The difference Between ‘Woke’ and ‘Awake’
On June 2 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. was invited to give the Commencement Address at Morehouse College and the title of his speech was “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” In it he described the revolution as the success of the civil rights movement and the end of most colonization in the world, and though he was very pleased with the results, his speech was advocating for people to remain ‘Awake’ and notice all the injustices in the world: the poverty, the inequality and the unneeded wars. Here are two quotes from his speech:
“John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms: “No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” And he goes on toward the end to say, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” We must see this, believe this, and live by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution.”
Our current climate and environmental breakdown situation is one that Dr. King wouldn’t have imagined, though he did warn us about our unquestioned belief in technological progress to the detriment of our cultural and moral values. Our profligate use of the Earth and its resources is causing an unprecedented extinction. We are facing a life-threatening ecological and Earth system’s degradation, and just like in his day, we are accepting US wars started under false pretenses that are causing destruction all over the world.
It would be sensible to imagine, that if Dr. King were alive now, he would be aware of these issues, just like in his time, he was not just for racial justice but also for the plight of the poor of all races and against the war in Vietnam. As an ‘awake’ person now, he would have been for social justice, but also against racially motivated police brutality, the current unfair justice system and our growth-obsessed economic system that is leading to a dire environmental degradation. His protests against the Vietnam war give us a hint that his idea of being ‘awake’ would have included protests against the series of catastrophic wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia, especially when Americans have been once again been misled into accepting as a false security and human rights necessity.
In contrast to Dr. King’s idea of being ‘awake’, we now have a new word that is becoming commonplace thanks to the Resistance that grew instantaneously after the results of the 2016 election were announced. The word is ‘woke’ and it is defined as being a social justice advocate. I have already found it a few times as a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle and have also seen it at the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan where they sell t-shirts for kids with the message: “I love naps but I stay ‘woke’”. From the above examples it is evident that the word has entered the mainstream lingo with a meaning of being a social justice activist, a part of the Resistance.
The word ‘woke’ comes from the African American vernacular and it means that you are aware of racial discrimination and its consequences. During the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, the word was used to describe a person who understood the unfairness of excessive use of force by the police when dealing with African Americans. After the Black Lives Matter issue left the center stage, the word ‘woke’ entered the mainstream culture defined as being into social justice in general.
Social justice advocacy is very commendable, but unfortunately, the word ‘woke’ has degraded into an easy tribal identification meme, in which agreeing with a few identity politics issues as defined by the dominant culture, makes you a member of the club of the ‘enlightened people’. Meanwhile, the justice issues that Dr. King advised us to notice in order to be ‘awake’, are completely ignored. The limitation to a few repeated social justice topics and the zealousness based on minutia inherent in being ‘woke’, has caused the word to become a derisive term in urban slang:
According to the Urban Dictionary, the word ‘woke’ means: the act of being very pretentious about how much you care about a social issue, like in the following sentences:
“Yeah, most people don’t care about parking spaces for families with disabled pets. I wish they were ‘woke’ like me”.
“I’m sure glad I attended that college seminar on crypto-genderism, now I’m really ‘woke’.”
A contributor to the dictionary described it with this sentence: “Being “Woke” is what happens when instead of taking one blue pill, you down the entire bottle.”
The blue pill, a metaphor from the movie The Matrix, allows you to remain comfortably ignorant of the reality of the world, while the red pill makes you accept the truth of reality, a harsher proposition. Applying Dr. King’s idea of being ‘awake’, it is the equivalent of taking the red pill, a preoccupation with all the injustices in the world, not just an allegiance to a progressiveness based on a very narrow set of values defined by the media and the establishment culture.
In our current state of affairs, the polarization of the country is causing an increase in tribal identification behaviors that is allowing for the mainstream culture to define the windmills that most people decide to battle. As a result, we are seeing armies of well-meaning Don Quixotes, blissfully ignorant of the inconvenient troubles in the world’s reality. The mainstream culture is more interested in the public taking a bottle of blue pills while avoiding the red one like the plague.
It is evident that racism and gender justice issues aren’t just windmills-to-fight for Don Quixote, these are real issues that should be taken seriously. What turns them into windmills is the way the mainstream culture uses them to manipulate a battle of identity politics and create division. These issues are being used as a distraction so that people don’t notice the ones that Dr. King would have called being ‘awake’.
Our sense of outrage seems to be very prescribed by what the mainstream culture dictates, if you want to be part of the “enlightened crowd”, any small dissent is highly discouraged. The result is a uniformity in opinion that doesn’t encourage a belief in the health of our democracy. The individuality of a personal sense of outrage based on critical thinking has been greatly diminished, we are allowing the culture to think for us and feel happy and accepted by conforming.
This is quite evident when while walking around Manhattan you find stands selling buttons for the ‘woke’ Resistance. Most of the messages limit themselves to expressing hatred or derision at Trump and his supporters, some encourage an image of women’s strength, while others decry men’s toxicity, and one invited people to feel outrage. Most of the outrage was directed at Trump, while there were only two buttons showing rhetorical climate change advocacy, too few to show a real concern about the extreme climate and environmental breakdown that is threatening our future quality of life, not one button urging outrage at war or at the most pressing humanitarian crisis in the world, Yemen.
