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And I’m gon' help him wake up other black folk’.įor years ‘woke’ was widely used as slang by African-American communities.
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Garvey done woke me up, I’m gon stay woke. In 1972, Barry Beckham’s play Garvey Lives! includes a character claiming he’ll ‘stay woke’ using the work of Jamaican activist leader Marcus Garvey: ‘I been sleeping all my life. The glossary was alongside an article on African-American street slang by black novelist William Melvin Kelley, and his explanation of ‘woke’ was the ‘well-informed, up-to-date’ definition the OED uses today. Times Magazine glossary of ‘phrases and words you might hear today in Harlem’ in 1962. Fast forward a few centuries and the first recorded use of ‘woke’ in its politically conscious incarnation was via a N.Y.
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The word was first used in the 1800s but back then, it only meant the act of not being asleep. Like most words, the history of woke is a surprisingly long one. For instance, people describe themselves as ‘being woke’ as opposed to ‘being awake’ or having ‘woke up’. The implication is that once someone has become woke, they can’t easily go back to sleep. ‘Woke’ is a natural successor to these, but its grammatical quirk is a product of AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) which through the ambiguity of its tense, implies being woke is a state of mind rooted in the past. Everyone from angry politicians to conspiracy theorists has told the world they’re ‘blind to the truth’ or that they need to ‘open their eyes’, and rap music with a political message is widely known as ‘conscious’ hip-hop. ‘Woke’ follows a long history of words and phrases that relate the gaining of knowledge to sleep and/or sight. The Urban Dictionary, meanwhile, explains that ‘being woke means being aware… knowing what’s going on in the community (related to racism and social injustice)’. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice’. In its modern-day, politicised context, ‘woke’ is defined by the OED as ‘originally: well-informed, up-to-date. So how do we define woke? What does woke mean - what's the woke definition? However it remains unclear exactly what our senior politicians think the word woke means, or indeed, if they all think it means the same thing. Last summer, Downing Street was accused of launching a 'war on woke' and stoking cultural divisions to distract from other issues, such as the Dominic Cummings lockdown row in the summer and the government's handling of the Coronavirus. The issue here appears to be that there appears to be a 'war on woke' within some sections of the Conservative party, with Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick criticising 'town hall militants and woke worthies' just last week as he announced laws to protect monuments after the toppling of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol. 'I can’t comment on that … nothing wrong with being woke but what I can tell you is I think it’s very important for everybody … certainly I would put myself in the category of people who believe it’s important to stick up for your history, your values and your traditions and things you believe in.' It's the question Boris Johnson stumbled over earlier this year, when Labour's shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy declared that Joe Biden was a 'woke guy.' When Prime Minister Boris Johnson was then asked, in turn, if he believed that Joe Biden was in fact, woke, he gave just the sort of clear, unequivocal answer we've come to expect: The question, perhaps, is more what, exactly, that meaning of woke is? Many of the fields listed here overlap to some degree with one or more other areas.How woke are you? Added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, it’s clear that the word ‘woke’ has both meaning and history.