How the word “woke” became a weapon to torpedo anti-discrimination activists

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You may have seen it pass in articles, and even on mainstream newspaper covers : what does the word “woke” mean, used today in France mainly to criticize people committed against discrimination?

In English woke means “awake”, it is a word that was born in African-American communities in the 1950s. It has a positive meaning, it is a synonym of well-informed person, aware of political issues, as shown in this article from New York Times, dated 1962.

In 2016, “Woke” was named “Word of the Year” by MTV

After being forgotten for a while, the word returned to the United States in the 2010s, in the wake of the assassination of Michael Brown and the #BlackLivesMatters movement. A hashtag is popularized: #staywoke and a website is set up: StayWoke.org.

In 2016, the word became so popular that the very serious American dictionary Merriam Webster made an article of it, and that the channel MTV put it in his words of the year. But already, critics are appearing, who laugh at this ease of “Display an alleged virtue”, often empty of action. Like this sketch from the Saturday Night Lives show, which imagines a Levis Woke jeans:

Woke spreads abroad with a pejorative connotation

In October 2019, Barack Obama will strongly criticize what he considers to be an intransigent attitude of certain activists. “The idea of ​​purity, and no compromise, and that you’re politically awake, and all that.” You should stop this very soon. The world is complicated and full of ambiguities, ”he says.

From that moment on, the word “woke” spread abroad, in its negative version. In France, in 2019 it was labeled “buzzword” by the BETC agency, who qualifies it as a “lazy posture of personal appreciation”. In Quebec, the conservative polemicist Mathieu Bock-Côté qualified of “ideological plague of 2020”. And even in the United States, the word has taken on a largely pejorative connotation. The definition that prevails over the Urban dictionary of slang words, which highlights the definitions most voted by readers, the summary like being “pretentious and showing awareness of societal issues”.

In France, the word “woke” does not cover any real political movement.

Today, the word “woke” is used in France only as a criticism, as a caricature which aims to discredit those committed against discrimination, believes the journalist Judith Lussier, who analyzed these criticisms in her book We can’t say anything more. To our knowledge, the word “woke” is not claimed by any anti-discrimination activist in France, and therefore does not cover any real political movement. It is more of a political and media tool against certain left-wing activists than a category of analysis. “No French researcher specializing in discrimination uses it”, adds researcher Sophie Pochic.

The importance of this term, which is ultimately used by a very small sphere of activists and intellectuals, should not be exaggerated. In March, a poll The Express revealed that only 6% of those polled know what the weekly called “woke thinking”. Even in the UK, where English is spoken, only half of the people have heard of the phrase “be woke”.





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