In a ‘woke’ world it seems fine to completely ignore the human suffering in Yemen, a crisis that started in 2015 and wouldn’t have happened without the aid in weapons and aircraft carriers from the US and Western Europe to Saudi Arabia. In an “awake” world, Yemen would have been at the top of the agenda. Why is such an extreme case of injustice being ignored by people who are supposed to be interested in social justice? It is quite easy to see that the mainstream media doesn’t talk much about it, and if it does, it is to create a fairy tale of a civil war as an internal problem of Yemen, without ever explaining how it would not have happened without a regime change sponsored by the US and Saudi Arabia. Since we are in a culture in which if the media doesn’t talk about it, it is not happening, most people are unaware of the reality of the situation.
A good example is a segment on June 20th 2017 on NPR’s All Things Considered. At the time, the war in Yemen was raging with the help of the West and their choice for a theme on Yemen was: “She May Be the Most Unstoppable Scientist in The World”. The segment explains how a female Yemeni scientist, Eqbal Dequan, continues her career as a scientist even though her car was shot at while leaving her unscathed, and she has had to endure the constrictions of the life of a woman in Yemen. It is very laudable of Ms. Dequan, but it is quite appalling that in the NPR segment there is no mention of the raging war and the horrible suffering with thousands of people dying of hunger and preventable diseases. No mention either of the extreme Saudi bombings enabled by weapons and logistic assistance from the West that have left the country in complete chaos. No mention of a civilian population being prevented from receiving food and medicines by a blockade of Yemeni ports by US aircraft carriers. No mention of the thousands of women and men crying for their emaciated and dead children.
In an ‘awake’ world, the media would have had repeated reports about the real causes of the war, the injustice of bombing a civilian population and the ensuing crisis. Instead, the media complied with the Pentagon’s need for keeping the crisis ignored, conveniently misleading their audience about the reasons for the war so that their sense of outrage could be directed at the plight of women in a fundamentalist country.
Another useful example to explain the media’s insistence on blue pill stories is a recent item that was reported equally by most media outlets: For the first time in history the 6 major defense contractors in the US were proud to announce that all their CEOs were women. It is certainly good for women to break the glass ceiling, but another thing is to report about defense contractors only when they can be whitewashed by their hiring practices. Otherwise, their extreme power in Washington that allows them to get away with manufacturing unnecessary and destructive wars is ignored. It is certainly not in the media’s interest to bite the hand that feeds them, since without the media’s help to mislead the public into accepting the wars, these wouldn’t happen. Being ‘awake’ is to be willing to see not only the good in women breaking the glass ceiling, but the detrimental role that defense companies and the Pentagon have in an eternal war strategy that is bleeding America dry and is completely unsustainable from an environmental point of view.
In truth, the corporate media isn’t interested in the public fretting over people in Yemen since it doesn’t suit their corporate sponsors and owners. If the media would tell the truth about Yemen, it would become evident that the West, the supposed leader in Democracy and human rights, has been heavily supporting a very unjust war against a civilian population that is suffering a horrendous humanitarian crisis, and they would lose their corporate backing immediately. Our Western values imply that human rights are sacred, so it is surprising that even though a lot of the non-Western world is aware of the injustice going on, the people in the West aren’t very aware of it, and especially of their government’s complicity with it. If a human being has a sense of outrage, shouldn’t the outrage be directed at such a big injustice? Isn’t that what Dr. King would have called being ‘awake’? Who could consider this media as truly informative when they neglect to inform you in such a blatant way and instead distract you with tame issues?
What matters in the mainstream culture is a repetition of certain items that are deemed safe for a continuation of a status quo that benefits corporations and politicians. Once an item is repeated, it slowly takes a tinge of truth that is enhanced by mere repetition, until what was false, becomes suddenly true. As Goebbels said: “A lie repeated many times becomes truth”. Do we really want our sense of outrage to be directed only by what the media chooses for us, just because it suits the moneyed interests that sustain them? As long as we accept such media-manufactured sense of outrage, we can call ourselves ‘woke’ but not ‘awake’.
Western culture is proud of its emphasis on individualism, especially when compared to the collectivism of the East. However, is there any true individuality in a system in which the establishment culture can dictate the basis for a very limited sense of outrage to create a very unified collective opinion? If we consider ourselves true individuals, the repetition of suggestions of windmills-to-fight by the mainstream culture should not determine our battles all the time. We are social animals, we tend to relish belonging to what we perceive is the right tribe, but we are also endowed with logic and critical thinking, and these should help us redefine being ‘woke’.
We are living at a time when being truly ‘awake’ is a priority. We are facing the collapse of ecosystems around the world, a return to a pre-Holocene type of disorderly climate that will wreak havoc with our agricultural productivity and survival probabilities and a dwindling of resources essential to our way of life; still, none of these are included on the list for being ‘woke’. Our acquiescence to wars made possible under false pretenses is alienating many countries, causing intense suffering and yet most people in the West aren’t even aware of the suffering that these wars cause. At the environmental juncture in which we are, it becomes even more evident that war is a useless activity. The US military emits more greenhouse gases than most countries in the world due to its intense energy use. War ends up not creating anything with all the energy and entropy it creates, but instead destroying. Our present situation is not one of business as usual, when people could just be ‘woke’ and argue back that wars are inevitable and our economic system based on high energy consumption is the given. This is the time when we need to be awake, like Martin Luther King Jr. advised and notice that business as usual is spelling our doom.
