase into Google Translate, you’ll probably get the result “not touching the ground”. What’s less obvious from this phrasing is that it’s often used to objectively describe people. Thereby it could be thought of as meaning ‘ungrounded’. There’s one problem with translating it to that though, and that is the connotation doesn’t match at all. If you call somebody ‘ungrounded’ in English, that’s just like, your opinion man, and more charitably it’s just too much of an abstract concept to be passing judgement on without controversy. In English conversation, it’s a matter of debate if someone is truly ungrounded, especially when the matter thereof is socially contentious. In Indonesian, however, it’s hardly abstract. When people say “gak napak tanah moment” it’s objective and obvious on the degree of wetting your pants. The whole language is a lot more matter-of-fact and so it has more wherewithal to convince on that front than English does, making Indonesian a lot more invulnerable to manipulations through language comparatively. Gak napak tanah is describing the propensity of Indonesians to nonetheless throw off the cuffs of objective reality and end up making strange, stupid and/or dangerous conclusions about the world. You can imagine how funny it is when someone else is wrong, and that’s the essence of how this becomes a thing.
From the screencap above, there is an interesting Reddit discussion about the definition of gak napak tanah. The top comment says it best: it’s a lack of social awareness. There are many more you can read through and translate if you want, but I found that the more I read, the more it had the propensity to confuse and obscure the cultural context in which this is being said, which is the entire purpose of my import here.
You can’t translate culture, but you can try to borrow it by taking it as a loanword and handling it with enough care that the cultural connotations inside it may arrive intact. So, it’s very foolish to say what one commentor had said, that gak napak tanah = not touching grass. Touching grass is a Twitter neologism and thereby just about the worst cultural background possible for wrangling with this. We must centre the phenomenological problem here: people propagating delusional thinking through language gymnastics.
In light of things like maggots at my local Shake Shack, particularly the Orwellian contortions the OP makes about not ‘defaming’ said restaurant, and especially that the original post was dogpiled with tons of people threatening him for posting it without irrefutable proof, I’ve come to think that being woke, or gak napak tanah, as I’ve outlined here is the primary political sickness ailing America today.
There is obvious and immediate proof about this in the fact that here is a major health emergency and everybody’s response to it was violent denialism. When you’re putting the reputation of a restaurant chain over your own health and safety, your politics is utterly broken and you are not taking care of your own needs anymore. It doesn’t make sense to privilege the former over the latter to such an absurd degree that it feels ‘reasonable’ to automatically assume horrible intentions or corporate conspiracies on the part of someone who is trying to warn you about something that will make you sick and die.
I sympathise with it even as I don’t empathise: Americans are the most lied to people in human history. I get why it feels reasonable to say shit like this:
But it’s still wrong, insane, and incredibly self-destructive for the person writing it and everyone in their community. You still live and breathe and eat in the real world. In that world, health and safety comes leagues ahead of ‘detecting tricks’ online about corporate sabotage that doesn’t concern you. The Labrat anon doesn’t merely ‘stand corrected’ – he talked tons of shit, apologised for none of it, and only backed down when the irrefutable proof arrived, meaning there is no chance in hell that the OP is being given any measure of charity. This is one of a small legion of delusional people who stand together in upholding a personal politics that is destroying everyday American life.
No matter what happens, you still have real, material political problems that directly and significantly affect your life. When there are maggots in your food, it’s a reminder that you’re fast running out of time to confront those problems. Being woke to ‘detect tricks’ is trying to solve a problem you don’t have by blinding you to problems you do have. You do this because it gives you psychological comfort by letting you act out publicly in a way that makes you feel in control. But you actually need real control, so you don’t have food with maggots in it. The illusion of control created with performances about “extraordinary claims” and “this feels disingenuous” and so on don’t help you with that. At some point these people just have to be yelled at that they’re eating maggots and when they keep blabbing about health scores and deserved flak they get told to shut the fuck up because they’re eating fucking maggots. It shouldn’t need to get this bad to stop this kind of nonsense.
For all its wistful beginnings in the fight for racial justice in an economic era that was paradise compared to the one we have today, it seems that being woke not worth the baggage that it evidently comes with. Perhaps it does help in weeding out unconscious biases, but is that a worthy pursuit when it invariably leads to people jumping down each other’s throats with zero trust or goodwill in service of some vague false comfort at huge injury to public health? I don’t think so.
The new politics is going to throw this shit away, because it has to. The new politics solves for maggots at Shake Shack by going back to basics. Do you cook? I do. Anyone want to buy some grilled burgers I make most days? And so on it goes…